Riley-Smith Crusades collection

Collection

Identifier: OU-SC-RILEY

Staff Only

Scope and Contents note

The Riley-Smith Crusades Collection consists of documents, photographs, and recordings acquired along with Jonathan Riley-Smith's personal library of thousands of monographs, periodicals, and other publications. It documents a small fraction of Riley-Smith's work as a researcher and professor. There are also a few items regarding his personal life. Of particular interest are the nearly 1,000 slides documenting crusades history Riley-Smith took during tours of the Middle East.

Dates

1955 - 2016

Creator

Riley-Smith, Jonathan, 1938-2016. (Person)

Access and Use note

The Riley-Smith Crusades collection is open for research.

Copyright

Copyrights owned by Jonathan Riley-Smith were transferred to Oakland University. The collection includes occasional materials produced by outside parties. Copyright to these items may be held by the original creators.

Biographical note

Jonathan Riley-Smith (1938-2016) was the foremost scholar of the Crusades.

He was educated at Eton College and Trinity College Cambridge. He received a BA (1960), MA (1964), PhD (1964) and LittD (2001) from Cambridge. His first lecturing post was at the University of St Andrews (1964-72). He was then director of studies in history at Queens’ College, Cambridge (1972-78), professor of history at Royal Holloway, University of London (1978-94) before returning to Cambridge as the Dixie professor of ecclesiastical history, at Emmanuel College (1994-2005).

His research focused especially on the definition of the crusade, the crusaders’ motives, and the establishment and rule of Europeans in the Holy Land. He was an authority on the history of the Military Orders, especially the Knights of Saint John. He published many books, both academic monographs and works of general interest. His 1977 book, 'What were the Crusades?' has proved very influential and has been through four editions. He was also the editor of 'The Atlas of the Crusades' (1991) and 'The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades' (1995).

He was a co-founder (1980), and later president (1987-1995), of the Society for the History of the Crusades and the Latin East and supervised over 30 doctoral students.

He was married to Louise Field and had three children.