Professor Malcolm Barber

Contact Details

Department of History
University of Reading
PO Box 218, Whiteknights
Reading, RG6 6AA
UK

Email: m.c.barber@reading.ac.uk

Background

When and where did you initially develop an interest in the history of the crusades and/or the Latin East?

As an undergraduate at the University of Nottingham, 1961-4.

Who or what sparked your enthusiasm for the subject?

Special Subject on the First Crusade, taught by Dr Bernard Hamilton.

Education

Please provide details of your Higher Education, including dates, institution(s) and the name(s) of your research supervisors.

  • University of Nottingham, BA, 1961-4.
  • University of Nottingham, PhD, 1964-8. Supervisor, Dr Bernard Hamilton.
  • British School at Rome, 1965-6.

Career History

Please provide details of your academic career history, including confirmation of your current institutional affiliation and contact details.

  • British School at Rome: Rome Scholar in Medieval and Italian Studies, 1965-6
  • University of Reading: Assistant Lecturer, 1966-9, Lecturer, 1969-88, Senior Lecturer, 1988-93, Reader, 1993-5, Professor, 1995-2005, Professor Emeritus, 2005 ff.
  • Wolfson Senior Scholar, 1976-7.
  • British Academy Research Reader, 1989-91.
  • Leverhulme Research Fellow, 1997-8.
  • Senior Fellow, National Humanities Center, North Carolina, 1998-9.
  • Whichard Visiting Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC, 1999-2000.

Influences and Methodologies

What ideas and/or methodologies have informed your approach to your research?

Analysis of texts and material culture (particularly artistic production); study of the physical environment.

Research Outlook

What do you consider to be the most important avenues for future research in the field of crusader studies?

Avenues for future research: collection of computer-based data on military orders, including numbers, commanderies, and hierarchies; modern texts, preferably with translations; logistics of crusading.

Research Output

Please provide details of your research output, including publications and other media as appropriate.

Books
  • The Trial of the Templars  (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1978), vii + 311 pp (Spanish, Italian, French, Turkish and Greek translations). Second edition, 2006, x + 398 pp (German, Czech and Danish translations).
  • The Two Cities. Medieval Europe 1050-1320 (London: Routledge, 1992), 581 pp
    Second edition, 2004, xv + 540 pp
  • The New Knighthood. A History of the Order of the Temple (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xxi + 441 pp (Italian, Swedish, Polish, Spanish, German, Czech and Turkish translations).
  • Crusaders and Heretics, Twelfth to the Fourteenth Centuries, Variorum Collected Studies series, 498 (Aldershot: Variorum, 1995), x + 287 pp (A collection of thirteen previous articles with introduction and index).
  • The Cathars. Dualist Heretics in Languedoc in the High Middle Ages, Medieval World series, ed D Bates (London: Longman, 2000), xvi + 282 pp (Polish, German, Dutch and Italian translations).

Texts and translations

  • With K Bate, ed and trans, The Templars, Manchester Medieval Sources, ed R Horrox and JL Nelson, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), xviii + 350 pp
  • With M Ailes, ed, trans and annotated, The History of the Holy War. Ambroise’s Estoire de la Guerre Sainte, 2 vols (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2003), vol 1, xi + 211 pp, vol 2, xix + 214 pp. 

Editing

Books

  • With P Noble and P McNulty, East Anglian and other Studies presented to Barbara Dodwell (Reading: Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies 1985), 141 pp (special issue of Reading Medieval Studies).
  • The Military Orders. Fighting for the Faith and Caring for the Sick (Aldershot: Variorum, 1994), xxvii + 401 pp (the proceedings of a conference held at St John's Gate, Clerkenwell, Sept, 1992).
Journals
  • With P Noble and J Norton-Smith, Reading Medieval Studies, 1977-85.
  • Annual Bulletin of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East, 1986-90.
  • The Journal of Medieval History, 1996-2002.
Articles
  • 'The Origins of the Order of the Temple’, Studia Monastica, 12, 1970, 219-240.
  • ‘James of Molay, the Last Grand Master of the Temple’, Studia Monastica, 14, 1972, 91-124.
  • ‘Propaganda in the Middle Ages: the Charges against the Templars’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 17, 1973, 42-57.
  • ‘Women and Catharism’, Reading Medieval Studies, 3, 1977, 45-62.
  • ‘Lepers, Jews and Moslems: the plot to overthrow Christendom in 1321’, History, 66, 1981, 1-17 (reprinted in The Other Side of Western Civilization: Readings in Everyday Life, ed S Chodorow, NewYork, 1984).
  • ‘The Pastoreaux of 1320’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 32, 1981, 1-24.
  • ‘The Templars and the Turin Shroud’, The Catholic Historical Review, 68, 1982, 206-225.
  • ‘The World Picture of Philip the Fair’, The Journal of Medieval History, 8, 1982, 13-27.
  • 'The Social Context of the Templars’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 34, 1984, 27-46.
  • ‘The Crusade of the Shepherds, 1251', in Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History, Winnipeg 1982, ed JF Sweets ( Lawrence, Kansas, 1984), pp 1-23.
  • ‘Western Attitudes to Frankish Greece in the Thirteenth Century’, in Latins and Greeks in the Eastern Mediterranean after 1204, ed B Arbel, B Hamilton and D Jacoby (London: Frank Cass, 1989), pp 111-28 (also in Mediterranean Historical Review,4 (i), 1989).
  • ‘Update: The Crusades’, The Historian, Spring, 1989, 16-18.
  • ‘The Second Crusade, 1147-1149’, in Chronicles of the Crusades, ed E Hallam (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), pp 115-49.
  • ‘Catharism and the Occitan Nobility: the Lordships of Cabaret, Minerve, and Termes’, in The Ideals and Practice of Knighthood, vol 3, Papers from the Fourth Strawberry Hill Conference, 1988, ed C Harper-Bill and R Harvey, Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1990), pp 1-19.
  • Los Templarios (Cuardernos. Historia, no 219) (Madrid, 1990), 31 pp
  • ‘The Crusades against the Cathars’, ‘The Popular Crusades, 1212-1320’, and ‘The Fall of the Templars’, in The Atlas of the Crusades, ed J Riley-Smith (London: Times Books, 1991), pp 76-7, 82-3, 124-5.
  • ‘Supplying the Crusader States: The Role of the Templars’, in The Horns of Hattin, ed BZ Kedar Jerusalem and London: Israel Exploration Society and Variorum, 1992), pp 314-26.
  • ‘The Order of St Lazarus and the Crusades’, The Catholic Historical Review, 80, 1994, 439-56.
  • Entries on ‘Knights Hospitallers’ and ‘Knights Templars’, in The Dictionary of Art, vol 18 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp 151-3, 153-5.
  • ‘How the West Saw Medieval Islam’, History Today, 47, 1997, 44-50.
  • Entry on ‘Templars’, in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed EA Livingstone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp 1584-5.
  • Entries on ‘Angevins and Capetians in the late twelfth century’ and ‘The Templar Network’, in Atlas of Medieval Europe, ed A MacKay and D Ditchburn (London: Routledge, 1997), pp 71-2, 91-2. Second edition, 2007, pp 103-5, 116-18.
  • ‘Frontier Warfare in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem: the campaign of Jacob's Ford, 1178-9’, in The Crusades and their Sources: Essays presented to Bernard Hamilton, ed J France and WG Zajac, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 9-22.
  • ‘Templars’, for the Online Reference Book (ORB) for Medieval Studies, general editor, C Schriber, based at Rhodes College, Tennessee (an online textbook source on the World-Wide Web).
  • ‘The Knights Templars’, The Historian, 60, 1998, 4-9.
  • ‘The Trial of the Templars Revisited’, in The Military Orders, vol 2, Welfare and Warfare, ed H Nicholson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), pp 329-42.
  • ‘The charitable and medical activities of the Hospitallers and Templars’, in A History of Pastoral Care, ed GR Evans (London: Cassell, 2000), pp 148-68.
  • ‘Moving Cathars: The Italian Connection in the Thirteenth Century’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 10, 2000, 5-19.
  • ‘The Albigensian Crusades: Wars Like Any Other?’ in Dei Gesta per Francos. Crusade Studies in Honour of Jean Richard, ed M Balard, BZ Kedar and J Riley-Smith (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), pp 45-55.
  • Introduction to De laude novae militiae by Bernard of Clairvaux (Kalmazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2001), 9-27.
  • Entries on ‘The Albigensian Crusades’ and ‘The Sicilian Vespers’, in The Oxford Companion to Military History, ed R Holmes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp 27, 831-2. 
  • Entry on ‘Vienne, Konzil von’, in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, ed A Döhnert (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter , 2003), pp 76-9.
  • ‘The Career of Philip of Nablus in the Kingdom of Jerusalem’, in The Experience of Crusading, vol 2, ed P Edbury, and J Phillips (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp 60-75.
  • ‘The Templar Preceptory of Douzens (Aude) in the Twelfth Century’, in The World of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Literature and Society in Southern France between the Eleventh and the Thirteenth Centuries, ed M Bull and C Léglu (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2004), pp 37-55.
  • Entries on ‘Hugh of Payns’, Jacob’s Ford’, James of Molay’, ‘Temple, Order of the’ and ‘William of Beaujeu’, in The Crusade. An Encyclopedia, ed A Murray, ABC-Clio, 2006, pp 610, 649-50, 652-3, 1149-57, 1278.
  • ‘The Impact of the Fourth Crusade in the West: the Distribution of Relics after 1204’, in Urbs capta. La quatrième croisade et ses consequences, Realités Byzantines 10, ed A Laiou (Paris: Lethiellleux, 2005), pp 325-34.
  • ‘Northern Catharism’, in Heresy and the Persecuting Society in the Middle Ages. Essays on the Work of RI Moore, ed M Frassetto (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp 115-37.

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