Christopher Tyerman (born 22 May 1953) is a British academic and historian focusing on the Crusades. In 2015, he was appointed Professor of History of the Crusades at the University of Oxford.
He was an undergraduate at New College, Oxford, and was awarded a first-class Bachelor of Arts degree in 1974; he lectured at the University of York between 1976 and 1977, before returning to the University of Oxford as a research fellow at Queen's College (1977–82); in 1981, he was awarded a doctor of philosophy degree and won the Royal Historical Society's Alexander Prize Medal. He also took up another research fellowship at Exeter College which lasted from 1982 to 1987. All the while, he had been a medieval history lecturer at Hertford College, Oxford since 1979, and in 2006 was elected one of its fellows.[1] In 2015, he was awarded the chair of Professor of History of the Crusades at the university.[2]
Tyerman's research interests lie in crusading in medieval western Europe, which he has explored from cultural, social, religious and political angles. He has focused especially on the high Middle Ages and medieval France. He has also published works on the history of education, including a monograph history of Harrow School. His published works include:
"Sed nihil fecit? The last Capetians and the Recovery of the Holy Land", War and Government in the Middle Ages, ed. J. Gillingham & J. C. Holt (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1984)
"The Holy Land and the Crusades in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries", Crusade and Settlement, ed. P. W. Edbury (Cardiff: Cardiff University Press, 1985)
"Some English evidence of attitudes to the crusade in the thirteenth century", Thirteenth Century Studies, i, ed. S. Lloyd (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1986)
"Harrow School in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries", Journal of the Byron Society, 1989
"Who went on Crusade to the Holy Land?", The Horns of Hattin, ed. B. Z. Kedar (Jerusalem, 1992)
"Were there any Crusades to the Holy Land in the Twelfth Century?", English Historical Review, cx (1995)
"Holy War, Roman Popes, and Christian Soldiers: Some Early Modern Views on Medieval Christendom", The Medieval Church: Universities, Heresy and the Religious Life, ed. P. Biller and B. Dobson, Studies in Church History: Subsidia 11 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1999)
"What the Crusades meant to Europe", The Medieval World, ed. P. Linehan and J. Nelson (Routledge, 2001)
"Principes et Populus: Civil Society and the First Crusade", Cross, Crescent and Conversion, ed. S. Barton and P. Linehan (Leiden: Brill, 2008)
"The Expansion of Europe and the Crusades", A Companion to the Medieval World, ed. C. Lansing and E. English (Blackwell, 2009)
"Court, Crusade and City: The cultural milieu of Louis I, duke of Bourbon", Soldiers, Nobles and Gentlemen: Essays in Honour of Maurice Keen, ed. P. Coss and C. Tyerman (Boydell and Brewer, 2009)
"Henry of Livonia and Crusade Ideology", Crusading and Chronicle Writing on the Medieval Frontier, ed. M. Tamm, L. Kaljundi and C. Selch Jensen (Ashgate, 2011)
"New wine in old skins? The Crusade and the Eastern Mediterranean in the Later Middle Ages", Byzantines, Latins and Turks in the Eastern Mediterranean World after 1150, ed. C. Holmes and J. Harris (Oxford Byzantine Studies, Oxford University Press, 2012)
