Professor Peter Spufford

Peter Spufford, Litt.D., F.B.A.   
Professor Emeritus of European History,
University of Cambridge
Fellow, Queens’ College

Contact.
He can be reached by post at Queens’ College, Cambridge, CB3 9ET, Great Britain, or by telephone in College at +44 (0)1223-335574; or at  Home at +44 (0)1223-833943.
His E-mail address is ps44@cam.ac.uk
Messages can be left in College at +44 (0)1223-335511, or by fax at +44 (0) 1223-335522.

A symposium in his honour is being held over two days (16-17 Sept. 2010) in Queens’.
The organisers write of him:
‘Professor Peter Spufford FBA is the leading medieval monetary historian of the day. His work has transformed our understanding of money in later medieval Europe and inspired and stimulated a generation of historians and numismatists. In particular, his Money and its use in Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 1988) was the first full-scale study of the history of money, not merely coinage, to have been written for medieval Europe, and it remains the standard work in this field‘.

The symposium will be tightly focussed on the subject matter of Spufford’s work, and will take as its theme a reconsideration of the principal strands in his Money and its Use.

For details:  http://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/seminars_events/conferences/spufford.html

Until 2001 Peter Spufford was Professor of European History in the University of Cambridge. He is now Emeritus and a Life Fellow of Queens’ College in that University. He was formerly Director of Studies in History at Queens’

He was born in 1934 and since 1962 has been married to Margaret Spufford, a distinguished historian of sixteenth and seventeenth century England. She is now also an Emeritus Professor and a Fellow of the British Academy. They have had two children. Their son Francis is now a well known writer and broadcaster.

His academic career was divided between the universities of Cambridge and Keele. At Cambridge he obtained First Class Honours in the Historical Tripos and went on to write a Ph.D. under the supervision of Professors Philip Grierson of Cambridge and Professor Hans Van Werveke of Ghent. This became his second book, Monetary problems and Policies in the Burgundian Netherlands, 1433-96. After a research fellowship at Jesus College in Cambridge, he moved to Keele in 1960 as an assistant lecturer. He stayed there for nineteen years, ending as acting head of the Department of History before returning to Cambridge, where he has been successively Reader in Economic History and Professor of European History, as well as a Fellow of Queens’ College.

His historical work, although encompassing the whole of Europe, has focussed particularly on the two most commercially advanced areas of late medieval Europe, northern Italy and the southern Netherlands. His reputation rests on his seminal book Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe. In its preparation he created the innovative Handbook of Medieval Exchange (Royal Historical Society, 1986), and set in motion the study of the organisation and later the buildings of medieval European mints.

One sabbatical he travelled with his family along the land trade routes of thirteenth century Europe, using the Itinéraire de Bruges as his guide. This laid the foundations for his more recent major work, Power and Profit, The Merchant in Medieval Europe (Thames and Hudson, 2002). It  explored further some of the main themes of  Money and Its Use. It is also available in German, Italian, Swedish, and Magyar, and is currently being translated into Japanese. It deals with both bulk trades and luxury trades. The English publisher wanted to emphasise bulk trades by using a picture of unloading grain on the dust-jacket and the Swedish publisher wanted to emphasise luxury trades by using a picture on the dust-jacket which shows the magnificence of the highest quality Tuscan silk textiles.



The quality of his published work has been recognised by election to the British Academy, and by the conferment of a higher doctorate, a Litt.D., by the University of Cambridge. He is also a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and has been awarded the Medal of the Royal Numismatic Society for his writing.

Alongside his own historical work he has also helped run the British Record Society for fifty years as Secretary, General Editor and Chairman. In that time the Society published fifty two volumes of indexes to or texts of historical records, primarily probate records and Hearth Tax returns. He is planning a guide to probate records.

Current research
He is currently working on the rise and decline of financial centres in Europe from the later middle ages to the present day, besides editing the Low Countries volumes in Philip Grierson’s ‘Medieval European Coinage’ series.  His most recent publications include From Antwerp to London. The Decline of Financial Centres in Europe, Wassenaar 2005, and How rarely did medieval merchants use coin? Utrecht 2008.

For a list of his principal publications  - Click here