Rate My Professor Andrew Jotischky

Professor Andrew Jotischky is Professor of Medieval History in the Department of History at Royal Holloway, University of London. He holds an MPhil and PhD in History and previously taught for twenty years at Lancaster University, serving as Head of the History Department there. His research focuses on medieval religion and culture, particularly Christianity, encompassing religious lives, motivations, and institutions; travel and cultural interactions between Greek and western Europeans; crusading; hermits and monks; fasting and asceticism; and pilgrimage. Jotischky examines religious figures in their political, cultural, and spiritual landscapes, with specific interests in monks, hermits, female religious, Latin-Greek Christian relations, sainthood in the Middle Ages, Holy Land pilgrimage, shrine devotions, and the cultural history of food, feasting, and fasting.

Jotischky has published extensively, including The Monastic World: A Twelve Hundred Year History (Yale University Press, 2024), A Companion to Medieval Pilgrimage (editor, ARC Humanities Press, 2024), A Hermit's Cookbook: Monks, Food and Fasting in the Middle Ages (Bloomsbury, 2021), Crusading and the Crusader States (second edition, Routledge, 2017), Latin and Greek Monasticism in the Crusader States (Cambridge University Press, 2010), The Carmelites and Antiquity: Mendicants and their Pasts in the Middle Ages (Oxford University Press, 2002), and The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Medieval World (with Caroline Hull, Penguin, 2005). He has also edited Pope Eugenius III (1145–1153): The First Cistercian Pope (Amsterdam University Press, 2018). As Director of Postgraduate Research Education for the School of Humanities at Royal Holloway, he engages in public outreach through BBC Radio 4 appearances, podcasts, and lectures such as the Royal Historical Society lecture in 2022. His work contributes to understanding medieval religious institutions and their broader societal roles.