The University of Sheffield
Department of History

Professor Edmund King, M.A., Ph.D. (Cantab.), FSA

Emeritus Professor of Medieval History [11th-15th c. British Political and Economic; Anglo-Norman history]

Photo of Professor Edmund King

Email: e.king@sheffield.ac.uk
Room: Jessop West: 1.10 | Telephone: 0114 22 22589

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).

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