After growing up in New York, Charlie Briggs majored in history at Grinnell College in Iowa, before going on to receive his M.Litt. from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1993). After a decade and a half of teaching and administration at Georgia Southern University, where he was Professor of History, Briggs returned to the more amenable climes and landscape of the Northeast. A specialist in the intellectual and cultural history of Europe in the thirteenth through early sixteenth centuries, he teaches courses in late medieval and early modern European history, global history, historical methods, and the history of the book.

Briggs’s most recent books are The Body Broken: Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe, 1300–1525 (Routledge, 2020) and A Companion to Giles of Rome (Brill, 2016), which he co-edited with Peter S. Eardley. He has also authored Giles of Rome’s “De regimine principum”: Reading and Writing Politics at Court and University, c. 1275-c. 1525 (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and edited (with David Fowler and Paul Remley) The Governance of Kings and Princes: John Trevisa’s Middle English Translation of the “De regimine principum” of Aegidius Romanus (Garland, 1997). His current book project is a reassessment of the history of early Renaissance humanism, tentively titled Reframing Early Humanism: Scholasticism, Classicism, and the Languages of Politics, 1260–1350.

He has published numerous book chapters, including: “Western Medieval Specula, c. 1150-c. 1450,” (with Cary J. Nederman) in A Critical Companion to the “Mirrors for Princes” Literature (Brill, 2023); “History at the Universities: Oxford, Cambridge, and Paris,” in Medieval Historical Writing: Britain and Ireland, 500-1500 (Cambridge University Press, 2019); “Moral Philosophy and Wisdom Literature,” in The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, vol. 1, 800-1558 (Oxford University Press, 2016); “Scholarly and Intellectual Authority in Late Medieval European Mirrors,” in Global Medieval: Mirrors for Princes Reconsidered (Ilex Foundation/Harvard University Press, 2015); “The Clerk,” in Historians on Chaucer: The “General Prologue” to the Canterbury Tales (Oxford University Press, 2014); and “History, Story, and Community: Representing the Past in Latin Christendom, 1050-1400,” in The Oxford History of Historical Writing, Volume 2: 400-1400 (Oxford University Press, 2012). His articles have appeared in the journals Rhetorica, LATCH [Online], Journal of Medieval History, English Manuscript Studies, Medieval Perspectives, Manuscripta, and Scriptorium.

In addition to receiving research funding from the American Philosophical Society, he has been a Leslie Humanities Fellow at Dartmouth College, a Mellon Fellow at Saint Louis University, and Starr Foundation Visiting Fellow at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. In December 2011 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and in 2017 he was named UVM’s inaugural President’s Distinguished Senior Lecturer.