Rosamond Deborah McKitterick (born 31 May 1949) is an English medieval historian. She is an expert on the Frankish kingdoms in the eighth and ninth centuries AD, who uses palaeographical and manuscript studies to illuminate aspects of the political, cultural, intellectual, religious, and social history of the Early Middle Ages. From 1999 until 2016 she was Professor of Medieval History and director of research at the University of Cambridge. She is a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College and Professor Emerita of Medieval History in the University of Cambridge.

Early life and education

McKitterick was born Rosamond Pierce in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, England, on 31 May 1949. From 1951 to 1956 she lived in Cambridge, England, where her father had a position at Magdalene College. In 1956 she moved with her family to Western Australia where she completed primary and secondary school and completed an honours degree at the University of Western Australia. She holds the degrees of MA, PhD, and LittD from the University of Cambridge. McKitterick's doctoral thesis was entitled The Carolingian Renaissance: A Study in the Education of a Society. It was submitted under McKitterick's maiden name of Pierce. The thesis was approved on 24 February 1976. McKitterick's supervisor was Walter Ullmann.

Academic career

In 1971 she returned to Cambridge University to pursue her career. She was a Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge and then became a professorial fellow of Sidney Sussex College. McKitterick has been described as a "doyenne in her field; her decades of tireless research and teaching have been poured into a steady stream of major publications on Carolingian subjects." Thomas F. X. Noble considers McKitterick to be "one of the most original and productive historians of Europe's early Middle Ages". She has supervised 42 PhD theses to completion, as of October 2015, with five more in progress. She has been a member of the council of the British School at Rome.

Honours

McKitterick was a Balsdon Fellow at the British School in Rome, April–June 2002. Her research focus was "Charlemagne in Italy". From 2005 to 2006 she was a Fellow at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study. In 2010 McKitterick was awarded the Dr A. H. Heineken International Prize for History by the Royal Dutch Academy. The prize was established in 1990 and is awarded bi-annually for outstanding scholarly achievement in the field of history. Other awardees include Judith Herrin and Aleida Assman. In 2015 McKitterick was elected to the Lectio Chair at the Katholieke Universiteit of Leuven's Centre for the Transmission of Texts and Ideas in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. On 16 March 2017, McKitterick was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London (FSA). She is also an elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA). She was the President of the Ecclesiastical History Society (2018–19). McKitterick is a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, and the Austrian Academy of Sciences. On 15 October 2018 McKitterick delivered the James Lydon Lecture in Medieval History and Culture at Trinity College Dublin with "Rome and the Invention of the Papacy in the Early Middle Ages". In 2018 McKitterick was honoured with a Festschrift, Writing the Early Medieval West, to mark her retirement in September 2016. The volume consists of contributions from fifteen of McKitterick's former students.

Personal life

She married David McKitterick, Librarian of Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1976. They have one daughter.

Publications

Monographs

Edited volumes

Festschrift

Articles and book chapters