The College Record 2022

Obituaries
pilgrimage more generally, as well as in medieval art and architecture, particularly
of France and Italy, which always informed his work, and for which frequent family
holidays provided much source material. The Sepulchre of Christ is the third of
Colin’s major and transformative books. The first, The Discovery of the Individual,
1050 – 1200 (1972) was truly ground-breaking, inspirational, and controversial, for
it convincingly challenged the Burckhardtian orthodoxy (still often believed!) that it
was only with the Italian Renaissance that the concept of the individual first emerged
in the European West. As a reviewer wrote in 1975, ‘every future exploration of this
subject will have to begin right here’: it still does! The Papal Monarchy: the Western
Church 1050 – 1250 (1989) is a massive, beautifully written (as were all his works),
analysis of developments across the Western Church set against the background of
emerging papal power, and the growing centralization of ecclesiastical authority. The
book was long in the making, for it deploys an extraordinary range of material, both
primary and secondary, and makes detailed use of work in an impressive number
of European languages, in which Colin was fluent (he also published in German, and
was a frequent reviewer of works written beyond the Anglophone sphere).
Following his retirement, he continued to live in Southampton. As a lecturer on
Viking cruises, he was enabled to travel widely including the Baltic, Eastern Europe,
Scandinavia, and the Mediterranean which enjoyably enriched his post-retirement
research. This included a series of articles primarily but not exclusively, on the
crusades, as well as two books, Pilgrimage: the English Experience from Becket
to Bunyan, an edited volume to which he made a substantial contribution, and
The Sepulchre of Christ. Between 1998 and 2000 he served as President of the
Ecclesiastical History Society, and was elected FBA, in 2007. In 2009 he was made
an Honorary Fellow of the College.
Almost to the end of his life he remained, what he had always been, a most convivial
raconteur, with a lively sense of humour. He retained a strong interest both in the
research of others, and in his own. Though sadly affected by dementia towards
the end of his life, the last time I saw him we were able to discuss the Cistercians
in twelfth-century France, and their abbeys, many of which he remembered and
knew well, and in his very last days he was still trying to articulate new thoughts on
crusading warfare.
At his funeral, Colin’s son summed up the principles by which his father lived: ‘Be kind,
be truthful, be curious’. There is no better testimony to his life and scholarship.
Brian Golding
120 The Queen’s College | College Record 2022