Richard Pfaff | Program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies

Professor Emeritus of History (3291)

Campus Box 3195
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3195
pfaffrw@email.unc.edu

M.A. Oxford, 1963
D.Phil. Oxford, 1965
D.D. Oxford, 1995

Research Interests

Richard Pfaff’s research and teaching interests center on the ecclesiastical, cultural, and political history of medieval England, most often in the ninth through twelfth centuries, but for certain topics and approaches stretching back to the Age of Bede and occasionally into the later middle ages. His scholarly work focuses primarily on liturgical manuscripts, and more broadly on medieval libraries, monastic scriptoria, architecture, hagiography, and the Fathers—and also on the history of scholarship in England in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and English antiquarian studies in general. He is currently working, as a long-range project, on a history of the liturgy in medieval England.

Among his publications are New Liturgical Feasts in Later Medieval England(1970), Montague Rhodes James (1980), Medieval Latin Liturgy: a Select Bibliography (1982), The Eadwine Psalter: Text, Image, and Monastic Culture in Twelfth-Century Canterbury (co-editor, with M. Gibson and T. Heslop, and co-author; 1992), The Liturgical Books of Anglo-Saxon England (editor and co-author; 1995), and Liturgical Calendars, Saints, and Services in Medieval England (1998) and articles in, inter alia, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Recherches de Théologie ancienne et médiévale, Scriptorium, Speculum, and Studia Patristica, as well as in Festschriften, congress proceedings, and other collections.

He is a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and of the Royal Historical Society. In past years fellowships have been held at the National Humanities Center, Magdalen College, Oxford, and Magdalene College, Cambridge. He is also an Honorary Vice-President of the Henry Bradshaw Society, and in 1995 was awarded the degree of Doctor of Divinity by the University of Oxford.