Katharine Sykes
John Cowdrey Memorial Junior Research Fellow in History, St Edmund Hall
Research Interests
I am interested in all aspects of medieval monastic history, with a particular focus on monastic legislation, the impact of gender on monastic structures, and the ways in which medieval people (religious and lay) thought and wrote about monasteries. These themes come together in my work on double monasteries, religious communities in which men and women lived, worked and prayed together.
My doctoral thesis, a revised version of which was published in 2011 in the series Vita Regularis: Abhandlungen, examined the origins of an order of double monasteries known as the order of Sempringham or Gilbertine order. It demonstrates that the order – the only monastic order to be founded in medieval England – is far more innovative than has previously been thought, particularly in terms of its structure of government and the legislation within which this system is set out.
My current project, Men, women and the monastic life: the English double monastery from conversion to dissolution, aims to set the findings of my doctorate in perspective, by examining the concept and practice of the double monastery from the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons in the seventh century to the dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century. I am particularly interested in the ebb and flow of the fortunes of the double monasteries, and what this can tell us about wider currents and trends: what do terms such as ‘monastery’ and ‘monastic life’ mean to different groups of people in different periods? Who gets to decide? And how widely are such innovations (or self-conscious reformations) accepted?
I am also preparing an edition and translation of the statutes of the order of Sempringham, to be published by Lincoln Record Society.
Projects and Publications
- Inventing Sempringham: Gilbert of Sempringham and the origins of the role of Master, Vita Regularis: Abhandlungen 46 (Münster, 2011).
- ‘Sanctity as a form of capital’, in Sainthood and Sanctity, ed. Peter D. Clarke and Tony Clayton, Studies in Church History 47 (Woodbridge, 2011).
- ‘Canonici albi et moniales: perceptions of the twelfth-century double house’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 60 (2009), 233–245.
- ‘Cistercian influences on Gilbertine legislation’, Cîteaux: commentarii cistercienses 59 (2008), 1–27.