I was born in Nottingham in 1947 to Peter Kent, an exploration geologist, and Betty, née Hood, who later became Chair of the Nottingham Bench of Magistrates. I was a committed medievalist from the age of about four, since that was clearly where all the good stories came from. I was educated at Nottingham High School for Girls, GPDST, and at Cambridge at what was then New Hall, now Murray Edwards, where I stayed for my PhD (part-supervised by Magdalene’s JAW Bennett) and a Junior Research Fellowship. In 1970 I married Michael Cooper (a Fellow of St John’s, Cambridge, and later of Wolfson, Oxford; he died in 2007), and we had two daughters.
In 1978 I was appointed to a tutorial fellowship at University College, Oxford; the college had just changed its statutes to admit women, and I became its first woman Fellow. My remit was to teach 1100-1660, though, as the advertisement stated, ‘a willingness to teach the twentieth century would be an advantage’ – which I also did for some years. I served for some years as editor in Old and Middle English for Medium Ævum. I was awarded a personal professorship, and a D.Litt. I returned to Cambridge in 2004 to take up the offer of the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English, and of a professorial fellowship at Magdalene. I retired in 2014, in so far as academics ever do retire. My last research student (of 31) completed her doctorate in 2017.
BA, MA (Cambridge)
PhD (Cambridge)
D.Litt (Oxford)
Honorary doctorate, Washington and Lee University, Virginia, 2001
Fellowship of the British Academy, 2006
Chair of the Medieval Studies Section, 2014-17
Emeritus Fellowship, University College, Oxford, 2004; Honorary Fellowship, 2009
Life Fellowship, Magdalene College, Cambridge, 2014
Co-editor/ Executive editor, Medium Ævum, 1989-2002
President of the New Chaucer Society, 2000-02
Gollancz Lecturer of the British Academy, 2016
Senior Tutor, University College, Oxford, 1997-2000
Chair of the English Faculty, University of Oxford, 1990-93
Chair of the English Faculty, University of Cambridge, 2010-12
Cambridge University representative Trustee, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, 2013-17
Trustee, The Prince’s Teaching Institute, from 2013
Fellow of the British Academy
New Chaucer Society
Early Book Society
Pastoral: Mediaeval into Renaissance (D.S. Brewer, 1978)
The Structure of the Canterbury Tales (Duckworth; U of Georgia Press, 1983)
Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (Oxford University Press, 1989, 1996)
The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 2004)
Shakespeare and the Medieval World (Arden Companions to Shakespeare, 2010)
The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray, co-edited (Oxford University Press, 1997)
Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts and Presents, co-edited (Cambridge University Press, 2013)
Sir Thomas Malory: Le Morte Darthur – The Winchester Manuscript, modern-spelling edition (Oxford World’s Classics, 1998)