Rosamond McKitterick received the degrees of MA, PhD, and Litt.D. from the University of Cambridge and also studied for a year (1974-5) at the University of Munich.
Rosamond was promoted to a Personal Chair in 1997 and since 1999 she has held the Chair in Medieval History in the University of Cambridge's Faculty of History. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Royal Society of Arts, Manufacturing and Commerce, and the Society of Antiquaries, and a Korrespondierendes Mitglied of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica and of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, a Corresponding Fellow of the medieval Academy of America, Associé correspondant étranger of the Societé Nationale des Antiquaires de France and elected a member of the Academia Europea in 2012.
In 2002, she was the Hugh Balsdon Fellow at the British School at Rome and in 2005-6 Fellow-in-Residence at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study.
In 2010 she was awarded the International Dr A.H. Heiniken Prize in History. She was Scaliger Felow in the Univeristy Library, Leiden in 2010, and Lester K. Little Fellow in Residence of the American Academy in Rome in 2011.
She held the LECTIO Chair 2015 at the Katholieke Universiteit of Leuven's Centre for the Study of the Transmission of Texts and Ideas in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, was the James Lydon Lecturer in Medieval History and Culture, Trinity College Dublin in 2018, and Guest Professor at the University of Verona, Department of Civilisations and Cultures in Spring 2019. She has been Chair of the Faculty of Archaeology, History and Letters of the British School at Rome since 2013. She has presented many conference papers and lectures at universities in Britain, Continental Europe, North America and Australia. She has also served on academic evaluating and selection committees in Britain, Austria, Germany, Finland, France and the Netherlands.
She was President of the Ecclesiastical History Society 2018-2019 when her chosen theme was the Church and the Law. She was General Editor of Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought until 2019.
Her current work within the field of the early medieval history of Europe focusses on the degree to which a people’s knowledge and use of the past is an important formative element of political identity, as well as a means of articulating it.
Her particular focus at present is on Rome, Italy and the Franks. This interest in a people’s (re)construction, knowledge and use of the past is also part or her longstanding research on the early medieval manuscript evidence for the role of the written word and books in the exertion of cultural influence.
Publications, Links, and Resources
The Frankish Church and the Carolingian Reforms 789-895, Royal Historical Society, Studies in History (London, 1977); The Frankish Kingdoms under the Carolingians, 751-987 (London, 1983); The Carolingians and the Written Word (Cambridge, 1989); Books, scribes and learning in the Frankish kingdoms, sixth to ninth centuries (Aldershot, 1994); Frankish kings and culture in the early middle ages (Aldershot, 1995); Anglo-Saxon missionaries in Germany: personal connections and local influences. The Eighth Annual Brixworth Lecture, Vaughan Paper No. 36 (Leicester, 1991);History and its audiences(Inaugural lecture) (Cambridge University Press, 2000); History and memory in the Carolingian world (Cambridge University Press, 2004); Perceptions of the past in the early middle ages, (Robert Conway Lectures (Notre Dame, 2006); Karl der Große (Darmstadt 2008 in English as Charlemagne: the formation of a European identity (Cambridge, 2008); Turning over a new leaf: change and development in the medieval Book (with Erik Kwakkel and Rodney Thomson) (Leiden, 2012); Rome and the invention of the papacy: the Liber pontificalis (Cambridge, 2020).
Books edited include Ireland in Mediaeval Europe. Studies in memory of Kathleen Hughes. Ed. with Dorothy Whitelock and David Dumville (Cambridge, 1982); The Uses of Literacy in Early Mediaeval Europe (Cambridge , 1990) ; Lasting Letters: An inscription for the abbots of St Albans (with Lida Lopes Cardozo) (Cambridge: Kindersley Cardozo, 1992); Carolingian Culture: emulation and innovation. (Cambridge, 1993); The New Cambridge Medieval History II: 700-900. (Cambridge University Press, 1995); (with Roland Quinault), Edward Gibbon and Empire (Cambridge, 1996); The Short Oxford History of Europe: The Early Middle Ages. Europe 400- 1000 Oxford, 2001) (also published in Spanish (Barcelona, 2002) and Polish (Warsaw 2006); The Times Atlas of the Medieval World (London, 2003 Oxford and New York , 2004); Catalogue of the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge IV.Music, Maps and Calligraphy, with J.Stevens, S.Tyacke and J.Whalley (Boydell and Brewer, Woodbridge, for Magdalene College, 1989); Catalogue of the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge V.Manuscripts Part I Mediaeval, with R.Beadle (Boydell and Brewer, Woodbridge for Magdalene College, 1992);La culture des elites au haut moyen âge, Collection haut moyen âge (with François Bougard and Régine Le Jan) (Brepols: Turnhout, 2009); Ego trouble: Authors and their identities in the early middle ages, Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters Denkschriften des Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften (with Irene van Renswoude, Matthew Gillis and Richard Corradini)(Vienna 2010); Rome across Time and Space: cultural transmission and the exchange of ideas, c. 500-1400 (with Claudia Bolgia and John Osborne) (Cambridge, 2011); Old Saint Peter's, Rome (with John Osborne, Carol Richardson and Joanna Story) (Cambridge, 2013);Romanness after Rome. Special Themed Edition as Guest Editor of Early Medieval Europe 22 Number 4 (2014); The Resources of the past in early medieval Europe (with Clemens Gantner and Sven Meeder) (Cambridge, 2015); The Church and the Law, Studies in Church History 56 (with Charlotte Methuen and Andrew Spicer (Cambridge, 2020); The Codex epistolaris carolinus, Translated Texts for Historians (with Dorine van Espelo, Richard Pollard and Richard Price) (Liverpool, 2020). To Spring 2020, 171 articles and chapters in books.