Edmund King

Edmund King is Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at the University of Sheffield and a specialist in medieval English history. He studied at the University of Cambridge, where he took both his bachelor’s degree and doctorate and was a student of the distinguished economic historian M. M. Postan. King joined the Department of History at Sheffield in 1966 and was appointed to a chair in 1989. During his academic career he also held visiting fellowships at the Huntington Library in California, where he was a Fulbright Scholar, and at All Souls College, Oxford, and taught at the universities of Connecticut and Michigan.

King has published widely on medieval England, combining broad surveys with detailed research into the politics and historical writing of the twelfth century. His illustrated Medieval England, first published by Phaidon in 1988, appeared in several later editions and in Japanese translation. Much of his specialist scholarship has concentrated on the reign of King Stephen (1135–1154). His major works in this field include the edited collection The Anarchy of King Stephen’s Reign (1994), an edition of William of Malmesbury’s Historia Novella for Oxford Medieval Texts (1998), and his substantial biography King Stephen, published in the Yale English Monarchs series in 2010.