This book examines how eleventh-century kings were portrayed in the writing of twelfth-century historians. Winkler employs a modern literary critical approach to demonstrate how much of our understanding of eleventh-century history stems from authorial strategies of later writers rather than from contemporary sources.

Emily A. Winkler is the John Cowdrey Junior Research Fellow in Medieval History at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford, and Departmental Lecturer in Medieval History at the Faculty of History and Balliol College, University of Oxford. She has published articles on historical writing, political thought, and the reception of the classics in the early and central Middle Ages, with particular reference to the British Isles, the North Sea zone, and the Anglo-Norman world. Dr Winkler is also a Teaching Fellow in the Department of History at University College London.

• Part I - Structures of Historiography and Royal Responsibility


• 1: Introduction


• 2: The Foundations of Conditional Kingship


• 3: Invasion, Explanation, and Responsibility in Anglo-Saxon England


• Part II - Twelfth-Century England


• 4: Within the Providential Plan: William and Henry


• 5: The Challenge to Providence: John and Gaimar


• Part III - Royal Responsibility and the English


• 6: Conditional Kingship: Expanding the Nature of the Succession


• 7: Conditional Kingship: Expectations for Kings


• 8: Redeeming the English Past


• 9: Conclusions - Conquest and Rulership