She gained a degree and a PhD at the University of Sheffield and was a postdoctoral researcher there on the Partonopeus de Blois project.
[2] While working as an academic she published a number of articles on medieval warfare and its portrayal in contemporary narrative literature; she also wrote War and Combat 1150-1270: The Evidence from Old French Literature which was published by Boydell and Brewer in 2003.
[4] After leaving academia she started to write historical fiction, and is the author of a series of medieval murder mystery novels featuring Edwin Weaver as the central character.
The novels are set against the backdrop of the baronial war in the early 13th century, when the nobles of England rebelled against King John and invited Prince Louis of France to take the throne, before some of them changed their minds following John’s death and the accession of his nine-year-old son Henry III.
[9][10] In 2022 she published Two Houses, Two Kingdoms: A History of France and England, 1100-1300, also with Yale University Press; the Times Literary Supplement noted that it was 'written with verve and based on impeccable scholarship'.