Florence H R 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 in my 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 Chronicles 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.

I publish Ælfgif-who?, a bestselling Substack newsletter and podcast that illuminates the lives of women who lived in England between 600 and 1100 AD. I have appeared on BBC’s Woman’s Hour and History Hit’s Gone Medieval podcast, and my work has also featured in Pink News, BBC History Extra Magazine, and the Byline Times. I am currently writing my first trade book on early English monarchy.

Research interests

I am interested in the religious ideology that underpinned queenship in the earliest stages of English monarchy. I research the development of a Christian understanding of queenship, utilising contemporary liturgical rites for royal inauguration - specifically the First English Ordo, the Second English Ordo, the Erdmann Ordo and the Judith Ordo - as well as extant images, documentary evidence, and material culture. I look at evidence for the introduction, development, and standardisation of the ritual anointing and crowning of queens in early medieval England.

My wider research interests include the use of royal ritual as a way to ideologically justify monarchy, the lives of women in early medieval England, women in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, the invention of anointing in the early Middle Ages, the portrayal of queenship and royal marriage in the theology of Hincmar of Rheims, biblical queenship, coronation insignia, maternal ancestry, the conquests of England in the eleventh century, images of Emma of Normandy, artistic achievements in early medieval Northumbria, and the ways in which claims to medieval history can be used to place cultural value judgements on modern communities in England.

Publications:

'Hugeburc of Heidenheim, Lives of Wynnebald and Willibald', in The Palgrave Encylopedia of Medieval Women's Writing in the Global Middle Ages, ed. by Michelle M Sauer, Diane Watt and Liz Herbert McAvoy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)

Forthcoming: 'Emma of Normandy and the Gendered Iconography of Crowns', in Gender, Memory and Documentary Culture, 900-1300, ed. by Laura Gathagan and Charles Insley (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2024)