Linehan, Peter Anthony (1943-2020) historian

Person

Linehan, Peter Anthony (1943-2020) historian

1943-2020

Peter Anthony Linehan was born on 11 July 1943 in Mortlake, Richmond upon Thames. He was a pupil at St Benedict's School, Ealing, and in 1961 began work on a History undergraduate degree at St John's College, Cambridge, eventually writing a PhD on 'Reform and reaction: the Spanish kingdoms and the Papacy in the thirteenth century'. He became a Fellow of St John's in 1966, and over the next decades spend twenty years as a Tutor, fourteen as Tutor for Graduate Affairs, and eleven as Dean of Discipline (a role in which, disliking the divisive nature of fines, he exercised creativity when administering punishments). Specialising in the history of the medieval Church and of medieval Spain and Portugal, he published around a hundred books and articles on these topics. His first book, The Spanish Church and the Papacy in the Thirteenth Century, caused a minor scandal in Spain for its discovery of chaotic rivalries; its author was labelled 'an enemy of the Church'. Other works included History and the Historians of Medieval Spain, The Ladies of Zamora and The Medieval World. He was a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Historical Society, and in 2018 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Within St John's, he was a member of the Fellows' Book Group and a conductor of College ghost tours, and the editor of St John's College: A History, published to coincide with the College's 2011 quincentenary. To the latter he contributed the section on the twentieth century, allegedly to encourage those living members of St John's featured therein to permit him to retain his set of College rooms into retirement. Peter Linehan died in Cambridge on 9 July 2020.

(Sources: College obituary; Telegraph obituary.)

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