Charity Urbanski (she/her)

I am a historian of Medieval Europe focusing on the political and cultural history of twelfth-century France and England. My interest in history derives from my desire to understand the world we currently live in, and particularly how contemporary cultural attitudes and political arrangements came into being. I was drawn to medieval history because the period was one of important transformations, and because it was populated with people who are at once familiar to us and yet still profoundly foreign in many of their assumptions, attitudes, and practices. Teaching medieval history allows me to share this fascinating period with my students, and explain how our own world was forged by developments in medieval Europe.

My first book, Writing History for the King: Henry II and the Politics of Vernacular Historiography (Cornell University Press, 2013), examines the politics of vernacular history writing in England. It focuses on two of the earliest vernacular histories produced in Old French: Wace's Roman de Rou (c. 1160-1174) and Benoit de Sainte-Maure's Chronique des ducs de Normandie (c. 1174-1189). While both works were commissioned by Henry II to commemorate his Norman ancestors, Wace and Benoit produced two very different versions of Norman history. Wace's version was apparently so inflammatory that he was fired and replaced with Benoit. I argue that Henry commissioned these histories as part of a larger political program to restore royal power after two decades of civil war, and that he attempted to marshal the past to enhance his authority and secure the succession of his children. I also explore how the authors entrusted with this project turned their histories into forums for debating royal policies and used history writing to endorse or undermine the king.

Since completing my first book, my research focus has shifted from examining the attempts of the powerful to harness the past for their own ends, to examining monstrosity in medieval Europe. My most recent book, Medieval Monstrosity: Imagining the Monstrous in Medieval Europe (Routledge, 2023), is aimed at undergraduate teaching and contains a series of thematic essays that are each accompanied by primary sources in English translation. The book first examines how medieval Europeans conceptualized the monstrous, as well as how clerical and secular authorities deployed the rhetoric of monstrosity to dehumanize non-Christians, non-Europeans, and women, and then turns to explore the cultural functions of more fantastic monsters like revenants, werewolves, and dragons.

Before coming to the University of Washington in 2008, I taught at UC Berkeley and UCLA. My course offerings at UW have included seminars on Medieval Outlaws, the Monstrous in the Middle Ages, the Supernatural in the Middle Ages, and the Politics of Medieval History Writing. My lecture courses include lower division surveys of Medieval Europe and Tudor England, and upper division courses on Medieval England, Medieval Women, the Late Middle Ages, and Gender and Sexuality in Medieval Europe.