Nicholas Brooks (historian) facts for kids

Nicholas Peter Brooks, FBA (14 January 1941 – 2 February 2014) was an English medieval historian.

Biography

Nicholas Brooks was educated at Winchester College, and graduated from Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1961 with a degree in history. His doctoral studies on the Anglo-Saxon charters in the archive of Canterbury Cathedral, also undertaken at Oxford, were supervised by Dorothy Whitelock, and provided the basis for his monograph The Early History of the Church of Canterbury, published in 1984. Brooks was lecturer and then senior lecturer in medieval history at the University of St Andrews from 1964 until 1985, when he was appointed to the chair of medieval history at the University of Birmingham; in 1989 he was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy. From 1991 to 2013 he was chairman of the British Academy's Anglo-Saxon charters project, co-editing the two volumes on the Canterbury archive, published in 2013, with Susan Kelly; he also chaired the British Academy's Stenton Fund Committee, and was a member of the Fabric Advisory Committees for the cathedrals at Canterbury and Worcester. After retiring as professor of medieval history at the University of Birmingham in 2004, Brooks was an emeritus professor, in which role he continued to supervise research students. A festschrift, Myth, Rulership, Church and Charters: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Brooks, was published in 2008. Until his death, Brooks was also a member of the Research Project Advisory Panel for the study of the 7th- or 8th-century Staffordshire Hoard, which he described as "bling for warrior companions of the king".