Florence Scott

Profile

My research is supervised by Pauline Stafford, Visiting Professor of the IMS and Professor Emerita of Early Medieval History at Liverpool University, and Julia Barrow, Professor in Medieval Studies at Leeds. My PhD Advisor is Catherine Karkov, Professor of Art History at Leeds.

I completed a First Class Honours Degree in History at the University of Leeds in 2016, in which I wrote a dissertation on the broad political roles of queens in eleventh-century England. I then earned a Distinction-level MA in Medieval Studies in the Institute of Medieval Studies (IMS) at Leeds in 2017, in which I wrote a dissertation on the textual relationship between the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Encomium Emmae Reginae. In the same year I began my current PhD thesis, which is fully funded by a School of History/IMS Scholarship.

Teaching:

I am a Postgraduate Tutor on the module 'Medieval and Renaissance Europe 550-1550', within the School of History.

Outreach:

I am employed as an Educational Outreach Fellow for the School of History, a role that involves promoting the study of history and university education to groups of young people. This requires me to teach school pupils about matters relating to my own research, more general historical topics, historical skills and higher education. I have worked with ages 10-18 and have also provided guidance to A-level tutors and heads of department from sixth form colleges. 

I am a member of the Leeds School of History Staff-Student Forum, the student representative on the Institute of Medieval Studies Steering Committee, and the student representative for the IMS Staff-Student Committee. I am also President of the LUU Medieval Society.

Conference Papers:

I delivered a paper at the 2018 International Medieval Congress as part of a session on Norman Women, organised by Francesca Petrizzo. The paper was entitled 'Emma of Normandy and her Legacy: the Encomium Emmae Reginae and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles 1035-44'.

Along with my colleague Samuel Bradley I am organising and chairing a strand comprising of three sessions for IMC 2019, entitled 'Births, Marriages (Coronations) and Deaths: Royal Ceremony in the Middle Ages'.

Research interests

I research the ideas and representation of queenship from the ninth to the eleventh centuries in England, with a focus on religious inauguration ceremonies in which the wives of kings were anointed and crowned as queens.

I work with a range of sources including liturgical rites (the sequence of prayers used in religious ritual), theology and biblical exegesis, as well as illuminated manuscripts that contain images relevant to inauguration or monarchy. My research covers the theological ideas of 'sacred queenship' contained in the Judith Ordo, Second English Ordo and Third English Ordo: three extant recensions of Anglo-Saxon and early Anglo-Norman inauguration liturgy containing rites for anointing and crowning a queen consort. These sources can be a gateway to our understanding of how queens and queenship were viewed within medieval English society, particularly their religious significance. I am interested in the sacramental nature of the anointing ceremony and the significance of the various coronation insignia, as well as biblical queens and the development of the cult of Mary, Queen of Heaven.