In particular, she has written extensively on the Old Hall Manuscript, English masses as well as the works of Johannes Ciconia and John Dunstaple.
[1] Bent was educated at the Acton Haberdashers' Aske's School for Girls and Girton College, Cambridge University (where she read music, was organ scholar, and is now an honorary fellow), receiving her BA in 1962 and PhD in 1969.
Bent's research centres on English, French and Italian music of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries and includes work on the medieval motet.
Her study of the Old Hall Manuscript (both her 1969 dissertation and the edition, co-edited with Andrew Hughes, published in the Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, 1969–73), was a key work in scholarship on early English music.
Her awards include the Royal Musical Association's Dent Medal, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship, the Frank Llewellyn Harrison Medal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland,[3] the Claude V. Palisca award of the American Musicological Society, and honorary doctorates from the universities of Glasgow, Notre Dame and Montréal.