About
I am Research Fellow in Medieval History at Flinders University, supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award: ‘Contesting Conquest: Pre-Modern Attempts to come to Terms with the Past’ (DE250100116). I am also a Travelling Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (AAH) (2024), and an Early Career Fellow of both the Australian Historical Association (AHA) (2024) and the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (ANZAMEMS) (2023).
My research focuses on historiography, cultural memory, and the transmission of historical narrative across time and place. With research specialities in the history of early medieval England and its reception, as well as in Icelandic saga literature, I have published numerous articles and book chapters on various aspects of society, culture and historiography in England and Scandinavia in the Middle Ages, and their intersections.
My first monograph, Early English Queens, 850–1000: Potestas Reginae, is a biographical study of English royal women in the years 850-1000 that explores the development of queenship at a critical juncture in the history of early medieval England. It was published in Routledge’s Lives of Royal Women series in 2024. My second monograph, Remembering England: Cultural Memory in the Sagas of Icelanders, examines depictions of Viking Age England in the Sagas of Icelanders and their utility as historical sources. It was published in Routledge’s Studies in Medieval History and Culture series in 2025. My edited collection, Pre-Conquest History and its Medieval Reception: Writing England’s Past, brings together a collection of essays from notable scholars at various career stages who examine the reception of England’s pre-Conquest past in the histories of later medieval commentators. It was published in 2025 in the York Medieval Press series, Writing History in the Middle Ages.
Publications
Matthew Firth,
Remembering England: Cultural Memory in the Sagas of Icelanders (Routledge, 2025) (
link).
Matthew Firth, ed.,
Pre-Conquest History and its Medieval Reception: Writing England’s Past (York Medieval Press, 2025) (
link).
Matthew Firth,
Early English Queens, 850-1000: Potestas reginae (Routledge, 2024) (
link).
Erin Sebo, Matthew Firth and Daniel Anlezark (eds),
Emotional Alterity in the Medieval North Sea World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) (
link).
Matthew Firth, ‘‘Cesare splendidior’: Anglo-Norman Memories of Æthelflæd of Mercia’, in
Pre-Conquest History and its Medieval Reception: Writing England’s Past, ed. M. Firth (York Medieval Press, 2025), 192-211 (
link).
Matthew Firth, ‘Eadwig’s Coronation Scandal: Sexuality, Rhetoric and the Vulnerability of Reputation’, in
Premodern Ruling Sexualities: Representation, Identity, and Power, ed. G. Story and Z. Rohr (Manchester University Press, 2024) (
link).
Matthew Firth, ‘Memories of Viking Age Cultural Contact: England in the
Íslendingasögur‘,
Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, series 3, 17 (2023), 1-26 (
link).
Matthew Firth, ‘Vikings and Francia, 799–936’, in
Routledge Handbook of French History, ed. David Andress (Routledge, 2023), 31-41 (
link).
Erin Sebo and Matthew Firth, ‘Saxo Grammaticus’s Account of the Viking Age Site on the Danish Island of Hjarnø in
Gesta Danorum’, Scandinavian Studies 95, 2 (2023), 166-82 (
link).
Matthew Firth, ‘Rage and Lust in the Afterlives of King Edgar the Peaceful’, in
Emotional Alterity in the Medieval North Sea World, ed. Erin Sebo, Matthew Firth and Daniel Anlezark (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), 201-230 (
link).
Matthew Firth, ‘Identifying Queenship in Pre-Conquest England’, in
Norman to Early Plantaganet Consorts: Power, Influence, Dynasty, ed. Aidan Norrie et al. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), 17-45 (
link).
Matthew Firth, ‘On the Dating of the Norse Siege of Chester,’
Notes and Queries 69 (2022) (
link)
Matthew Firth, ‘Deconstructing the Female Antagonist of the Coronation Scandal in B’s
Vita Dunstani,’
English Studies 103 (2022) (
free eprint)
Matthew Firth, ‘Æthelred II ‘the Unready’ and the Role of Kingship in
Gunnlaugs saga Ormstungu,’
The Court Historian 25 (no.1, 2020), 1-14 (
free eprint).
Matthew Firth and Erin Sebo, ‘Kingship and Maritime Power in 10th-Century England,’
International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 49 (no. 2, 2020), 329-40 (
free eprint).
