Christopher Brooke
Historian who brought humane sympathy to the study of medieval life, Church and marriage
CHRISTOPHER BROOKE, the former Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge, who has died aged 88, was a prolific and wideranging medieval historian known for his broad imaginative sympathy, his elegance of expression and his ability to enter the emotional and spiritual world of characters as varied as Hildebrand, Heloise and Wolfram von Eschenbach.
Expert in half a dozen specialised disciplines, from palaeography to architectural history and archaeology, Brooke wrote several highly successful textbooks, including From Alfred to Henry III (1961, vol 2 in the Nelson History of England series) and Europe in the Central Middle Ages, 962-1154 (1964, in Longman’s General History of Europe series) and books addressed to the wider public, including The Saxon and Norman Kings (1963) and The Twelfth Century Renaissance (1969). He edited or co-edited numerous medieval texts, including editions of the letters and charters of Gilbert Foliot and the letters of John of Salisbury, and was general editor of several important historical series, including the four-volume History of the University of Cambridge, Nelson’s History of England, and Oxford (formerly Nelson’s) Medieval Texts.
During a career spent at Cambridge, Liverpool University and Westfield College, London University, Brooke’s writing and teaching were characterised by a broad humanity, a dedication to the sources and a deep interest in the visible and tangible remains of the past. His books would often include passages on archaeological, literary and artistic – as well as documentary – evidence. As president of the Society of Antiquaries of London in the early 1980s he led the struggle to preserve and continue the work at Sutton Hoo, which led to the establishment in 1983 of a new research project at the Anglo-Saxon burial site. A series of essays published in Medieval Church and Society (1971) indicated some of the themes that most interested Brooke, including the development of the concept of Christian marriage, the growth of “popular” religion (on which he collaborated with his wife and fellow medieval historian Rosalind), urban society and the mendicant orders.
In a typically wide-ranging later work The Medieval Idea of Marriage (1989), Brooke offered fascinating insights into the nature of marriage in the Middle Ages, both in its social, political, legal and religious aspects, and its treatment in contemporary art and literature. Central to his account was a description of how the early medieval Church gradually took over an institution that had been largely self-regulated according to local custom, and formulated a set of doctrines which included an extraordinarily restrictive definition of consanguinity which banned marriage between couples with a common great great great great great grandparent – a ruling which had to be modified in the 13th century after the nobility became too interrelated to marry. Brooke placed much of the blame on the reforming 11th century Benedictine monk St Peter Damian, a man, according to Brooke, “with a quite exceptional horror of human sexuality [who] even among the ascetics of his age stood out for his reluctance to accept the married state as within God’s providence”.
In Medieval Church and Society, Brooke also drew attention to what he called “one of the most notable revolutions in our history” – the development of the idea of privacy. He placed this revolution in the late Middle Ages, a time which saw the development of popular as opposed to institutionalised religion, the growth of private worship and more compartmentalised church design, implying that the much vaunted “rise of the private life” in Western Christendom in the centuries before the Reformation owed its origin less to material wealth than to a new religious sensibility.
In his later years Brooke established a fruitful collaboration with the photographer Wim Swaan, with whom he published several lavishly illustrated books including A History of Gonville and Caius College, his last home – and his first.
Christopher Nugent Lawrence Brooke was born on June 23 1927 in Cambridge where his father, Zachary, was a lecturer (later professor) in medieval history and a fellow of Gonville and Caius College. In an interview he described himself as “a hereditary historian” who by the age of 14 had given up “collecting engine numbers and took to collecting medieval archdeacons instead”.
Brooke was educated on a scholarship at Winchester College but returned to Caius (on another scholarship) as an undergraduate.
After his father’s death in 1946 he was taken under the wing of the great historian of monasticism Dom David Knowles, taking his special subject on St Francis and studying for a PhD under his supervision.
It was at Knowles’s seminars that he first met Rosalind Clarke, who would become a greatly respected historian of the Franciscan movement and whom he would marry in 1951. Later he would collaborate with Knowles
and Vera London on The Heads of Religious Houses, England and Wales, 940-1216 (1972), a project begun by his father. In 2002 he would publish a major new revision of Knowles’s classic edition of The Monastic Constitutions of Lanfranc.
After National Service in the Army Education Corps, Brooke returned to Caius as a college fellow and university lecturer, before being tempted away to Liverpool in 1956 to succeed Geoffrey Barraclough as Professor of Medieval History.
At 29 years of age he was one of the youngest professors ever appointed at the university, and over the next 10 years, with his modern history colleague David Quinn, he built up one of the most lively and distinguished schools of history in the country, establishing warm links between senior and student common rooms and revealing an unsuspected talent for football.
After a further 10 years, from 1967 to 1977, as Professor of History at Westfield College, University of London, Brooke returned to Cambridge as Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History and professorial fellow of Caius, where he remained a life fellow after his retirement in 1994.
A kindly looking, rather slight, figure, Brooke was known for his devotion to his college and its traditions and the generosity he showed towards students and colleagues alike. His seminars were relaxed affairs at which students felt free and stimulated to speak. Many became lifelong friends.
Brooke’s other books include London 800-1216: The Shaping of a City (1975, with Gillian Kerr), while the range of his interests is shown in Jane Austen, Illusion and Reality (1999), a tribute to his favourite author. As well as his history of Caius, his collaborations with Wim Swaan included The Monastic World 10001300 (1974) and Oxford and Cambridge (1988, also with Roger Highfield).
Brooke was a fellow of the British Academy, of the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Historical Society. He was appointed CBE in 1995.
His wife Rosalind died in 2014. They had three sons of whom one predeceased him.
Professor Christopher Brooke, born June 23 1927, died December 27 2015