Professor Stephen Henry Rigby

Stephen Rigby graduated from the University of Sheffield with a first-class degree in Medieval and Modern History in 1976 and was awarded a University of London Ph.D. in 1983. for his study of two medieval Lincolnshire towns. He was appointed as a lecturer in medieval history at the University of Manchester in 1979 and became professor of medieval social and economic history in 2004. He retired in 2010 but has remained research active as an emeritus professor. His books and articles have ranged across four main areas: medieval English social and economic history; social theory and the philosophy of history; medieval literature in its historical context; and medieval ethical, social and political theory. He has recently published an edited collection of essays on the medieval Robin Hood and is currently working on a historical map of Boston (Lincolnshire) for the Historic Towns Trust. He is teaching two courses at the ICE Summer School in 2025, one on English medieval society and the other on medieval English literature. His teaching is debate-centred, introducing competing ways of analysing medieval social structure or of interpreting works of imaginative literature in their historical context.