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Name
Jessica Bennett
Hometown
Newport News
Major
History
Graduation Year
2019
Jessica Bennett won the Abels-Johnson Prize for best paper at the 2019 Longwood Undergraduate Medieval Conference. This is a regional conference that brings together students from universities in the southeastern and mid-Atlantic states.
Her paper, "London’s Guilds and Their Crowning Moment, 1480–1560," explains the co-dependent relationship between the guilds of the City of London and the English crown in the later Middle Ages. The judges commended her for her in-depth knowledge of the medieval guild records and for the breadth of her research topic, which included the medieval craft guilds, Early Modern mercantile guilds such as the Merchant Adventurers Company and even the Virginia Company.