My research interests include ecclesiastical history, biblical exegesis, and liturgy in the Middle Ages. My current project takes up all of these subjects in the context of Anglo-Norman England. It considers how sacred conceptions of the past, ever present in liturgy and the reading of the Bible, influenced a monk who was also a prolific historian: William of Malmesbury.

William of Malmesbury has long been considered a reliable historian in the empirical mode, but his work as a biblical exegete has been neglected. The lacuna is surprising, since William’s Liber super explanationem Lamentationum Ieremiae prophetae—a piece of comparable length to his more voluminous histories—includes history as its first sense of biblical interpretation. Clearly, William saw history and biblical exegesis as connected. Taking his biblical commentary as its starting point, my project shows how William’s histories are shaped by four senses of biblical interpretation—history, allegory, morality, and anagogy. Addressing each sense in turn illuminates something new about William and his world. A close reading of his biblical commentary also sheds new light on William himself and his scholarly motivations in the context of Malmesbury Abbey. At a moment when interest in William of Malmesbury is growing, my project explores the role of exegesis in his history writing to better understand the life and work of one of twelfth-century England's most prolific and influential historians.