Robert John Bartlett, CBE, FBA, FRSE (born 27 November 1950) is an English historian and medievalist. He is Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Mediaeval History Emeritus at the University of St Andrews.
Bartlett was born in Streatham. After attending Battersea Grammar School in London (1962 to 1969), he studied at Peterhouse, Cambridge, St John's College, Oxford and Princeton University as a Jane Eliza Procter Visiting Fellow. He obtained research fellowships at several institutions, including the University of Michigan and University of Göttingen, before working at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Chicago and the University of St Andrews, where he currently resides.
He is particularly known for his work The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950-1350, which won the Wolfson History Prize in 1993. He specializes in medieval colonialism, the cult of saints, and England between the 11th century and the 14th century. He gave the 2007 Ford Lectures at the University of Oxford. He wrote and presented Inside The Medieval Mind, a four-part documentary broadcast by the BBC in 2008 as part of a medieval season.[1]
In 2010, he wrote and presented The Normans on the BBC, a documentary series about their wide-ranging impact on Britain, countries of the Mediterranean and as far afield as the Holy Land.[2] In 2014, he presented the BBC documentary series The Plantagenets, about the eponymous royal dynasty.[3]