Sarah Foot

Sarah Rosamund Irvine Foot, FRHistS, FSA (born 1961) is a British early medieval historian and academic. She is the current Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Oxford.

Life and work

The daughter of the military historian M. R. D. Foot, she was educated until 1979 at Withington Girls' School in Manchester. She then went up to Newnham College, Cambridge to study at the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic, where she was taught by, amongst others, Rosamond McKitterick and Simon Keynes.

She gained her doctorate in 1990 and was, from 1989 to 1990, research fellow at Gonville and Caius College before becoming a fellow and tutor there. In 1993 she took up a lectureship at the University of Sheffield where subsequently, in 2001, she was made senior lecturer. In 2004, she was appointed to the newly established chair of Early Medieval History.

On 22 February 2007 Queen Elizabeth II appointed Foot to the Regius Chair of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Oxford. She is the first woman ever to hold this chair. Postholders are expected to lead research and develop graduate studies within their areas of specialisation. Regius professors are expected to take a leading part in developing the work of the Oxford Theology Faculty. In the past the chair has been held by a number of distinguished scholars. Previous holders of the Chair in Ecclesiastical History include John McManners, Peter Hinchliff and Henry Mayr-Harting. The professorship is also annexed to a canonry at Christ Church, although the postholder need only be a lay Church member. At a special ceremony on 6 October 2007 she was installed as Residentiary Canon of the Cathedral.

Her main areas of research lie in the history of Anglo-Saxon England, particularly Anglo-Saxon monasteries, women and religion, and the Cistercians. She also works on the history of the early medieval Church and society as well as the invention of the English in historiography, and historical theory. In 2001 she was awarded a major grant to carry out research into the ruined Cistercian abbeys of Yorkshire. She has written a biography of Aethelstan, the first king of all England. Among her current projects are the charters of Bury St Edmunds Abbey.

Foot is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. She is an editor of the Oxford History of Historical Writing.

She has one son and is married to Michael Bentley, Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews.

Selected publications

• Handbook of Historical Theory, Sarah Foot and Nancy F. Partner (eds.), London, Sage 2012. ISBN 978-1-4129-3114-4
• Æthelstan: The First English King, New Haven, Yale University Press 2011. ISBN 978-0-300-12535-1
• "Patrick Wormald as Historian", in: Stephen Baxter, Catherine E. Karkov, Janet L. Nelson and David Pelteret (eds.), Early Medieval Studies in Memory of Patrick Wormald, Farnham, Ashgate 2009. ISBN 0-7546-6331-0
• "Where English becomes British: Rethinking Contexts for Brunanburh", in: Julia Barrow and Andrew Wareham (eds.), Myth, Rulership, Church and Charters: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Brooks, London, Ashgate 2008. ISBN 0-7546-5120-7
• Monastic life in Anglo-Saxon England, c. 600–900, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 2006. ISBN 0-521-85946-8
• "Reading Anglo-Saxon charters: Memory, Record or Story?", in: Elizabeth. M. Tyler and Ross Balzaretti (eds.), Narrative and History in the Early Medieval West, Abingdon, Marston 2006. ISBN 2-503-51828-1
• "Finding the Meaning of Form: Narrative in Annals and Chronicles" in: Nancy F. Partner (ed.), Writing Medieval History (Writing History), London, Hodder Arnold 2005. ISBN 0-340-80845-4
• "The Historiography of the Anglo-Saxon 'Nation-State'" in: Len Scales and Oliver Zimmer (eds.), Power and the Nation in European History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 2005. ISBN 0-521-84580-7
• "Confronting Violence: a Medieval Perspective on the Ethics of Historiography" Storia della storiografia 42 (2002), pp. 23–41
• Veiled Women I: the Disappearance of Nuns from Anglo-Saxon England, Aldershot, Ashgate Publishing 2000. ISBN 0-7546-0043-2
• Veiled Women II: Female Religious Communities in England, 871–1066, Aldershot, Ashgate Publishing 2000. ISBN 0-7546-0044-0
• "Remembering, Forgetting and Inventing: Attitudes to the Past in England after the First Viking Age", Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series 9 (1999), pp. 185–200
• "English People" in: Michael Lapidge et al. (eds), The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England, Oxford, Blackwell 1998, p. 170f. ISBN 0-631-15565-1
• "The Making of Angelcynn: English Identity before the Norman Conquest," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series 6 (1996), pp. 25–49

See also

• Regius Professor
• University of Sheffield