Thomas Noel Bisson

Thomas Noel Bisson, one of the leading historians of medieval Europe, died on June 28th at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, following a brief illness. He was 94. Bisson was the loving husband of Carroll (Webb) for forty-three years until her death in 2005, beloved father of daughters Noël Bisson and Susan Bisson Lambert, and cherished grandfather to Josephine, Caroline, William, and Helen. At his death he was the Henry Charles Lea Professor of Medieval History Emeritus at Harvard University.

In an era when many historians turned to social and cultural history, Bisson maintained a career-long focus on institutional history, with a special interest in the nature of power — both how power was exercised and how it was experienced. His Crisis of the Twelfth Century (2015) was a wide-ranging and original interpretation of the origins of European government, grounded in a lifetime of work on such topics as parliaments, fiscal regimes, and feudalism. He had a particular interest in and affection for the history of Catalonia, authoring a major edition and study of the earliest fiscal accounts of the region (1984), the standard account in English of the Crown of Aragon (The Medieval Crown of Aragon: A Short History, 1986), and Tormented Voices (1998), a creative and deeply empathetic attempt to hear in fragmentary sources the lived experience of medieval peasants subjected to unconstrained lordly power. This book remains the most beloved and widely read of his many works. He was equally at home, however, in English and French history; his final work was an edition and translation of the Chronography of Robert of Torigni (2020), a key source for the history of the Anglo-Norman world. His earliest books — Assemblies and Representation in Languedoc in the Thirteenth Century (1964); Conservation of Coinage: Monetary Exploitation and its Restraint in France, Catalonia, and Aragon (c. A.D. 1000–c. 1225) (1979) — are less well known, but they contain the seeds of what was to come. He saw a through-line from his scholarship on the history of state to the American political landscape, and he often lamented what he considered to be a sacrifice of the public good for the interests of the powerful and monied few. In his last years, Bisson cherished time with friends at his house in Cambridge discussing Paul Krugman’s latest column over a mug of Earl Grey and a brownie.

Bisson received his B.A. from Haverford College in 1951. He was drawn there, in part, by a family friendship with philosophy professor Rufus Jones who summered in South China, Maine, living and preaching within that seasonal lakeside community, which included Bisson’s extended family. It was Jones’ particular kind of socially engaged faith, tied to the Quaker traditions of Haverford College, that spoke to Bisson. As an undergraduate, Bisson fell under the spell of medieval historian William E. Lunt, who set him on his career path. Bisson received his Ph.D. in 1958 from Princeton University, studying under the distinguished Joseph R. Strayer, whose own scholarly questions stayed with Bisson his whole life. He taught at Amherst College, Brown University, and Swarthmore College before embarking on a two-decade period at University of California, Berkeley, 1967–87. He was the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Harvard University from 1988 until his retirement in 2005 and chaired the department from 1991 to 1995.

His many professional honors included election as President of the Medieval Academy of America (1994–95), Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. His election, at age 44, to the American Philosophical Society made him one of the youngest scholars ever to receive that recognition. Catalonia recognized his important work in reconstructing the region’s early history with election as a Corresponding Member of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans, an honorary doctorate from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and, in 2001, the Cross of St. George. Among his many visiting fellowships, he was most happy at Oxford, where he spent several terms.

Bisson was an exceptional and admired teacher and was as passionate about teaching his First Year Seminars as his graduate-level courses. From his move to Berkeley, when he first supervised Ph.D. students, he never lost his belief in the fundamental importance of liberal arts education. Bisson took enormous pride in the work of the generations of students he nurtured, the multiple undergraduate theses he advised, and the over two dozen PhD dissertations he supervised between his time at Berkeley and then at Harvard. He shaped his students as historians and remained a deeply caring presence as they pursued diverse paths. Many are now distinguished scholars at colleges and universities across the globe. His students gathered virtually with Bisson in 2021 to celebrate his ninetieth birthday, and then again, this past spring at his Hammond Street house, where for decades they had received an affectionate welcome. He and his wife regularly hosted gatherings with the purpose of celebrating and enriching the experience of his students. Those who studied with Bisson felt a common bond that crossed institutional lines. Over the years, reunions of these students ("Bissonfests") took place at academic conferences in numerous cities. One of his greatest gifts to his students was the fellowship he created.

Bisson was born in New York City in 1931, but his formal schooling began in China where his father, the American political writer and journalist T.A. Bisson, was researching Japan and China at a pivotal moment in the histories of both countries; an interest in the nascent communist movement would inform T.A. Bisson’s first book. T.N. Bisson remembered being ferried to school in a rickshaw and a particular visit to the Forbidden City at age six, where he was left behind a locked inner gate at closing. Bisson’s own scholarly trajectory was deeply shaped by the experience of his father, a brilliant scholar in his own right who was prevented from realizing his full potential and lost his academic post during the height of McCarthyism. Bisson’s mother, Faith Williams, was the daughter of John E. Williams, a Welsh-American Presbyterian medical missionary and a founder of Nanking University in China. The large Williams clan moved abruptly back to Auburndale, Massachusetts, following the murder of the elder Williams in the Nanking Incident of 1927.

Classical music was a source of profound joy throughout Bisson’s life. Having inherited his mother’s musical talent, he studied violin and piano from a young age and flirted with both composition and musicology as possible avenues of study. He approached his music with the same impassioned focus as his scholarship; vacation reading would include the latest biographical tome (swiftly consumed, deeply absorbed), and he could contribute astutely to any conversation on the composers he most adored. The interplay of music and text in Schubert’s Lieder excited him most in later life, and he treasured any opportunity to accompany on the piano a friend or family member who shared – or capitulated to – this obsession by singing with him. His wife Carroll, a classicist by training and a Renaissance woman by career, was every bit his intellectual partner. She was the first reader of all his writing, and they shared a deep love of T.S. Eliot, the Beaux Arts Trio, Paris, Oxford, and much else. Bisson deeply regretted that she did not live to share in his delight in the musical, academic, and artistic careers of their children, sons-in-law, nephews, and grandchildren. It is not a coincidence that three of his grandchildren are pursuing careers in the arts and the fourth in academia.

A lifelong baseball fan, Bisson was as happy to discuss Koufax as Schubert. His passion began with his childhood team, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and he could recount visits to Ebbets Field, including watching Jackie Robinson; his children grew up as alien Dodgers fans in Berkeley, and the family acquired their first color TV on the eve of the 1981 World Series, Dodgers vs. Yankees. He retained vivid memories of the Phillies of the 1950s, but his future was as a Red Sox fan. An Auburndale relative introduced Bisson to Fenway Park as a child, a visit fondly and firmly marked in his memory by a Jimmie Foxx home run over the Green Monster. On relocating to Cambridge from Berkeley, Bisson rarely missed a televised Sox game and diligently consumed the morning sports columns, often firing off a frustrated follow-up email to medievalists of similar commitments.

Beloved by all, Bisson will be greatly missed.