Jennifer Paxton is working on a book manuscript entitled Chronicle and Community in Twelfth-Century England, which looks at the ways in which medieval English monastic communities used historical texts to assert various claims to power and authority in a rapidly changing political, economic, and spiritual landscape. She is focusing on chronicles written at eastern English monasteries in the aftermath of the great upheavals of the Norman Conquest and the civil war of King Stephen’s reign, in which monastic compilers deployed every resource at their command to distinguish themselves from rival houses and defend themselves against the sometimes aggressive claims of lay lords and even bishops. Dr. Paxton is also working on a further project that examines changing views of abbatial leadership across the Anglo-Norman world in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
