SUNY Brockport Fall History Lab

Description:  Laura L. Gathagan’s Embodying Conquest is an unapologetically feminist biography of the powerful eleventh-century Norman ‘conquest queen’ centered on the mountain of administrative evidence she left behind. Instead of a traditional chronological approach centered on her life cycle, Gathagan uses the organizational metaphor of Mathilda’s body to subvert the impulse to consider her relationally as daughter, wife and mother. By contrast, Embodying Conquest uses the frame of body parts, not to suggest that Mathilda was defined by her biology, but instead to show how her actions as patron, judge and ruler embodied female power in a world we typical construe as primarily masculine. Mathilda was the ruler of England, a builder of monasteries, a judge and a patron. With her mouth, she dispensed justice. With her hands, she endowed religious orders. With her crowned head, she asserted female authority. She embodied power. Embodying Conquest examines her life in full by shifting the focus from a relationally reckoned narrative to one in which Mathilda’s actions are central.

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Laura L. Gathagan is Associate Professor of History at the State University of New York at Cortland. She received her Master’s Degree in Medieval Studies from Fordham University and her PhD in History from CUNY Graduate Center. She was the editor of The Haskins Society Journal: Studies in Medieval History from 2014-2023 and is now the Vice President for North America of the Haskins Society. She is the Series Editor, with Charles Insley (University of Manchester), of Medieval Documentary Cultures.

Dr. Gathagan has published widely on medieval women and power both in secular and monastic contexts. Her most recent works include ‘Abbess, Judge, Jailor: Authority and Imprisonment at Holy Trinity, Caen’, in the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library and ‘Mathilda of Flanders: The Innovator’ in English Consorts: Power, Influence, Dynasty: Volume I (Palgrave Macmillan) and ‘Family and Kinship in the Age of William the Conqueror’ in The Cambridge Companion to the Age of William the Conqueror.She also co-edited the forthcoming essay collection Gender, Memory and Documentary Culture, 900-1200 for Boydell Press (January 2025) with Charles Insley. Her first monograph is The Queenship of Flanders c.1031-1083: Embodying Conquest.