Research

My dissertation, “The King’s Matter: Text, Flesh, and Political Performance in the Reign of Edward IV, 1461-1483,” bridges political history, manuscript studies, and literary analysis, offering a new framework for understanding power in late medieval England as a dynamic, visible process. Whereas traditional scholarship tends to read fifteenth-century political texts as straightforward propaganda, I argue that authority under Edward IV was constructed and contested through public interactions with the king’s physical presence. 

Drawing on rare, often anonymous or non-commissioned manuscripts, my award-winning work shows how different social groups including guilds, court alchemists, and religious communities, depicted the monarch’s body as an active site of political negotiation. This approach not only recasts our understanding of late medieval kingship but also challenges narratives about the emergence of the modern state after the central Middle Ages—particularly the assumption that legitimacy now depended on indirect and abstract government rather than the visibility and physical presence of the ruler. In doing so, my work invites a reconsideration of how power operates through the performance of the ruler’s body across historical moments.