Barbara H. Rosenwein

Rosenwein has authored or edited several works of historiography and general history. She co-authored Debating the Middle Ages: Issues and Readings (1998), The Making of the West (2022), and is the author of A Short History of the Middle Ages (2018) and Reading the Middle Ages (2018), all of which have been published in several revised editions.

Rosenwein has been visiting professor at many leading universities, including the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris, 1992), École normale supérieure (Paris, 2004), Utrecht University (2005), the University of Gothenburg (2014), TU Dresden (2015), Trinity College, Oxford (2015), and the University of Iceland (2016). She was a scholar in residence at the American Academy in Rome from 2001 to 2002, was elected fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1991 and the Medieval Academy of America in 2003, and been affiliated with the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London since 2009. Rosenwein has contributed to Encyclopædia Britannica.

Rosenwein specializes in medieval history and the history of emotions. Her scholarship may be divided into several phases. Her earliest research centered on the Abbey of Cluny, on which she wrote To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter: The Social Meaning of Cluny's Property (1989). She then proceeded to examine immunities (privileges given to monasteries to protect them from the encroachment of laypeople or the jurisdiction of bishops in the Middle Ages), resulting in Negotiating Space: Power, Restraint, and Privileges of Immunity in Early Medieval Europe (1999). In the third phase, Rosenwein examined the history of emotions, editing Anger's Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (1998), and writing Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (2006) and Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions 600-1700 (2016). The latter work has since been translated into Italian. In later years, Rosenwein has continued her research in medieval history and the history of emotions, co-authoring notable works such as The Middle Ages in 50 Objects (2018) and What is the History of Emotions? (2018). Among her latest works are Anger: The Conflicted History of an Emotion (2020) and "Love: A History in Five Fantasies" (2022). She is also the author of a large number of articles for scholarly publications.

Since 1971, Rosenwein has been closely affiliated with Loyola University Chicago, where she was instructor (1971-4), assistant professor (1974–80), associate professor (1980-1988), and professor (1988-2014). She retired from teaching as professor emerita in 2015, but continues to write and research.

Barbara H. Rosenwein, née Herstein (born March 1, 1945) is an American historian who is professor emerita of history at Loyola University Chicago. Rosenwein is an expert in medieval history, on which she has written a number of influential works.

Barbara H. Rosenwein was born in Chicago, Illinois, on March 1, 1945. She received her B.A. (1966), M.A. (1968) and Ph.D. (1974) at the University of Chicago.