Biography
Rachel's first degree was in mathematics; she then trained as a librarian and worked in a variety of specialist and academic libraries. She did an MPhil in Medieval History at Cambridge in 1998-1999 and then completed her PhD at King's College London (on "Masculinity, nobility and the moral instruction of the Carolingian lay elite") in 2005. Between 2012 and 2014 she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at King’s, working on the ‘Making of Charlemagne’s Europe’ charter database project. She currently works as a librarian at the University of Bedfordshire and has been a visiting research associate at King’s since 2015.
Research Interests
- Early medieval gender and women’s history
- Carolingian cultural and religious history
- Digital humanities
Rachel’s research has covered a wide range of topics in early medieval history, connecting together religion, morality, gender and politics. She is currently working on a project exploring the persistence of patriarchal structures between the classical and the early modern world.
Selected Publications
- Morality and Masculinity in the Carolingian Empire (CUP, 2012)
- Hincmar of Rheims: Life and Work (MUP, 2015), co-edited with Charles West
- The Divorce of King Lothar and Queen Theutberga: Hincmar of Rheims’ De Divortio (MUP, 2016), co-translated and annotated with Charles West
- ‘Spiritual heirs and families: episcopal relatives in early medieval Francia’, in Almut Höfert, Matthew Mesley and Serena Tolino (eds.), Celibate and Childless Men in Power. Ruling Eunuchs and Bishops in the Pre-Modern World (Routledge, 2017), 129-148
- ‘Political culture and the changing role of countesses, 750-1050’, History 102 (2017), 824-839