Robert James Brentano (19 May 1926 – 21 November 2002) was a prize-winning author and historian of medieval England and Italy. One of his books, Two churches: England and Italy in the thirteenth century, won the 1968 John Gilmary Shea Prize and the Haskins Medal. Brentano was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1978[1] and the American Philosophical Society in 1996.[2]