Overview
I am a PhD candidate studying late pre-Conquest, Anglo-Norman, and Angevin England, focusing on the history of gender, politics, and law. My first research interest concerns queenship, examining how Emma of Normandy, Matilda of Flanders, Matilda of Scotland, the Empress Matilda, and Eleanor of Aquitaine constructed their political personae in cooperation and conflict with their husbands and how they used their gender to accommodate and alter notions of kingship, queenship, and sovereignty. By examining the language of charters, laws, chronicles, sagas, 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 High Medieval political, legal, and cultural efflorescence that bound England to the North Sea and the Mediterranean. My second research interest concerns paradigms of conquest, empire, nationhood, and assimilation in historiographical representations of the post-conquest polities established by Cnut the Great and William the Conqueror. I attend to how new ideas of Englishness and new political traditions, particularly of kingship and queenship, were created as Anglo-Norman historians traced the evolution of the English gens as it invaded and dominated Britain, faltered and persisted under Danish and Norman rule, and finally evolved into a contested Anglo-Norman identity in the struggle for political, cultural, and economic hegemony in the British Isles and in France.
Email: amm545@cornell.edu
Committee:
Oren Falk (chair), Andrew Galloway, and Rachel Weil