Fantastic detours, contested maps, and the long shadow of courtly love are just some of the paths Laura Ashe follows in her work as an Oxford University scholar of medieval literature and history. Known for tracing the emotional, political, and philosophical threads that stretch from the 12th century to today, Ashe examines texts, letters, and historical events to reveal how medieval ideas about power, identity, and belief continue to shape modern society. She does not merely study the past; she listens for its echoes, and what she hears challenges many of our assumptions about the progress and stability of history. Her work uncovers uncomfortable connections, showing how tensions from centuries ago still haunt contemporary conflicts and debates.
Ashe did not learn history through ruins or relics. She came to it through maps, and those primary school atlases that tell lies with straight lines. The moment she learned borders had moved, the past stopped being a story and became an argument.
“Someone told me the borders of Europe weren’t fixed,” she recalls. “And it was like the ground shifted. What do you mean they moved?”
From then on, the world looked less like a map and more like a draft. From then on Yugoslavia happened. The lesson sank in: stability is a performance. The stage collapses easily.
What Sound Does History Make?
“It is screaming,” she says without hesitation, “Every time I watch the news, I have to get my blood pressure back under control”.
The First break
While other children memorised the names of kings and the dates of historical events, Ashe was more interested in the seams of history. She saw how its stories were stitched and how some lines were frayed. She never really feared nuclear war as she was too young to experience the Cold War and such matters were not discussed anyway. But she feared the illusion of permanence.
“I grew up thinking things were fixed and good,” she says. ” History taught me otherwise.”
The past was not just unsettled. It was unsettle-able.
The Most Dangerous Invention
If there is one idea Ashe would like to detonate publicly, it is the idea of the nation-state.
“It’s ideologically damaging,” she says flatly. “As a medievalist, I know how recent and artificial it is.”
She has spent years arguing that medieval England had precocious systems of governance. However, the irony is that belonging was looser and more plural even in that precocious and highly developed state. The modern nation-state, she argues, is about drawing borders around identity, weaponising difference, and pretending that land can belong to people.
The state, the world it is all teetering on the brink of hell, she says, “and has already fallen in, really.”
The Footnote She Would Smuggle into the National Curriculum.
If Ashe could sneak just one thought into the mind of every schoolchild, it would be this:
It did not have to be this way.
How we live now is contingent on, and vulnerable to, tiny changes. One different decision made in the past, and none of this might have come to pass. Your school, town, and government could all have been unrecognisable.
Ashe tells me humans love teleology. However, there is no straight path just millions of moments where it could have gone the other way.
Soundtrack of the Archive
She half-jokes that Rage Against the Machine fits her work best. However, when she reaches for real accompaniment, it is early music: modal, mournful, and dissonant. Or James Blake’s Overgrown, that elegy to intimacy and entropy.
Her history does not march. It aches.
The Myth with the Most Blood on Its Hands
The claim that everyone simply accepted their place doesn’t hold up.
“That’s utter nonsense,” Ashe says. “The notion that people were passive and oblivious to their own social realities is just a convenient myth.”
Through her study of medieval literature, she finds quite the opposite: a world full of self-awareness, subtle resistance, and wit. People reflected on their conditions, challenged them, and turned constraints into creativity.
A Line That Still Haunts Her
“There is no you without me, no me without you.”
It is from a medieval text on love and power. She quotes it softly as if it still catches in the throat.
However, the line is not just romantic, it is resistant. A vow against erasure. A refusal to separate the self from the other.
Brutality: Then and Now
Ashe does not romanticise the past. She knows that violence is real. However, she baulks at how modern audiences use medieval violence to comfort themselves.
“Yes, three armed men on horses could ride into your village and take everything,” she says. “But people are gunned down today. We just have better weapons.”
Pretending that we are more civilised is an ideological sleight-of-hand.
The brutality did not end; it just upgraded.