Thesis title: Crusade Diplomacy and the Kings of England, 1461-1528

My thesis uses previously unpublished archival material to argue that in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, crusading was neither primarily a commemorative chivalric throwback to family exploits of yore, nor yet a cynical ploy to wrest money or concessions out of a waning papacy, but rather formed a shared diplomatic framework to which the rulers and prelates of Europe subscribed, and a shared diplomatic language which they spoke in service of their wider geopolitical goals – which did, in fact, occasionally involve physical combat with the enemies of Christendom in an era of rapid Ottoman expansion and proto-colonial European expansion into largely Muslim-dominated territories in Africa.

Ecclesiastical, political, and military history of the later crusades (post-1291)

Development of the concept of ‘Christendom’ in English religious and political thought

Pre-Reformation Church-State relations in England

Modern uses of crusading imagery and memory

Digital humanities, especially for palaeography, textual editing, and network analysis

At Royal Holloway

HS1107 Republics, Kings, & People: The Foundations of European and Islamic Political Thought from Plato to Rousseau

HI3012 The Crusades and the Eastern Mediterranean, 1095-1291

At City, University of London

HI1002 Conflict, Conquest, and Cultural Encounter in World History, 450–1550

HI1004 History in the Age of Digital

HI3007 The History of Things: Material and Cultural History in the Twentieth Century