International Man of Mystery: Williams College Observers Ask, Who is Eric Knibbs, and Why Did He Resign?

WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - Secure in a dream job in medieval history at Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH), Eric Knibbs is an American ex-pat who is now free at last to speak his mind regarding Williams College. He is unencumbered by the burdens of advancing in a contemporary American academic career and physically distant from the anti-racist zealots who are ripping apart our nation.

To see what he escaped at Williams College, all you need to do is read up on a recent missive from the history department confessing its support for rioting and violence throughout the nation.

So, who is Eric Knibbs? 

Eric is a scholar of early medieval legal history, and the current editor of the False Decretals of Pseudo-Isidore. He is part of the MGH which is now housed in the prestigious Bavarian State Library in Munich, Germany.

We can learn a little more about him by looking over his old bio at Williams College which tells us, "Eric Knibbs is a historian of the Middle Ages, with a particular interest in early medieval canon law and the phenomenon of medieval forgery. He received his Ph.D. from Yale in 2009, and has done postdoctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich."

He does look like he was a young phenomenon. He published his first book within two years of getting his Ph.D. prior to starting at Williams College. The bio reports: "He is the author of Ansgar, Rimbert and the Forged Foundations of Hamburg-Bremen (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), which argues that most of the early documentation for the archdiocese of Hamburg-Bremen, a fixture of German historical scholarship that has long been viewed as fundamental for the history of Christianity in Scandinavia, is either forged or falsified. In fact, the archdiocese emerged much later than scholarship has assumed, and our understanding of Frankish expansion and missionary history during the reign of Louis the Pious (814–840) has been accordingly distorted." 

I suppose you could read him, from a leftist perspective, as a scholar fully devoted to uprooting Christianity by demonstrating the insincerity of some of its proponents going as far back as the Middle Ages.

I assume that Eric wrote the following comments himself describing the nature of his research saying, "His current research focuses on the extensive and notoriously difficult legal forgeries associated with Pseudo-Isidore. Concocted in the ninth century, the fake laws of Pseudo-Isidore remained undetected until the early modern period and exercised an incalculable influence on the legal tradition of Roman Christianity. By studying the sources of the forgeries, their early manuscript tradition and the broader political and religious context in which they emerged, he hopes to shed new light on the identity of the forgers, the context of their work, and their enormous significance for early medieval history."

Selected Publications

Books:

Amalar: Liber Officialis/On the Liturgy, English translation, facing-page Latin edition, with notes, introduction and index. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 35 and 36 (Harvard University Press, 2014), 2 vols, 1231pp.

Alcuini Eboracensis: De fide sanctae Trinitatis et de incarnatione Christi libri tres. Latin edition with introduction and critical apparatus; together with Prof. E. Ann Matter of the University of Pennsylvania. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012). 250 pp.

Ansgar, Rimbert and the Forged Foundations of Hamburg-Bremen (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). 270 pp.

El cartulario del monasterio aragonés de San Andrés de Fanlo: Siglos X-XIII. Latin edition with introduction and notes; together with Prof. Carlos Laliena Corbera of the University of Zaragoza (Zaragoza: Universidad de Zaragoza, 2007). 255 pp.

Articles:

“Pseudo-Isidore in the A1 Recension,” in Karl Ubl and Daniel Ziemann, eds. Fälschung als Mittel der Politik? Pseudoisidor im Licht der neuen Forschung (Hannover, 2015), 81–95.

“The Interpolated Hispana and the Origins of Pseudo-Isidore,” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte: Kanonistische Abteilung 99 (2013), 1–71.

“Pseudo-Isidore at the Field of Lies: Divinis praeceptis (JE †2579) as an Authentic Decretal,” Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law n.s. 29 (2011/2012), 1–34.

“The Manuscript Evidence for the De octo quaestionibus Ascribed to Bede,” Traditio 63 (2008), 129–83.

Why did he resign after getting tenure at Williams College? 

At this point, I am trying to balance my desire to help Eric get his story on the record with my desire to have a life. I am tempted to read through every blog post and truly understand his noteworthy scholarship and its relevance. It is too deep in the weeds for me. Nevertheless, I think it should be clear to any objective reader that he is the real deal - a scholar of exceptional productivity. He is the sort of academic specialist who I imagine might be offended and bothered by attempts to sabotage his efforts by asserting they are not sufficiently woke. 

As a young professor at Williams College in the last 1980s, I remember having an epiphany that the school was the sort of place designed to allow an obsessed academic to focus on their scholarly pursuits in perfectly comfortable and serene conditions. The pay was not much, but you could blissfully lose yourself there. You could concentrate, and never bother to look up from what obsessed you. This, in the end, that wasn't enough for me. It looks like the failure of the school to provide that comfortable cocoon for Eric meant it wasn't enough for him either.