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Publications

Monograph

  • Emily A. Winkler, Royal Responsibility in Anglo-Norman Historical Writing, Oxford Historical Monographs, Oxford University Press (Oxford, 2017).
Abstract

This book asks how eleventh- and twelfth-century writers understood and explained leadership. It pioneers the application of philosophical ideas about causal and moral responsibility, and of multi-lingual close readings, to unpacking the problem of conquest in post-war Anglo-Norman thought. It contributes to medieval intellectual, political, and cultural history. The book argues that responses to the Danish Conquest of 1016 and the Norman Conquest of 1066 changed dramatically within two generations of the latter conquest. Repeated conquest could signal repeated failures and sin across the orders of society, yet early twelfth-century writers in England not only extracted English kings and people from a history of failure, but also established English kingship as a worthy office on a European scale. Their new, shared view of royal responsibility, based more on a king’s character than his origin, represents a distinct phenomenon in England’s twelfth-century historiography.

Edited Books

  • Rewriting History in the Central Middle Ages, 900–1300, ed. E.A. Winkler and C.P. Lewis, International Medieval Research 26, Brepols Turnhout, 2022).
Abstract

Rewriting was a defining characteristic of the central Middle Ages (900–1300), distinct both from earlier traditions of universal history and from later traditions of making continuations which left the narrative core intact. Reimagining the past by rewriting happened across genres, in the vernaculars as well as the universal languages of Latin and Greek, and across Europe, west and east. The chapters in this book explore the reasons and methods for rewriting, ranging across the Anglo-Norman realm, France and Flanders, Christian Iberia, Norman Italy and the Mediterranean, Byzantium, and Georgia and Armenia.

  • The Normans in the Mediterranean, ed. E.A. Winkler & L. Fitzgerald, Medieval Identities and Socio-Cultural Spaces 9, Brepols (Turnhout, 2021).
Abstract

This book examines the explosive Norman encounters with the medieval Mediterranean, c. 1000–1250. The collected chapters investigate politics, culture, society, and historical writing. Together, they explore the Normans’ personal, local, and interregional interactions in the Mediterranean, alongside their legacy in the years following their incursions. The book questions the idea of conquest as replacement, and examines how human interactions created new nodes and networks that transformed the medieval Mediterranean. The book’s geographic range includes Iberia, the eastern Roman Empire, Lombard Italy, Islamic Sicily, southern Italy, and the wider Mediterranean world.

  • Designing Norman Sicily: Material Culture and Society, ed. E.A. Winkler, L. Fitzgerald & A. Small, Studies in Medieval Art and Architecture, Boydell & Brewer (Woodbridge, 2020).
Abstract

This book investigates material culture and its creators in the new medieval kingdom of Sicily. Its chapters consider how images, designs, artifacts, structures and objects were used to help create the story of the medieval kingdom, and what they reveal about the complex political and social dynamics that underpinned the so-called “multicultural” state. The book argues that a visual language developed in medieval Sicily and southern Italy in this period. It explores familiar and unexplored aspects of Siculo-Norman art, in particular areas only made possible by recent advances in technology and international academic collaboration. Topics addressed include manuscripts and mosaics, textile diplomacy, the drama of coins and trade, new readings of old buildings, and the insights of archaeological excavations into everyday life.

  • Discovering William of Malmesbury, ed. R.M. Thomson, E. Dolmans and E.A. Winkler (Woodbridge, 2017; reprinted in paperback, 2020).
Abstract

In the past William of Malmesbury (1090–1143) has been seen as first and foremost a historian of England. This book reveals not only William’s real greatness as a historian and his European vision, but also the breadth and depth of his learning across other fields. Areas that receive particular attention are William’s historical writings, his historical vision and interpretation of England’s past; William and kingship; William’s language; William’s medical knowledge; the influence of Bede and other ancient writers on William’s historiography; William and chronology; William, Anselm of Canterbury and reform of the English Church; William and the Latin classics; William and the Jews; and William as hagiographer.

Peer-Reviewed Articles

  1. Emily A. Winkler, ‘Grief, Grieving, and Loss in High Medieval Historical Thought’, Traditio 77 (2022), 129–83. [Open Access – Direct Link]
Abstract

This article investigates how and why medieval ecclesiastical writers thought and wrote about experiences of grief in human history. It examines the works of three late twelfth-century Latin writers from England: a foundation history of Waltham Abbey and its holy cross, a series of annals kept by Hugh Candidus at Peterborough, and Gerald of Wales’s autobiographical and travel writing alongside his De principis instructione. Drawing on biblical, literary, theological, and iconographic models for grief and suffering in the western Christian tradition, the article situates these works in the exegetical and philosophical ideas they shared, and explains what is original and significant about their approaches to each instance of grief. It argues that the central problem these writers pondered in their narratives was the relationship between the universal and particular nature of grief. Grieving, they thought, had three key qualities: it impelled a desire to act; it could not be meaningfully measured; and it persisted in time. In prioritizing the experience of grief over its function, meaning, or morality, these writers considered the emotion rational, natural, and honest. The value these writers placed on human family or family-like relationships provides the context for understanding their priorities in thinking about responses to loss. Interest in grief's endurance, rather than its resolution in consolation, has been understood as more typical of secular, not sacred, thought. By showing how these writers’ ideas about grief's nature lived alongside and within other ideas of Christian thought, this article illuminates a greater range of medieval ecclesiastical ideas about the dignity of human history and emotion.

Emily A. Winkler, ‘Æthelflaed and Other Rulers in English Histories, c. 900–1150’, The English Historical Review 137 (2022), 969–1002. [Open Access – Direct Link]

Abstract

The aim of this article is to explain why Æthelflaed, ruler of Mercia, mattered to writers of history in twelfth-century England. It argues that these writers evaluated and compared rulers based not on sex or bloodline, but on the quality of a ruler’s achievements relative to the set and scale of challenges the ruler faced. They thought Æthelflaed remarkable because her triumphs for Mercia distinguished her from other rulers. The article shows that a new understanding of attitudes in twelfth-century England towards rulers, past and present, is required. It accounts for the absence of gendered comments about rulers, as well as the presence of non-binary concepts of gender, in medieval writing. The article also challenges the enduring idea that Latin writers imposed a shared, Wessex-dominated, national vision on the English past. They asserted Mercia’s independence under Æthelflaed’s sole rule, which shows that English regional interests persisted in the historical imagination long after the Norman Conquest.

Keywords: Æthelflaed of Mercia; Mercia; Wessex; gender; leadership; historiography; Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; William of Malmesbury; Henry of Huntingdon; Aelred of Rievaulx; John of Worcester; Anglo-Norman History; Empress Matilda; Stephen of Blois

  • Emily A. Winkler and C.P. Lewis, ‘Curating the Past in the Central Middle Ages’, in Rewriting History in the Central Middle Ages, 900–1300, ed. E.A. Winkler & C.P. Lewis, International Medieval Research, Brepols (Turnhout, 2022), 15–35.
Abstract

This co-authored article advances a new way to understand why people wrote history in medieval Europe. Instead of seeing rewriting as a political exercise of ‘construction’, we show it was also a creative enterprise of ‘curation’. This opens the field for exploring writers’ genuine desire to know and share history.

  • Emily A. Winkler and Andrew Small, ‘Normans and Conquest in the Mediterranean’, in The Normans in the Mediterranean, ed. E.A. Winkler & L. Fitzgerald (Turnhout, 2021), 11–40.
Abstract

This chapter explores ideas about Normans and conquest in the multi-cultural, multi-faith medieval Mediterranean world, c.1000–1250. Challenging the idea of conquest as replacement, it introduces the Normans and their legacy in the Mediterranean, and discusses ways of exploring how human interactions created the new networks that transformed the medieval Mediterranean.

  • Emily A. Winkler, ‘William of Newburgh, Henry II and the Kings of France’, in France et Angleterre: manuscrits médiévaux entre 700 et 1200, ed. F. Siri and C. Denoël, Bibliologia 37, Brepols (Turnhout, 2020), 233–53.
Abstract

This article examines William of Newburgh’s ideas about relations between contemporary rulers of England and France in his Historia rerum Anglicarum (History of English Affairs). Through a close-reading analysis of how William used language to reenact the emotional impact of war and peace, this article shows that William—long considered a writer resigned to war—argued forcefully for royal diplomacy. This study offers a new perspective on Angevin diplomacy, religious and historical thought, and ideas about emotion.

Keywords: historiography; William of Newburgh; Henry II; England; France; war; peace; diplomacy; kingship; allies and enemies; philosophy of history; exegesis; emotion

  • Emily A. Winkler and Liam Fitzgerald, ‘The Story of Designing Norman Sicily’, in Designing Norman Sicily: Material Culture and Society, ed. E.A. Winkler, L. Fitzgerald & A. Small (Woodbridge, 2020).
Abstract

This chapter explores the core themes of this book about the social history and material culture of the new kingdom of Norman Sicily. We think less in terms of type and origin, and more of agency: what did images’ creators and interpreters try to do? In tracing ‘conversations in trade’, across a wide range of material evidence and scholarly approaches, the chapter aims to open new ways of understanding of Norman Sicily’s shared visual language.

  • Emily A. Winkler, ‘King Alfred and the Danish wars in Anglo-Norman Histories’, in Textualität von Macht und Herrschaft: Literarische Verfahren im Horizont transkultureller Forschungen, ed. M. Albert, U. Becker, E. Brüggen, and K. Kellermann (Bonn, 2020), 201–25.
Abstract

This chapter examines early twelfth-century views of King Alfred before he became known as ‘the Great’. It asks how and why Anglo-Norman writers in England (c. 1120–1150) narrated the late ninth-century Danish wars and Alfred’s experiences of warfare. It proposes a new understanding of King Alfred’s twelfth-century legacy. English writers made more of Alfred’s struggles than his achievements in war. They thought teamwork among monks and rulers built tenth-century English history, not a ‘great man’. The chapter shows that how Alfred became ‘great’ in the twelfth century needs rethinking.

Keywords: King Alfred; historiography; Anglo-Norman, William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, John of Worcester, Geffrei Gaimar, Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; the legacy of King Alfred the Great; Anglo-Saxon; Danish; Vikings; emotion; Orderic Vitalis

  • Emily A. Winkler, ‘Imagining the medieval face of battle: the “Malfosse” incident and the Battle of Hastings, 1066–1200’, Historical Research 93 (2020).
Abstract

One hundred years after the battle of Hastings (1066), two historians wished to ask new questions about what the experience of the battle was like. Their approach – both sophisticated and seemingly modern – supplemented existing knowledge with imaginative recreation to fashion a fuller historical account of the battle. This article analyses the reporting of the ‘Malfosse’ incident, a deadly quasi-legendary episode in the encounter, in Wace’s Roman de Rou and the anonymous Chronicle of Battle Abbey, in relation to their sources and the Bayeux Tapestry. It argues that the prospect of historical detachment galvanized chroniclers into narrating the battle in a way that centred on experience.

Keywords: 1066, Malfosse incident, Battle of Hastings, historiography, battle narrative emotion, compassion

  • Emily A. Winkler, ‘Translation, Interpretation and the Danish Conquest of England, 1016’, Translation in Times of Disruption, ed. G. Iglesias Rogers and D. Hook, Palgrave Studies in Translating and Interpreting, Palgrave MacMillan (Basingstoke, 2017), 173–200.
Abstract

Through an investigation of key factors in translation and interpretation (time, distance and language) this chapter explores how eleventh- and twelfth-century historians responded to the Danish Conquest (1016). It considers translations of language and of ideas by employing comparative studies of narratives written within and outside England, including the eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Encomium Emmae Reginae, and new renderings of these in Geffrei Gaimar’s Anglo-Norman French Estoire des Engleis and in Latin works by Orderic Vitalis, William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon and John of Worcester. The chapter reassesses the uses of Latin and vernaculars, and demonstrates that minor alterations in translation transformed ideas about disruption in history.

Keywords: Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; Anglo-Norman; Cnut the Great; Danish Conquest of England; fidelity; interpretation; Latin; rewriting; translation; vernaculars

  • Emily A. Winkler, ‘The Latin Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan, British kingdoms and the Scandinavian past’, Welsh History Review 28 (2017), 425–56.
Abstract

This article examines storytelling and dynastic struggle in the only surviving biography of a medieval Welsh king, the twelfth- century Latin Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan, and it sets the Vita in its wider British, European, and North Sea context. It is the first study to establish the Life’s significance for the well-known flourishing of life-writing in twelfth-century Europe. I coin the term ‘destination myth’, in contrast to the more familiar term ‘origin myth’, to describe text’s saga-like argument for a foreign-born king’s right to rule. The article argues that the Vita’s author claimed parity for Welsh, Irish, and Norman kings based on shared Scandinavian descent, and authority for Gruffudd from Welsh law, maternal encouragement, and saga-like deeds of his family. The experience of invasion in Britain and Ireland demanded new Latin histories wherein Scandinavian dynasties could be a key source of legitimacy.

Keywords: Wales, Latin, Scandinavian history, North Sea zone, destination myth, Ireland, kingship, biography, invasion, exile, motherhood, legitimacy, law, dynasty

  • Emily A. Winkler, ‘William of Malmesbury and the Britons’, in Discovering William of Malmesbury, ed. R.M. Thomson, E. Dolmans and E.A. Winkler, Boydell & Brewer (Woodbridge, 2017), 189–201.
Abstract

This chapter shows that, despite different goals, twelfth-century English writers William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon shared a renewed interest in the British and Roman past of Britain with their contemporary, Geoffrey of Monmouth. It argues that they considered the worthiness and civility of Britain, as evident in some of its leaders, princes, and peoples, as originating before the era of Hengest and Horsa in the fifth century. In rewriting their key sources (Gildas, Bede, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle), William and Henry eliminated disparaging references to the Britons, improved the Britons’ honour, and rejected earlier English writers’ nation-like ‘us’. Their understanding of the past diminished the English national myth’s power to explain history. Their long view of English history was a story formed of conflict and settlement on a scale larger and longer than that of the first English settlers or the English nation.

Keywords:English, Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman, identity, history, Britons, Normans, Romans, Gildas, Bede, Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, William of Malmesbury, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Henry of Huntingdon, Vortimer, Vortigern, surrender, subjection, treaty

  • Emily A. Winkler and Emily Dolmans, ‘Discovering William of Malmesbury: The Man and his Works’, in Discovering William of Malmesbury, ed. R.M. Thomson, E. Dolmans and E.A. Winkler, Boydell & Brewer (Woodbridge, 2017), 1–11.
Abstract

This chapter offers an intimate and empathetic mini-intellectual biography of twelfth-century writer William of Malmesbury. It considers his life in relation to his works, all of which are now published in modern editions.

  • Emily A. Winkler, ‘The Norman Conquest of the Classical Past: William of Poitiers, Language and History’, The Journal of Medieval History 42 (2016), 456–78.
Abstract

This article is the first study to bridge the gap between literature and history in the most important written source for the Norman Conquest. William of Poitiers, who wrote the account of William the Conqueror’s deeds known as Gesta Guillelmi shortly after the Norman Conquest of England, has been generally regarded as a classical stylist who decorated his panegyric of William of Normandy with ancient rhetoric. This article argues that his three most sustained allusions to classical heroes of naval enterprises and conquest—Caesar, Aeneas and Theseus—each makes a specific moral and political point about the Conqueror and the memory of the Norman Conquest. His classical allusions did more than adorn: they contended. In arguing for William’s legitimacy as king of England, William of Poitiers addressed a wide audience and appealed directly to the fears, expectations and values of his day. The text offers a case study for medieval authorial ingenuity in applying the classics to the problems of the present.

Keywords: historiography; Norman Conquest; classical allusion; morality; politics; William of Normandy

  • Emily A. Winkler, ‘1074 in the Twelfth Century’, Anglo-Norman Studies 36 (2014), 241–58.
Abstract

This article explores how twelfth-century historians treated the post-Conquest past. It argues that they considered William the Conqueror’s reconciliation with the true English heir, Edgar the Ætheling, as the true turning point that confirmed William’s conquest of England. In these writers’ view—more than William’s defeat of Harold at Hastings in 1066, his capture of London, or his coronation in that year—William’s reconciliation with the English prince in 1074 resolved the last knotty problem of English rulership. It did so both in theory (Edgar, prince of the House of Wessex, was Edward the Confessor’s preferred heir) and in practice (Edgar was evidently seeking to regain the throne until that date). Their conquest narratives offer insight into their ideas about what constituted a conquest, what were the true threats to imposed authority, and what was the nature of English kingship.

Keywords Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, John of Worcester, Edgar the Ætheling, William the Conqueror, reconciliation, conquest, historiography, rulership, Edward the Confessor, Harold Godwineson

  • Emily A. Winkler, ‘England’s Defending Kings in Twelfth-Century Historical Writing’, Haskins Society Journal 25 (2013), 147–63. [published Oct. 2014]
Abstract

Keywords: Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, John of Worcester, Æthelred the Unready, Cnut of Denmark, conquest, historiography, rulership, kingship, Edward the Confessor, Harold Godwineson; William the Conqueror; Danish Conquest; Norman Conquest

Other Publications

  • Emily A. Winkler, ‘St Edmund of Abingdon and the Origins of the Medieval Hall’, St Edmund Hall, Oxford: Blog (22 Oct. 2019).
  • Emily A. Winkler, ‘The unfinished story of the Bayeux Tapestry’, Times Literary Supplement (Online edn, 24 Jan. 2018).
  • ‘A Journey through the Medieval Past: One Historian’s Quest and Questions’, The Aularian 23 (2016).
  • ‘“Upon the rock of Harlech”: an aspect on the sea and the past’, Bringing the Outside In: Enriching Student Learning in the Humanities through Environmental Engagement (Warwick: The Higher Education Academy, History and English Subject Centres, 2010), 42–3.
  • ‘Sicily: Island of Myth’, Corriere della Valle: Magazine of the Pacific Alliance 7:2 (2009), 14–15.