Fay West

Fay West is a PhD student and Graduate Teaching Assistant in the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies and School of History.

She completed a BA in History at Swansea University, for which she received a prize for her dissertation on the evolution of the hagiography of St Æthelthryth from Bede to the Liber Eliensis. She received a scholarship to undertake her MA degree in Medieval Studies at Swansea University, with a dissertation on the early cult and hagiography of St Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury. She then came to the University of Kent to do a PhD at the Centre of Medieval Studies in 2019 with a Vice-Chancellor’s Scholarship.

Fay’s particular fields of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Saint’s lives and cults
  
• Monasticism and monastic reform
• Medieval history writing and memory
  
• Tenth and Eleventh Century England
• Networks and cultural exchange between England and the continent before the Norman Conquest

Thesis title and description

The Creation of the narrative of an English Benedictine Reform: monastic memory and identity in England from ca. 980 to 1080 (working title).

This thesis explores themes related to the recording and memory of the English Benedictine monastic ‘reform’ of the late Tenth Century. It will explore the memory and legacy of St Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, as well as the customary known as the Regularis Concordia up to the Norman Conquest. It also explores how ‘reform’ was presented in the discourse of the movement’s contemporaries and immediate succeeding generations.

This thesis is supervised by Dr Edward Roberts and Professor Barbara Bombi.

HIST4260 - Making History: Theory and Practice
HIST4110 – Later Medieval Europe