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Anthony Bale

British historian

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionMar 27, 2026
Entity authorityQ4772054
Source-derived summary

Anthony Bale FBA is an English medievalist.

Early life and education

Bale was state-educated at a comprehensive school and sixth-form college in north Staffordshire. His father's family were Shetlandic lighthouse-keepers and his mother's family were Jewish refugees from Poland.

Biography

He is the eighth Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English (Cambridge) at the University of Cambridge. He is a fellow of Girton College, Cambridge. He was previously professor of medieval studies and dean of arts at Birkbeck, University of London. He has written widely on medieval Christian-Jewish relations and on medieval culture and literature.

He was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize 2011, a prize "awarded to outstanding scholars under the age of 36 who have made a substantial contribution to their field of study, are recognised at an international level, and whose future contributions are held to be of correspondingly high promise." He has published Feeling Persecuted: Christians, Jews and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages, which was awarded the Beatrice White Prize of the English Association. He has published new editions of The Book of Marvels and Travels by Sir John Mandeville and The Book of Margery Kempe. He co-edited (with Sebastian Sobecki) Medieval English Travel: A Critical Anthology, and was Morton W. Bloomfield Fellow at Harvard University.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Anthony Bale” is british historian. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Anthony, Bale and British, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA useful biographical orientation record, particularly for establishing names, roles and a first chronology. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2011—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1975-01-01. For this dossier, Anthony, Bale and British is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “british historian” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4772054. VIAF identifies the subject as 76640624. The Library of Congress control number is nr2002019699. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2011.

Critical limits

A concise life account rarely captures disputed attribution, private networks or the changing language used to describe a career. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Anthony Bale”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Anthony Bale primary sources, Anthony Bale archive and Anthony research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Anthony Bale”?
  2. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
  3. Which primary records establish identity, chronology and institutional ties?
Subject index

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Anthony Bale” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.