Chris Wickham

Christopher John Wickham FBA FLSW FRHistS (18 May 1950 – 9 October 2026) was a British historian and academic. From 2005 to 2016, he was the Chichele Professor of Medieval History at the University of Oxford and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He had previously taught at the University of Birmingham from 1977, rising to be Professor of Early Medieval History from 1997 to 2005.

Wickham was born in Rossett, Wales, on 18 May 1950. He was educated at Millfield, a public school in Street, Somerset, England. From 1968 to 1975, he studied at Keble College, Oxford. He graduated from the University of Oxford with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree in 1971. He then remained to undertake postgraduate research and completed his Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) degree in 1975 with a thesis entitled Economy and society in 8th century northern Tuscany.

Wickham spent nearly thirty years of his career at the University of Birmingham. He was a Lecturer from 1977 to 1987 and a Senior Lecturer from 1987 to 1989. He was promoted to Reader in 1989, and made Professor of Medieval History in 1993. He was the deputy to John Haldon as head of the School of Historical Studies at Birmingham for several years prior to 2005.

In 2005, he was appointed as Chichele Professor of Medieval History in the University of Oxford and fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. From 2009 to 2012, he also served as chair of the Faculty of History. From September 2015 to the end of the academic year, he was additionally Head of the Humanities Division of the University of Oxford. He retired at the end of the 2015/2016 academic year, in line with Oxford's mandatory retirement policy. Upon retirement, Wickham was appointed Professor of Medieval History on a part-time basis at the University of Birmingham. He was appointed Director of the British School at Rome on 5 November 2020, and held the post until July 2021.

From June 2009 to July 2011, Wickham served as a company director of the Past and Present Society. On 6 July 2013, Wickham was appointed a company director of the Past and Present Society, and he retained this position until July 2021.

His main area of research was medieval Italy – and more specifically Tuscany and central Italy – from the end of the Roman Empire through to the mid-thirteenth century. His emphasis was largely social and economic, though he also studied the legal and political history of the area. More generally, Wickham used a modified Marxist framework to examine how European society changed from late antiquity into the early Middle Ages, and pioneered comparative socio-economic analysis in this period.

In 2005 his work Framing the Early Middle Ages was published, which claims to be the first synthesis of early medieval European history since the 1920s. It is exceptional for its use of hitherto unincorporated evidence from both documentary and archaeological sources, as well as its bold use of comparative methods and rejection of national narratives. It was awarded prizes, including the Wolfson History Prize in 2006, the Deutscher Memorial Prize in 2006 and the American Historical Association's James Henry Breasted Prize in January 2007. He edited Marxist History Writing for the Twenty-First Century, a volume that sees various academics discuss the status and profile of Marxist historiography, and wrote a general history of early medieval Europe, published by Penguin, which examines cultural, religious and intellectual developments of the period not covered in his previous socio-economic study.

In 1990, Wickham married Leslie Brubaker, a Byzantine scholar.

He was a member of the Labour Party,^{[citation needed]} and was previously a member of the Democratici di Sinistra (Democrats of the Left). He was also active in the Communist Party of Great Britain alongside John Haldon while working at the University of Birmingham.

Wickham died on 9 October 2026, aged 76.

In 1998, Wickham was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA). In 2006, he was awarded the Wolfson History Prize for his book Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean 400–800. In 2014, he was awarded the Serena Medal by the British Academy "in recognition of his reputation as a medieval historian of exceptional distinction who has transformed our understanding of the early medieval Italian world". He was also elected a foreign member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, a fellow of the Learned Society of Wales in 2012, and an associate member of the Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium in 2014.

• Early Medieval Italy: Central Power and Local Society, 400–1000 (1981)
• Studi sulla società degli Appennini nell'alto Medioevo. Contadini, signori e insediamento nel territorio di Valva (Sulmona) (1982)
• Il problema dell'incastellamento nell'Italia centrale. L'esempio di San Vincenzo al Volturno (1985)
• The Mountains and the City: The Tuscan Apennines in the Early Middle Ages (1988)
• Social Memory (1992; with James Fentress)
• Land and Power: Studies in Italian and European Social History, 400–1200 (1994)
• Community and Clientele in Twelfth-Century Tuscany: The Origins of the Rural Commune in the Plain of Lucca (1998; first published in Italian, 1995)
• Courts and Conflict in Twelfth-Century Tuscany (2003; first published in Italian, 2000)
• Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean 400–800 (2005)
• The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000 (2009)
• Medieval Rome: Stability and Crisis of a City, 900–1150 (2014; first published in Italian, 2013)
• Sleepwalking into a New World: The Emergence of Italian City Communes in the Twelfth Century (2015)
• Medieval Europe (2016)
• The Donkey and the Boat: Reinterpreting the Mediterranean Economy, 950–1180 (2023)

• City and Countryside in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy: Essays Presented to Philip Jones (1990, with Trevor Dean)
• Las crisis en la historia (1995)
• The Long Eighth Century: Production, Distribution and Demand (2000, with Inge Lyse Hansen)
• Le marché de la terre au Moyen Âge (2005, with Laurent Feller)
• Rodney Hilton's Middle Ages: An Exploration of Historical Themes (2007, with Christopher Dyer and Peter Coss)
• Marxist History-Writing for the Twenty-First Century (2007)
• The Langobards before the Frankish Conquest: An Ethnographic Perspective (2009, with Giorgio Ausenda and Paolo Delogu)
• Italy, 888–962: A Turning Point (2013, with Marco Valenti)
• The Prospect of Global History (2016, with James Belich, John Darwin and Margret Frenz)