Richard Barber began his career as a writer in 1961 with the publication of Arthur of Albion, a general introduction to the Arthurian legends. He followed this with a biography of Henry II, and then the first survey of medieval chivalry for many years, The Knight and Chivalry, for which he was given a Somerset Maugham award in 1971.
Medieval history and literature have remained his speciality He wrote a full scale biography of the latter in 1978, Edward Prince of Wales and Aquitaine. The Penguin Guide to Medieval Europe appeared eight years later. In 1989 he collaborated with Juliet Barker on the first comprehensive history of medieval jousting, Tournaments: Jousts, Chivalry and Pageants in the Middle Ages. This was followed by a series of anthologies, of the myths and legends of the British Isles and of the Arthurian legends, which he edited for the Folio Society. In 2004, his book on The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief was widely praised: Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times wrote: ‘Fascinating … Barber demonstrates a gift for lucid, lively prose and an ability to make highly complex development both immediate and accessible’.
Edward III and the Triumph of England, an attempt to get as close to the extraordinary events surrounding the English victory at Crécy and the foundation of the Company of the Garter was published in 2012, and was also very well received. His most recent book is Magnificence and Princely Splendour in the Middle Ages. He is currently working on a book on the Marlborough mound, recently shown to be prehistoric and the only such mound to have been used as a castle motte. Research on the castle itself has shown it to be one of the most important royal castles in the thirteenth century.
He has also translated and edited medieval sources such as The Bestiary , The Pastons and The Life and Campaigns of the Black Prince. Beyond his medieval speciality, he has also written guidebooks (Companion Guide to Gascony and the Dordogne) and has edited John Aubrey’s Brief Lives and other seventeenth century authors.
His professional career has been as a publisher, since 1963. He worked at Macmillan and then at George Bell & Sons, where he oversaw the publication of the first volumes of Robert Latham’s great edition of The Diary of Samuel Pepys. In 1969 he and a group of friends founded The Boydell Press, and in 1972 helped Professor Derek Brewer to start D.S.Brewer Ltd, in order to publish books in medieval studies which were being neglected by the university presses. The two firms merged later to become Boydell & Brewer Ltd, and over the years a number of imprints, all founded by academics for similar reasons in the 1970s, were added to the list: Tamesis Books in Spanish studies, Camden House in German studies, and most recently James Currey in African Studies. In 1993 a music list was started in association with the Britten-Pears Library at Aldeburgh.
In 1989, he began a search for a solution to the problem of representation in America, and came up with an original idea. As a result, Boydell & Brewer Ltd, in association with the University of Rochester, started the University of Rochester Press in upstate New York. This has specialised in music studies from the Eastman School as well as historical series.
Boydell & Brewer Ltd, for which Richard Barber continues to work as a freelance editor, has been an employee-owned company since 2015. It continues the mission that began when Derek Brewer joined the organisation, remaining ‘a defiantly independent publisher of scholarly works for the academic community and thought-provoking, attractively-produced books for the general reader’.
Richard Barber is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Historical Society, and an Honorary Fellow of the Historical Association. He was Honorary Visiting Professor in the Department of History at the University of York from 2015 to 2018.
He has lived on the Suffolk coast for nearly fifty years, although sailing has now given way to gardening as a way of occupying his rather limited spare time.