Michael Clanchy

Michael Thomas Clanchy FBA (28 November 1936 – 29 January 2021)^[1] was a British medievalist who was Professor Emeritus of Medieval History at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London and Fellow of the British Academy.

Early life and education[edit]

Clanchy was born in Reading in 1936, the son of Henry, a Royal Navy captain from an Irish Catholic family, and Virginia, a New Zealander, and was educated at Ampleforth College.^[2] He went up to Oxford to read history, matriculating at Merton College in 1956 and taking a second class degree three years later. After two years teaching at Presentation College, Reading, Clanchy returned to Merton in 1961, and was awarded his DipEd the following year.^[3]

Career[edit]

Clanchy became a lecturer at the University of Glasgow in 1964,^[4] and was well known for his books, such as From Memory to Written Record (1979; revised and expanded editions 1993 and 2013: a study of the triumph of literacy in medieval England), England and its Rulers 1066–1272 (1983; revised editions 1998, 2006 and 2014), and Abelard: A Medieval Life (1997). His interests primarily lay in law and government in the 12th and 13th centuries. He was Patron of the London Medieval Society.^[5]

In 1985 he left Glasgow, and moved to London; he took up an honorary position at Westfield College and taught at University College London, whilst continuing his research independently. This led to the publication of Abelard: A Medieval Life in 1997, on the strength of which he was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 1999.^[4]

Clanchy appeared on In Our Time on BBC Radio 4, firstly in 2005 regarding Peter Abelard and Héloïse d'Argenteuil,^[6] and secondly discussing Magna Carta in May 2009.^[7] His work has been translated into a number of different languages, including French, German, Italian, and Norwegian.

Personal life[edit]

In 1963 Clanchy married Joan Milne, whom he had met whilst at University; they had a daughter, Kate, and a son.^[3][4][2]

Publications[edit]

• "The franchise of return of writs", Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., vol. 17 (1967)
• "Did Henry III have a policy?", History, vol. 53 (1968)
• Civil Pleas of the Wiltshire Eyre, 1249 (1971)
• The Roll and Writ File of the Berkshire Eyre of 1248, Selden Society, vol. 90 (1973)
• "Moderni in education and government in England", Speculum 58 (1975)
• From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307 (Oxford, 1979); 2nd ed. 1993; 3rd ed. 2013
• England and its Rulers, 1066–1272: Foreign Lordship and National Identity (London, 1983); 2nd ed. 1998; 3rd ed. 2006; 4th ed. 2014
• "Looking back to the invention of printing", in D. P. Resnick (ed.), Literacy in Historical Perspective (Library of Congress, D.C., 1983)
• Ranulf Glanvill, Tractatus de legibus et consuetudinibus regni Anglie qui Glanvilla vocatur, ed. and trans. G. Derek G. Hall with a guide to further reading by Michael T. Clanchy (Oxford, 1993)
• "Learning to Read in the Middle Ages and the Role of Mothers," in Studies in the History of Reading, ed. Greg Brooks and A. K. Pugh (Reading: Centre for Teaching of Reading, 1984), 33–39.
• Abelard: A Medieval Life (1997)
• ed. Letters of Abelard and Heloise (2003)
• "Law and theology in twelfth-century England: the works of Master Vacarius (c.1115/1120–c.1200)", Disputatio, vol. 10 (2006)
• "Did mothers teach their children to read?", in Lesley Smith & Conrad Leyser (eds), Motherhood, Religion, and Society in Medieval Europe, 400–1400 (2011)
• "Was Abelard right to deny that he had written a Book of Sentences?" Part 2, Controversy and Exchange, in Rethinking Abelard: A Collection of Critical Essays (Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, 2014)

See also[edit]

• A History of England

References[edit]

External links[edit]

• Prof. Michael T Clanchy biography