My friend Bob Moore , who has died aged 83, taught medieval history at the University of Sheffield from 1964 to 1994, and then at the University of Newcastle until his retirement in 2003. He was also known to many as RI Moore, the name under which he wrote as a historian.
In 1987, he published The Formation of a Persecuting Society. Unusually for a book on medieval history, its second edition was the subject of a Guardian column by Madeleine Bunting in 2007. Its fresh and iconoclastic insights into the roots of intolerance in modern society remain sharply relevant today, and a third edition is in preparation. Bob’s subsequent work on the persecution of religious heretics, culminating in The War on Heresy (2012), provoked considerable debate, and won him an important reputation internationally, especially in France.
