Laura Ashe

Laura Ashe is a British scholar, historian and author specialising in medieval English literature, history and culture. She is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and the David Woods Kemper Family Fellow in English at Worcester College. Her work ranges from the Anglo-Saxon and Norman periods to the later Middle Ages and early Tudor England, with particular interests in medieval kingship, chivalry, national identity, romance, historiography and the development of ideas about individuality and personal identity. She frequently works across the boundaries between literature and history, using chronicles, romances and religious writing to examine how medieval people understood political authority, conquest, morality and their place within society.

Ashe’s major books include Fiction and History in England, 1066–1200, which examines the relationship between historical writing, emerging fiction and national identity following the Norman Conquest, and The Oxford English Literary History, Volume I: 1000–1350: Conquest and Transformation, a wide-ranging study of the cultural changes produced by conquest, linguistic change, religious development and the growth of chivalric culture. She has also written Richard II for the Penguin Monarchs series and edited Early Fiction in England: From Geoffrey of Monmouth to Chaucer. Her more recent Chaucer’s Ethical Philosophy (2025) explores Geoffrey Chaucer’s engagement with questions of moral responsibility, subjectivity and human relationships, and won the New Chaucer Society’s 2026 Publication Prize for Best Monograph on Chaucer.