Sophie Thérèse Ambler
Dr Sophie Thérèse Ambler is a historian of the Middle Ages, with interests ranging widely across the history of war, politics, religion and society. She is Reader in Medieval History and Director of the Centre for War and Diplomacy at Lancaster University, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She holds a Philip Leverhulme Prize in History and in 2022 was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.
Sophie has appeared on TV and radio for the BBC, Channel 4, and History Hit. In 2019 Sophie’s second book, The Song of Simon de Montfort: England’s First Revolutionary and the Death of Chivalry, was published by Picador in the UK and Oxford University Press in the USA. It has been described as 'a bold and brilliantly written reassessment of one of (British) history's most misunderstood figures ... alive with human detail and acute political judgement' (Dan Jones), ‘a remarkable book: beautifully presented… finely written and based on a deep, scholarly knowledge of the sources’ (Sir Noel Malcom, Sunday Telegraph), and ‘exhaustively researched and beautifully written’, tracing ‘the remarkable life of a military and political giant of the medieval period who has never been more convincingly portrayed’ (Saul David, Daily Telegraph).
Sophie’s first book, published by Oxford University Press in 2017, was Bishops in the Political Community of England, 1213-1272: ‘an excellent book, bold in its range and persuasive in its reasoning’ (John Maddicott, Journal of Ecclesiastical History). She has published various academic articles and chapters on the military and political history of medieval Britain and Europe, including in English Historical Review, Historical Research, and The Cambridge History of Strategy, and in 2023 co-edited a special issue of the International Journal of Military History and Historiography on the Falklands War.
Her next book will be a new history of war in the later Middle Ages through the eyes of those who experienced it, whether as combatants, witnesses, victims or mourners. It is based on extensive new primary research, much of it archival, as well as investigation of battlefield landscapes.
