She took her first degree at the University of Kansas, Lawrence (BA History of Art, 1966), then went on to the University of California, Berkeley (MA, 1968),[1] with a thesis on “Monastic Planning After the Plan of St. Gall: Tradition and Change”[8] (advisor Walter Horn), followed by PhD research, completed in 1973, with a dissertation on 'West English Gothic Architecture: 1175-1250'.
While at Princeton, she received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support an archaeological investigation of Saint Benigne, Dijon, France, an 11th century church.
In Twelfth-Century Sculptural Finds at Canterbury Cathedral and the Cult of Thomas Becket (2019)[22][23] Malone reconstructs finds from the restoration of the Perpendicular Cloister as architectural screens that were built around the time of Becket’s canonisation (1173) to manage pilgrimage to his tomb and the site of his assassination.
In doing so, Malone was the first person to study the way in which the crowds of pilgrims to Canterbury were accommodated during the fifty years before Becket’s body was moved from the crypt to a shrine in the Trinity Chapel.
Reconstruction of these screens provides new evidence about early pilgrimage in a monastic site, and also establishes unusual sculptural activity during a previously unknown building phase at Canterbury Cathedral.
[24] Malone was co-editor, with Clark Maines, of Consuetudines et Regulae: Sources for Monastic Life in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period (2014).
[27] 'Interprétation des pratiques liturgiques à Saint Bénigne de Dijon d’après ses coutumiers d’inspiration clunisienne' in Dead of Night and End of Day, Disciplina monastica, Turnhout: Brepols, 2005).