The University of Sheffield
Department of History
Photo of Edmund King

Professor Edmund King

M.A., Ph.D. (Cantab.), FSA

Professor Emeritus of Medieval History

11th-15th c. British Political and Economic; Anglo-Norman history

 

Office Hours:

Email icon.e.king@sheffield.ac.uk

Phone icon.+44 (0)114 22 22589
 

Home icon.346 Glossop Road: A03

 

 

 

Major Publications

Edmund King, King Stephen book cover

Edmund King The Anarchy of King Stephen's Reign book cover

Edmund King Peterborough Abbey 1086-1310

Edmund King, William of Malmesbury Historia Novella: The Contemporary History book cover

Edmund King Medieval England book cover

 

Modules

 

 

 

 

Downloads

 

Full List of Publications
(PDF, 86KB)

 

Biography

 

Edmund King is Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at the University of Sheffield. He took his bachelor and doctoral degrees at the University of Cambridge, where he was a student of M. M. Postan. He joined the History department at Sheffield in 1966 and has held a chair since 1989. He has held visiting fellowships at the Huntington Library, USA (where he was a Fulbright Scholar), and at All Souls College, Oxford, and he has taught also at the universities of Connecticut and Michigan in the USA.

Edmund King has published widely in the field of Medieval British History. His illustrated survey of Medieval England (Phaidon, 1988) was a 'book of the month' choice of the History Guild; new editions have appeared from Tempus Publishing (2001, 2005) and The History Press (2009); and a Japanese translation appeared from Keio University Press in 2006. Increasingly his specialised research, growing from his teaching, has come to focus on the reign of King Stephen (1135-1154). The publications cited below include an edited volume of essays on the reign (Oxford University Press, 1994), an edition of one of the main chronicles, the Historia Novella of William of Malmesbury (Oxford Medieval Texts, 1998), and most recently a biography of the king (Yale English Monarchs, 2010).


Research

 

Current Research

Edmund King plans to write a further biography, on King Stephen's more able younger brother, Henry, bishop of Winchester. He is also involved in a project to publish the records of Peterborough Abbey (on which he wrote his doctoral thesis), for which he is preparing a new edition of the chronicles written in the monastery. He serves on the Councils of the Lincoln Record Society and of the Northamptonshire Record Society (where he was general editor responsible for publications 1970-94).

 

Research Interests

To Follow.

 

Knowledge Exchange and Public Engagement

To Follow.

 

Research Supervision

To Follow.


Administrative Roles and Responsibilities

 

The duties of an Emeritus Professor happily do not involve any responsibility for administration. Earlier in his career, Edmund King undertook a range of responsibilities within the department and the wider university. He was Head of Department, 1995-6, and 2001-04. He served as an officer both of the Faculty of Arts (Sub-Dean, 1975-79) and of the Faculty of Social Sciences (Deputy Dean and then Dean, 1990-94), and he was President of the university's Year Abroad Office, 1985-88.


Selected Publications

 

Books / Special Issues

King Stephen, xvii + 382 pp. + 16 pp. of plates (Yale English Monarchs: Yale University Press, 2010)

- editor (with trans. by K. R. Potter), William of Malmesbury Historia Novella: The Contemporary History, cxiv + 143 pp. (Oxford Medieval Texts: Clarendon Press, 1998)

- editor, The Anarchy of King Stephen's Reign, xxiii + 332 pp. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994)

- Medieval England, (The History Press, 2009)

Peterborough Abbey 1086–1310, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008)

Essays and Articles

- 'A week in politics: Oxford, late July 1141', in The Reign of King Stephen, 1135-1154, ed. Paul Dalton and Graeme White (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2008), pp. 58-79

- 'The Accession of Henry II', in Henry II: New Interpretations, ed. Christopher Harper-Bill and Nicholas Vincent (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007), pp. 24-46

- 'The Gesta Stephani', in Writing Medieval Biography, 750-1250: Essays in Honour of Frank Barlow, ed. David Bates, Julia Crick, and Sarah Hamilton (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), pp. 195-206.

- 'Stephen of Blois, count of Mortain and Boulogne', English Historical Review, 115 (2000), pp. 271-96