Rosalind Hill (1908-1997)
Educational Background
Hill was an undergraduate student of history at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, from 1928 to 1931. Her BLitt thesis on English Ecclesiastical Letter-Books of the Thirteenth Century was privately printed in 1937.
Career Notes
Hill’s first academic teaching position was at University College, Leicester (now the University of Leicester). In 1937 she was appointed to a lectureship at Westfield College, University of London, where she remained for the duration of her career. She was made a Reader of History in 1955 and a Professor of History in 1971; she retired in 1976.
Hill was an active member of the Ecclesiastical History Society, serving as Secretary between 1963 and 1973, and President in 1973–4. She was also Editor and Chairman of the Canterbury and York Society between 1968 and 1973, and was in regular attendance at the Institute of Historical Research’s seminars on the crusades and the Latin East.
Interests, Influences and Methodologies
Hill’s main research output involved the editing and publication of medieval sources, from crusade narratives to bishops’ registers. This interest was reflected in her choice of theme for her presidency of the Ecclesiastical History Society in 1973–4; the society’s conference proceedings for the year were published in 1975 as The Materials, Sources and Methods of Ecclesiastical History.Contribution to Crusader Studies
Hill’s main contribution to crusader studies was unquestionably her production of a new critical edition and translation of the Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum in 1962. This has remained the principal edition of the text for almost fifty years, and has been one of the first points of contact with the history of the crusades for numerous students and scholars.
It should also be noted that Hill’s wider contributions to scholarship of the Middle Ages included the editing and publication of several volumes of medieval English bishops’ registers, and the production in 1953 of a pamphlet for the University Federation for Animal Welfare on medieval attitudes towards animals.
Select Publications
‘Public Penance: Some Problems of a Thirteenth-Century Bishop’, History, vol 36 (1951), pp 213-26.
Both Small and Great Beasts: On the Attitude of Men towards Animals in the Middle Ages (London, 1953).
‘The Theory and Practice of Excommunication in Medieval England’, History, vol 42 (1957), pp 1-11.
Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum (London, 1962).
Unfashionable History: An Inaugural Lecture (London, 1972).
‘Uncovenanted Blessings of Ecclesiastical Records’, Studies in Church History, vol 11 (Oxford, 1975), pp 135-46.
‘Pure Air and Portentous Heresy’, Studies in Church History, vol 13 (Oxford, 1976), pp 135-40.
‘The Christian view of the Muslims at the time of the First Crusade’, The Eastern Mediterranean Lands in the Period of the Crusades, ed PM Holt (Warminster, 1977), pp 1-80.
For a full bibliography of Hill’s publications to 1978, see Medieval Women: Dedicated and Presented to Professor Rosalind MT Hill on the Occasion of her Seventieth Birthday, ed D Baker, Studies in Church History: Subsidia 1 (Oxford, 1978), pp 381-5.
Sources
Obituary published in The Independent (3 February 1997)
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Written by: Dr William Purkis
