Katy Bennett
Associate Lecturer

Profile

Biography

BA (Hons) History, Cambridge
MPhil Medieval History, Cambridge
PhD History, York

Katy Bennett is an Associate Lecturer in History. Her research focuses on loyalty, lordship, and governance in the late Middle Ages, with a particular focus on England and France. Before joining the department of History as an Associate Lecturer, she undertook her PhD at York, examining Gascon seigneurial changes of allegiance in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. She is closely involved in the Medieval Loyalty Research Network. Alongside her research, she has teaching experience in medieval British and French history (1066–1500) as well as in political history more broadly.

Research

Overview

Katy’s thesis, ‘Loyalty, Disloyalty, and Changing Allegiance in Late-Medieval Gascony, 1337–1476’, analysed seigneurial changes of allegiance in late-medieval Gascony, contested between the English and French crowns, as a comparative phenomenon. This research contributes towards pinpointing a definition of changing allegiance, an imprecise (but rarely explicitly defined) concept which encompassed a range of actions, and explores how far allegiance was an ideology as well as a practice, bound up with developing political ideas of legitimacy and sovereignty. She is in the process of publishing aspects of this research.

Teaching

Undergraduate

Current teaching:

• Historical Thinking
• Extraordinary Lives: The Medieval Worlds of Princes, Monks & Unconventional Women

Modules taught on previously:

• Chivalry, Identity and Love, 1350–1450
• Kingship, Rule and Crisis in Medieval England
• Political Communities in World History