Professor Chris Wickham

Another giant is gone – annus horribilis. He will be missed.

I always felt I owed Chris Wickham' my career. His generous encouragement after a School of Humanities presentation in 2004 before the formal University interview in Aston Webb for my Birmingham Fellowship gave me the confidence that gave me the job. Given this interview came after a six-year career break with young children, the odds seemed low. I remember many occasions in Birmingham and latterly Oxford where I would seek him out at a reception and thank him for his role at that crucial point in my career. He was always gracious and encouraging again. My thoughts are with Leslie and Chris' family and friends.

Chris was the very best mentor I could ever have asked for. If I am half the academic he was - as a researcher but especially as a mentor and bringer of kindness - I will consider it a job very well done. My heart goes out to Leslie.

Chris was truly a giant in the fields of late antique, medieval, and early modern studies. Master of an evidence pool whose scale is beyond fathoming, he wrote clearly and elegantly for all readers. This made his craft an instrument of his practice – a wide-angle view of history for a world badly in need of historical understanding. He was as dear as he was learned. Kind to me as a (once) younger scholar in (one of) his field(s), he made me feel valued and heard. Such persons are extraordinarily rare, and Chris will be extraordinarily missed.

I met Chris Wickham during my postdoc while I was organising a conference and editing the associated volume of essays. He did not have to give support and be kind to a random art historian like me but he did. His encouragement helped me and because it came from an expert like him, I was and still am grateful. He was generous with his knowledge and his time. The late antique and medieval studies are poorer because he is not around any more.

I have been lucky enough to have had Chris Wickham as a colleague in two different institutions, and for him to have been my boss in one of those. Over the years I have seen him in department meetings and seminars, on interview panels and picket lines, and when he just knocked on my door to check I was ok. Always, I have been struck by his intellectual and personal generosity. Even when he did not need to – because he was working part-time or was talking to a historian of modern Britain – Chris reached out. As a struggling Head of Department during the pandemic, his support got me through several difficult moments. The power and reach of Chris’s scholarship go without saying. I will remember him, though, for his kindness and as a role model of how to be an academic while maintaining one’s integrity and principles in a world in which those are in increasingly short supply. Chris has been an inspiration to me – as I know he has to countless others – and I will miss him greatly.

I was so sad to hear of his death. I was a PhD student of his 1984-1987 and, I believe, the first to actually complete their thesis (in those days we had 10 years to do so). Chris was often in Italy and so later on Nicholas Brooks assisted with supervision, but discussions with Chris would always open up new perspectives on my work. He was a great historian and a wonderful man.

I knew Chris since I was a doctoral student at Birmingham in the late 90s and early 2000s. Apart from being an outstanding historian, Chris was also a kind and generous human being who gave up his time to be supportive of students. His impact goes way beyond his academic achievements, and he will be greatly missed.

With Chris Wickham, the School of History and Cultures has lost one of its great scholars and friends. He was a rare colleague both for his genuine interest in research far beyond his own discipline before interdisciplinarity became fashionable, and for his commitment to a form of 'deep' historical writing that understood economic and political trajectories not only in relation to social, cultural, and intellectual life, and always as interwoven with the material world. This allowed him to reach and influence scholars working in very different fields, including my own: Chris's book Framing the Early Middle Ages has been exemplary for me for many reasons, but mainly because it engages with difference between cities and regions not as a problem to be resolved but rather as a source of additional insight. He was a scholar's scholar, and I deeply admired his kindness, his lack of ostentatiousness, and his willingness to mentor and support others.

Chris was one of the History Department’s greatest mentors. His comments were unbelievably incisive. It’s not an overstatement to say that Chris fundamentally changed how I work as a historian. Once he gave me feedback on a very average article I had written: ‘You’ve got the bottom layer and the top layer, Klaus, but you are missing the middle layer!’ As so often, when you look too close, you don’t see yourself what’s missing. With anything I’ve written since then, I have had this in the back of my mind. It’s made me better as a scholar, a lot more confident, a lot happier. Thank you, Chris, for your support and your generosity, and thank you also on behalf of the History Department, which owes you enormous gratitude.

I am shocked and saddened by the news of Chris' death. When I was a recent American PhD in Medieval History back in the mid-1980s, I met him in Lucca when we were both doing archival research. Although since then we were rarely in the same place at the same time, I always considered him a friend, a colleague, and a major influence on both my teaching and my scholarship. I recall that with his typical generosity many years ago, he kindly read the first and rough draft of my first book, returning it to me with extensive hand-written comments. In another example of his wise counsel, when I was organizing an international conference in Italy back in 1998-99, he offered valuable and insightful advice, even though he was unable to attend. All in all, I will remember him as an inspirational historian gifted with exceptional intelligence and generosity, and a person of the very highest character.

I remember Chris Wickham with great affection from my time as a student at Birmingham. His scholarship made it impossible to think about the transformation of the Roman world without asking how power was sustained through land, taxation and wealth. Alongside that monumental intellect, I remember his care for the Birmingham school and its students. One memory still makes me smile. During an end-of-year dinner in Leslie and Chris’s garden, a friend and I were desperate to watch Italy play. Without a second thought, Chris ushered us upstairs into their own sitting room. And so there we were, watching football on the sofa of one of the greatest historians of our time, feeling completely at home. He was loved by his students, and it is easy to see why. Goodbye, Chris. Che la terra ti sia lieve.

When Chris arrived in Oxford in 2005 as the new Chichele Professor, I was still very new to the Faculty of History myself and really unsure about what I was supposed to be doing as a tutor and lecturer. Chris immediately proved to be a fantastic sounding board, and he helped me to work out some very achievable medium and longer term goals. He was, of course, as so many other colleagues have observed, a truly wonderful medieval historian. But he was also an incredibly kind person, who is going to be missed very greatly close to home and in so many different parts of the world.

So saddened to learn of the recent death of Chris Wickham. Chris had an encyclopaedic general knowledge and a phenomenal memory. I remember him first in the early 1970s (looking in those days rather like some traditional images of Jesus) as part of a Keble College ‘University Challenge’ team that swept all before it. It was a pleasure to know him later as a Birmingham colleague from 1989 to 1994, albeit each in a different department, and then later still to witness his superb leadership of the Oxford History Faculty and his magisterial role in the Humanities Division there. Chris combined to an unusual degree on the one hand the most distinguished of scholarship and on the other great administrative efficiency paired with political nous and interpersonal skills. A rare example of an academic leader who seemed to have it all! Chris will be greatly missed.