J L Laynesmith
Part-Time Historian
Joanna Laynesmith is a medieval historian writing on queens, noblewomen and royal adultery in medieval Britain. She regularly gives lectures at conferences, local history groups or schools and has just been appointed editor of The Ricardian (the academic journal of the Richard III Society). She has been a guest on Radio 4's In Our Time, and has appeared on Time Team and The Real White Queen and her Rivals.
Her biography of Cecily Duchess of York, published by Bloomsbury Academic in July 2017, won the 2018 Royal Studies Network Book Prize.
'Its scholarship is impeccable and its style very readable.' Livia Visser-Fuchs in The Ricardian
Her first book, The Last Medieval Queens, was a joint winner of the Longman-History Today Book of the Year Prize 2005.
'an example of integrated medieval studies at their best'. Miri Rubin, Queen Mary University of London
Joanna's most recent book is a volume co-edited with Ellie Woodacre, University of Winchester, and published in 2023 by Palgrave Macmillan: Later Plantagenet and the Wars of the Roses Consorts. She is currently working on a study of the politics of royal adultery in early Medieval Britain.