Dr Thomas Smith FRHistS FRAS
Medieval historian
Dr Thomas Smith is a graduate of Kent and London universities; he gained his PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London, in 2013, where he won a Reid Research Scholarship. Thomas was elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2017 and Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society in 2021 and holds honorary research fellowships at Royal Holloway, the University of Kent, and Oxford Brookes University. A former Lecturer in Medieval History at Trinity College, Dublin, he is one of the most prolific historians working on the Middle Ages.
He has been the recipient of a number of major research funding awards, including a Scouloudi Junior Research Fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research, London, a Study Abroad Fellowship at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich (Leverhulme Trust), and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Leeds.
A leading specialist on the crusades, Thomas is the author of Rewriting the First Crusade (2024), Curia and Crusade (2017) and, with Dr Susan Edgington, The Deeds of the Franks who Conquered Jerusalem, an edition and translation published by Oxford University Press. In 2018, Curia and Crusade received the Highly Commended award in the British Records Association’s Janette Harley Prize. He has edited seven other academic books and written more than 40 articles and book chapters, including for the 'Cambridge History of the Crusades' and 'The New Cambridge History of Britain'.
Thomas has served as historical consultant on the TV series ‘Vikings’ and made media appearances on podcasts including ‘Gone Medieval’ (History Hit Network) and for ‘Medievalists.net’. He has delivered lectures on medieval history across Britain, Ireland, the United States, Australia, Japan, Germany, Austria, France, and Israel.
After lecturing at the universities of London, Leeds, Kent, Dublin, and Munich, Thomas currently holds the position of Keeper of the Scholars and Head of Oxbridge at Rugby School, where he has taught History since 2019.
You can find all his books on his Amazon Author page and follow Thomas on Instagram and Academia.
He is represented by The Andrew Lownie Literary Agency: https://www.andrewlownie.co.uk
His latest academic-facing book is Rewriting the First Crusade: Epistolary Culture in the Middle Ages (Boydell Press, 2024) – an exploration of the letters from the First Crusade, yielding evidence for a number of reinterpretations of the movement. It is available to order at a 40% discount from Boydell & Brewer using the promotional flyer.
The letters stemming from the First Crusade are premier sources for understanding the launch, campaign, and aftermath of the expedition. Between 1095 and 1100, epistles sustained social relationships across the Mediterranean and within Europe, as a mixture of historical writing, literary invention, news, and theological interpretation. They served ecclesiastical administration, projected authority, and formed focal points for spiritual commemoration and para-liturgical campaigns.
This volume, grounded on extensive research into the original manuscripts, and presenting numerous new manuscript witnesses, argues that some of the letters are post hoc "inventions", composed by generations of scribe-readers who visited crusading sites from the twelfth century on, adding new layers of meaning in the form of interpolations and post-scripts. Drawing upon this new understanding, and blurring the distinction of epistolary "reality", it rewrites central aspects of the history of the First Crusade, considering the documents in a new way: as markers of enthusiasm and support for the crusade movement among monastic clergy, who copied and consumed them as a form of scribal crusading. Whether authentic letters or literary "confections", they functioned as communal sites for the celebration, commemoration and memorialisation of the expedition.
Thomas' first academic-facing book, Curia and Crusade: Pope Honorius III and the Recovery of the Holy Land, 1216–1227 (Brepols, 2017), was Highly Commended in the 2018 British Records Association Janette Harley Prize.
The pontificate of Honorius III (1216–27) ranks among the most important papal reigns of the thirteenth century: the pope organised two large-scale crusades to recover the Holy Land, the second of which recovered Jerusalem for the first since 1187; he presided over a ‘golden summer’ of papal-imperial relations with the medieval stupor mundi, Frederick II, emperor of the Romans and king of Sicily; he developed an original theological conception of his office; and he laid the foundations for a centralised papal financial machine. Yet, despite his significant impact on thirteenth-century Christendom, Honorius has often languished in the shadow of his famous predecessor, Innocent III – a balance that the present book redresses.
Grounded in extensive original research into the manuscripts of Honorius’s letter registers, this study develops a revisionist interpretation of how the curia marshalled the crusading movement to recover the Holy Land. Questioning the utility of the historiographical construct of ‘papal policy’, this book provides new insights into crusade diplomacy, papal theology, the roles of legates, and the effectiveness of crusade taxation. It also includes a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the papal chancery and its documents, which will be of particular use to students and those approaching the medieval papacy for the first time.
Thomas was elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2017 and Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society in 2021. He is also a member of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East (SSCLE), the Haskins Society, and the Canterbury and York Society. Since September 2019, he has taught History at Rugby School, where he holds the position of Keeper of the Scholars.