Ron Baxter is an art historian specialising in the medieval period. After a brief flirtation with manuscripts, leading to the publication of Bestiaries and their Users in the Middle Ages (Sutton Publishing 1998), he turned to stone sculpture, and the Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland (CRSBI), for which he is the Research Director and an active fieldworker. He took his first degree and his PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art, where he was the Slide Librarian, and later the Conway Librarian, while teaching undergraduate courses. On his retirement from the Courtauld, he taught at York University for a while, but he is now freelance. In addition to his CRSBI work he frequently lectures and continually writes on art and architectural history and has recently published a monograph on Reading Abbey (The Royal Abbey of Reading (Boydell and Brewer 2016). He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and a member of the Fabric Advisory Committee of Peterborough Cathedral.
A castle visit can be a haunting experience; the crumbling walls evoking thoughts of medieval warfare. But for historians who can read their messages, castles provide valuable evidence of life in the Middle Ages.
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