Jennifer Jahner's research spans the long histories of rhetoric, law, and natural philosophy, focusing, in particular, on the European Middle Ages and its role in shaping our still-evolving understanding of rights, evidence, perception, and proof. Her research and teaching interests also include manuscript studies, visual culture, gender and sexuality studies, and history of science.

Jahner's first book, Literature and Law in the Era of Magna Carta (Oxford University Press, 2019) examines the grammatical and rhetorical training that informed constitutional thought in England at the beginnings of statutory law. It explores how poetry, which stood at the foundations of literate education in the Middle Ages, offered to law and its practitioners a powerful set of tools for conjuring theories of community, belonging, obligation, and injury. The book shows how the theory and practice of constitutionalism, articulated in legal codes and literature alike, emerged in tandem with the anti-Jewish laws and practices that would culminate in the 1290 expulsion of Jews from England.

Her current book project, Arts of Conjecture: Experimental and Literary Method in Later Medieval England, traces the early history of the experiment and its

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