Rachel Wilson

My research is an interdisciplinary approach to practices of history writing and philosophies of history during the European Middle Ages, primarily in the eleventh through thirteenth centuries. I blend methodologies of literary theory and archival, object-based research in my work with manuscripts and documents of historical texts during this period. In my dissertation, I focus on histories written in the Anglo-Norman realm on both sides of the English Channel. I interrogate how the manuscript culture of Europe in this time produced a materially-specific historical epistemology, which I seek to locate in autographs, or authorially-produced manuscripts. By recentering our consideration of historical authorship on process, and on the tangible traces of medieval hands at work, I suggest an understanding of the past within the Middle Ages that was radically contingent on a material textuality.