Dr Emily Winkler
College Lecturer in Medieval History
Emily Winkler is Lecturer in Medieval History (Hertford College and St Edmund Hall) and Associate Member of the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford. As a historian of medieval storytelling and historical thinking, especially in the period 1000–1300, she has written about a range of medieval ideas, including leadership and invasion; madness, grief, and the mind; compassion for mercenaries; and what medieval people thought the Romans did for them. Her trade book Pocket Bayeux Tapestry, a guide to the remarkable eleventh-century textile and its story of the Norman Conquest, will be published in September 2026 to coincide with the loan of the Tapestry to the UK.
As Principal Investigator of an Arts and Humanities Research Council project ‘The Search for Parity: Rulers, Relationships and the Remote Past, c. 1100–1300’ (2019–2022), she examined changing ideas about the ancient Roman past in medieval southern Britain. With her Co-Investigator Dr Nia Wyn Jones (formerly of Bangor University) she is currently completing their co-authored book, Historical Thinking in Medieval England and Wales: The Case of the Roman Past.
Emily is the Acquisitions Editor in History at Medieval Institute Publications (University of Western Michigan, Kalamazoo / De Gruyter, Berlin) and serves as Vice President for Europe of the Haskins Society. Previously, she held an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship at the University of Mainz in Germany and the John Cowdrey Junior Research Fellowship in History at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.
Undergraduate Teaching
At Hertford, Emily teaches the full range of late antique and medieval history from AD 250 to AD 1550. For the Preliminary Examination (first-year papers), she teaches The History of the British Isles 1 and 2, European and World History 1 and 2, and Historiography: Tacitus to Weber. For the Final Honour School (upper-level papers), she teaches The World of Late Antiquity, The Early Medieval World, The Central Middle Ages, The Late Medieval World, The History of the British Isles 1, 2, and 3, and Disciplines of History, in which students learn to do comparative history and study arguments about history in their intellectual context. As part of her history teaching, she enjoys teaching writing to undergraduate historians, exploring everything from crafting an essay to making an argument.
Graduate Teaching
Emily supervises dissertations for the interdisciplinary MSt in Medieval Studies, and has run the Doctoral Training Seminar for first-year doctoral students in Medieval, Byzantine, and Late Antique History at Oxford. She welcomes enquiries about co-supervision in History or Medieval Studies from prospective masters and doctoral students. Her current doctoral students are Carlo Maria Zanetti (University of Oxford) and Joshua Coulthard (Edge Hill University); her current masters student is Lauren Pidgeon (Oxford). Past masters students include Harriet Strahl (Oxford, 2022), Nia Moseley-Roberts (Oxford, 2022), Dr Giles Connolly (UCL, 2017), and Dr Liam Fitzgerald (UCL, 2017).
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Research interests
Emily Winkler works on historical writing and the literary, political, and intellectual culture of the high Middle Ages, with interests in the British Isles, the Anglo-Norman world, and the North Sea zone. She also works on the social and material culture of the Norman Mediterranean world, especially Sicily and southern Italy. In her research, she seeks to apply cross-disciplinary and comparative approaches to the past for a better understanding of medieval people and ideas. Several core questions are at the heart of her work. How did historians writing in the Middle Ages think about the past? How do art, architecture and archaeological remains tell stories about the thoughts and values of the people who created and interacted with them? What insights does the study of writing and rewriting history in the Middle Ages offer into diplomacy and conquest, both in practice and in perception? How can phenomenology—the study and philosophy of lived experience—and recent research on emotions in history help us to retrieve medieval ideas about human thought and feeling?
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Related websites
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Publications
Monograph
- E.A. Winkler, Royal Responsibility in Anglo-Norman Historical Writing, Oxford Historical Monographs, Oxford University Press (Oxford, 2017).
Trade Book
- Pocket Bayeux Tapestry, Bodleian Library Publishing (Oxford, September 2026). [in press]
Edited Books
- Rewriting History in the Central Middle Ages, 900–1300, ed. E.A. Winkler and C.P. Lewis, International Medieval Research, Brepols (Turnhout, 2022).
- The Normans in the Mediterranean, ed. E.A. Winkler & L. Fitzgerald, Brepols (Turnhout, 2021).
- Designing Norman Sicily: Visual Stories of a Mediterranean Kingdom, ed. E.A. Winkler, L. Fitzgerald & A. Small (Woodbridge, 2020).
- Discovering William of Malmesbury, ed. R. Thomson, E. Dolmans and E.A. Winkler (Woodbridge, 2017).
Peer-reviewed Articles and Chapters
- E.A. Winkler, ‘Madness and the Vita Merlini of Geoffrey of Monmouth’, Anglo-Norman Studies 48 (2026).
- E.A. Winkler, ‘England’s Enemies? Framing the Feelings of Foreigners in War Narratives, c. 1135–1250’, Parergon 42 (2025).
- E.A. Winkler, ‘Richard of Devizes, the Annals of Winchester, and the Chronicle of Richard I: Dates, Composition, and Authorship’, Mediaeval Studies 86 (2024). [forthcoming]
- E.A. Winkler & N.W. Jones, ‘The Very Idea of a Border in Britain’, in Borders in the Norman World: New Frontiers in Scholarship, ed. D. Armstrong, Á. Kecskés, C.C. Rozier and L.V. Hicks (Woodbridge, 2023).
- E.A. Winkler, ‘Grief, Grieving, and Loss in High Medieval Historical Thought’, Traditio 77 (2022).
- E.A. Winkler, ‘Æthelflaed and other rulers in English histories, c. 900–1150’, The English Historical Review 137 (2022). [Open Access]
- E.A. Winkler & 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.
- E.A. Winkler & A. Small, ‘Normans and Conquest in the Mediterranean’, in The Normans in the Mediterranean, ed. E.A. Winkler & L. Fitzgerald (Turnhout, 2021), 11–40.
- E.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 Series, Brepols (Turnhout, 2020), 233–53.
- E.A. Winkler & L. Fitzgerald, ‘The Story of Designing Norman Sicily’, in Designing Norman Sicily: Visual Stories of a Mediterranean Kingdom, ed. E.A. Winkler, L. Fitzgerald & A. Small (Woodbridge, 2020), 1–21.
- E.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.
- E.A. Winkler, ‘Imagining the medieval face of battle: the “Malfosse” incident and the Battle of Hastings, 1066–1200’, Historical Research 93 (2020), 1–21.
- E.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.
- E.A. Winkler, ‘The Latin Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan, British kingdoms and the Scandinavian past’, Welsh History Review 28.2 (2017), 425–56.
- E.A. Winkler, ‘William of Malmesbury and the Britons’, Discovering William of Malmesbury, ed. R.M. Thomson, E. Dolmans and E.A. Winkler, Boydell & Brewer (Woodbridge, 2017), 189–201.
- E.A. Winkler & E. Dolmans, ‘Discovering William of Malmesbury: The Man and his Works’, Discovering William of Malmesbury, ed. R.M. Thomson, E. Dolmans and E.A. Winkler, Boydell & Brewer (Woodbridge, 2017), 1–11.
- E.A. Winkler, ‘The Norman Conquest of the Classical Past: William of Poitiers, Language and History’, The Journal of Medieval History 42 (2016), 456–78.
- E.A. Winkler, ‘1074 in the Twelfth Century’, Anglo-Norman Studies 36 (2014), 241–58.
- E.A. Winkler, ‘England’s Defending Kings in Twelfth-Century Historical Writing’, Haskins Society Journal 25 (2013), 147–63.
Other Publications
- E.A. Winkler, ‘The unfinished story of the Bayeux Tapestry’, Times Literary Supplement (Online edn, 24 Jan. 2018).
- E.A. Winkler, ‘A Journey through the Medieval Past: One Historian’s Quest and Questions’, The Aularian 23 (2016).
- E.A. Winkler, ‘“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.
- E.A. Winkler, ‘Sicily: Island of Myth’, Corriere della Valle: Magazine of the Pacific Alliance 7:2 (2009), 14–15.