author
Kate Norgate
1853–1935
A pioneering British historian, she brought the world of the Angevin kings vividly to life and helped popularize the phrase “Angevin Empire.” Self-educated in an era that offered women few academic paths, she earned lasting respect for her command of medieval English history.
6 Audiobooks
John Lackland
by Kate Norgate
England under the Angevin Kings, Volume I
by Kate Norgate
England under the Angevin Kings, Volumes I and II
by Kate Norgate
England under the Angevin Kings, Volume II
by Kate Norgate
Richard the Lion Heart
by Kate Norgate
The Minority of Henry the Third
by Kate Norgate
About the author
Born in London in 1853, she grew up in a bookish world as the daughter of publisher and bookseller Frederic Norgate. She was largely self-educated, but found important encouragement from the historian John Richard Green and later helped Alice Stopford Green with editorial work after Green’s death.
Her reputation was made by England under the Angevin Kings (1887), a major study she spent many years researching in the British Museum. She went on to write John Lackland (1902), The Minority of Henry the Third (1912), and Richard the Lion Heart (1924), and she is especially remembered for helping fix the term “Angevin Empire” in historical writing.
Norgate never married and spent her later years in Gorleston-on-Sea, where she died in 1935. Though she worked outside the formal university system, later writers described her as one of the most learned women historians of the pre-academic era, and Somerville College, Oxford, elected her an honorary fellow in 1929.