Secretariat

Philip Jones

It is very sad to have to report the death, on 26 March 2006, of Dr Philip Jones, former Reader in Medieval History in the School of History. Born in 1921, Dr Jones won Open and State Scholarships to Wadham College, Oxford, and obtained a First Class in the Final Honours School of Modern History in 1945. He remained at Oxford to undertake research for a DPhil on the subject of the ruling Malatesta family of Rimini - a study in late medieval Italian history. He was appointed a Senior Demy by Magdalen College at the end of 1945 and his research was further supported by the award of the Amy Mary Preston Read Scholarship in 1946 and the Bryce Research Studentship in the following year. Awarded his doctorate in 1949, Dr Jones went on to become an extremely distinguished historian, whose publications on the Italian city-states of the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries and on Italian economic history are recognised as outstanding works of original and penetrating scholarship, infused by a remarkably wide command of the sources in several languages. Much of the early part of his career was spent at Leeds, where, following a brief spell at Glasgow, he took up a Lectureship in Medieval History in January 1950. He remained at Leeds until 1963, producing a number of very substantial publications which won him an enviable reputation. In recognition of his scholarship, he was made Reader in Medieval History in 1961. On his election to a Fellowship in History at Brasenose College, Oxford, Dr Jones resigned from his post at Leeds in September 1963. He remained at Oxford for the remainder of his career, and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1984. A full obituary of Dr Jones was published by The Independent on 3 May.