Dr Katy Bennett
Lecturer (Medieval History c.1100-1450)

Profile

Biography

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

Katy Bennett is a Lecturer in Medieval History c.1100–1450. Her research focuses on loyalty, lordship, and governance in the late Middle Ages, with a particular focus on England and France, and especially Gascony. Prior to joining the department as a Lecturer, she held the position of Associate Lecturer at the University of York, and she completed her PhD at York in 2026. Outside of York, she is closely involved in the Medieval Loyalty Research Network.

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, during a period where this territory was contested between the English and French crowns. Her thesis argued for allegiance as a fundamental structure of lordship and governance, and made a case for the further integration of the study of political ideas and political action. She is more broadly interested in the way that lordship, loyalty and governance interacted in the late Middle Ages, especially in a contested borderland region such as Gascony, and is currently working on expanding her doctoral research.

Katy has recently published her first article in the Journal of Medieval History, which argued that allegiance in Gascony was an ideological project, as the English (and French) kings cast themselves as the only 'natural' and 'legitimate' lords in the region. She has two further articles forthcoming in 2026, in Fourteenth Century England and The Fifteenth Century. The former examines an English legacy policy in Gascony pursued between 1340 and 1401 to make a case for the flexibility and frequently collaborative nature of English governance there. The latter uses the career of one Gascon lord to assess the integration of Gascony into comparative work on 'Plantagenet' rule, asserting that this style of rule was not only exported out of England, but shaped by those who participated in it at every level. She is in the process of publishing further aspects of her research.

Teaching

Undergraduate

• Extraordinary Lives: The Medieval Worlds of Princes, Monks & Unconventional Women
• Kingship, Rule and Crisis in Medieval England
• The Thought Police: Heresy & Repression in the High Middle Ages

Postgraduate

• Medieval Lives (MA)
• Perspectives on Medieval History (MA)