As well as writing about modern pop culture, I’m also an academic medievalist with a focus on twelfth-century Anglo-Norman literature and history writing.
I’m available for interviews and consultancy work on medieval topics – feel free to get in touch.
Publications
My first book, Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis: Kingship and Power, was published by Boydell and Brewer in October 2021. You can pick it up on their website in hardback and E-book form.
Geffrei Gaimar worked in Lincolnshire in the first half of the twelfth century; his only extant work is the Estoire des Engleis, an Old French translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. I’m fascinated by this hugely underrated writer, and I’m planning to continue digging into the Estoire in future articles.
Find out more about my book’s handling of Gaimar and kingship on Boydell and Brewer’s Proofed blog. I also had a great time answering some questions about the book for the Medieval Herald newsletter, where I got to draw parallels between Gaimar and Hitchcock. You can take the film fan out of medieval studies, but…
Articles
‘Cnut’s Rivals’, History Today, 67.12 (2017)
This is an article aimed at a general readership about Gaimar’s complicated take on Cnut; Cnut’s queen, Emma of Normandy; and (in Gaimar’s telling), their distinctly underhanded dealings with the dead king Edmund Ironside’s heirs.
‘Rewriting the Past: Women in Wace’s Roman de Brut‘, Reading Medieval Studies 37 (2010), 59-77
Wace’s Brut is copied in every one of the four surviving manuscripts of Gaimar’s Estoire. His handling of female characters in his treatment of British history is fascinating, and I plan to examine Gaimar’s take on female figures in his history of England in a future article.
Gem Wheeler 