We have been greatly saddened to learn of the death of Bob Moore on 5 February 2025.
Bob was educated at Royal Belfast Academical Institution and Merton College, Oxford. He joined the Department of Medieval and Modern History in 1964, the first of several new appointments in the post-Robbins expansion of the university sector. He was on the staff until 1994, when he took up the post of Professor of Medieval History at Newcastle University, from which he retired in 2003.
During his thirty years here, Bob played a significant role in the Department and the wider University. In the Department he took an energetic part in the revision of the curriculum. Work on the Hamlyn Historical Atlas, which he edited (1981), stimulated the introduction of a new course, “World Civilisations”, which would become a core module in a revised syllabus. You can discover more about Bob's work on the curriculum through his blogs - which are split into part 1 and part 2. He was also active in University administration, serving for many years on the Academic Development Committee (ADC), then the University’s main planning body.
Bob was an influential historian. His early work was on the history of heresy, and the efforts made to extirpate it, best attested in the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars in southern France: he produced a book of translated documents and a monograph, The Origins of European Dissent (1977, rev. 1985). As he dug deeper, he would come to argue for a link between the persecution of heretics, alongside other minority groups, and the growth of the power of state Institutions, culminating in the publication of his best-known book, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950-1250 (1987, rev. 2007). An admirable summary of his ideas will be found in his Creighton Lecture of 2004, in a distinguished series, published as “The war against heresy in western Europe”, Historical Research 81 (2008), pp. 189-210.
We said farewell to Bob in Newcastle on 28 February, a fine not-quite-Spring day, with a moving service and a memorable wake, of which the Irishman in him (never far from the surface) would have thoroughly approved.