Brian Tierney (medievalist)

Some thirty years after Tierney's book was published a summing up in the New Catholic Encyclopedia mentioned various criticisms of the work but added that "Most scholars recognize that Tierney correctly located in the late 13th and early 14th centuries the first discussions of papal infallibility" and that, as regards other disputed points in his work, "the discussion continues."

Tierney was a president of the American Catholic Historical Association. He was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Theology by Uppsala University, Sweden (1966) and Doctor of Humane Letters by Catholic University (1982). He also received the Award for Scholarly Distinction of the American Historical Association (1993). He was a Member of the American Philosophical Society, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, and a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded the Haskins Medal of the Medieval Academy ("For a distinguished book in the field of medieval studies") (2001) and the Quasten Medal of Catholic University ("For excellence and leadership in religious studies") (2003).

He received research grants from the Guggenheim Foundation (1955, 1956), The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (1961) the American Council of Learned Societies (1961, 1966), and the National Endowment for the Humanities (1977, 1985).

In 1951, Tierney joined the faculty of The Catholic University of America in Washington D.C. and served as Instructor, Assistant Professor, and Associate Professor in the History Department there until 1959 when he was appointed Professor of Medieval History at Cornell University. In 1969 he was named Goldwin Smith Professor of Medieval History and in 1977 was selected as the first Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor in Humanistic Studies. He retired as Bowmar Professor Emeritus in 1992.

In 1946, Tierney was accepted as a student at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He took a shortened course made available to war veterans and graduated in 1948 with First Class Honors. He then began graduate work under the guidance of Walter Ullmann a learned Austrian scholar who was primarily responsible for introducing the study of medieval canon law to English historians. Tierney completed a Ph.D. thesis in 1951. A revised version was published by Cambridge University Press in 1955 under the title Foundations of the Conciliar Theory.

Tierney enlisted in the Royal Air Force in July 1941 and served in Bomber Command until 1946, attaining the rank of Flight Lieutenant. He trained as an air navigator, partly in the U.S. at an astronavigation school conducted by Pan American Airways in Miami. After returning to England, he completed a tour of thirty missions flying over Europe in Wellington bombers. He next served for a year as a navigation instructor and then returned to operational flying and completed a second tour of sixty missions on Mosquitoes with 105 Squadron of the elite Pathfinder Force. Tierney was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and Bar for his RAF service.

Brian Tierney DFC & Bar (May 7, 1922 – November 30, 2019) was a historian and a medievalist. He was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He was a member of the faculty of the Catholic University of America for eight years until becoming professor of medieval history at Cornell University in 1959, becoming the Goldwin Smith Professor of Medieval History in 1969 and the first Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies in 1977.

Tierney was born in 1922 in Scunthorpe, an industrial town in Lincolnshire, England and grew up there during the Depression years of the 1930s. He was the second of four boys born to John Patrick and Helena (McGuire) Tierney, both of Irish descent. He left school at 16 to begin working in Bristol in southwest England. In January 1941, his home there was destroyed by a German air raid but fortunately the house was unoccupied at the time and there were no casualties.