Overview
I am a historian of late pre-Conquest and Anglo-Norman England, focusing on the history of gender, politics, and law. In particular, I research the construction of the Empress Matilda’s political persona as a female king and how she used her gender to accommodate and alter medieval notions of kingship, queenship, and sovereignty within the broader network of elite Anglo-Norman and Angevin women who bound the political and cultural construction of the North Sea to the Mediterranean. By examining the language of charters, chronicles, and romances in my research, I seek to explain the emergence of a uniquely feminine theory and practice of queenly politics and to elucidate the contributions of royal women to the political, legal, and cultural efflorescence that made the High Middle Ages.
Advisor: Oren Falk