Simon Keynes

Simon Douglas Keynes ( ; born 23 September 1952) is a British historian who is Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon emeritus in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of Trinity College.

Biography Keynes is the fourth and youngest son of Richard Darwin Keynes and his wife Anne Adrian, and thus a member of the Keynes family (and, by extension, of the Darwin–Wedgwood family). Two of his elder brothers are the conservationist and author Randal Keynes and the medical scientist and fellow fellow of Trinity Roger Keynes. He is the grandson of the surgeon Geoffrey Keynes and Nobelist Edgar Douglas Adrian, 1st Baron Adrian, grandnephew of the economist John Maynard Keynes and great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin.

He was born in Cambridge and educated at King's College School, The Leys School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He was lecturer in Anglo-Saxon History at Cambridge from 1978, reader in Anglo-Saxon History from 1992, and Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, from 1999 until 2019. He has been a fellow of Trinity College since 1976.

From 1993 to 2004 he was associate editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He retired from his professorship on 1 October 2019, and was succeeded by Rosalind Love.

Selected publications For a full list up to 2017, see 'Publications by Simon Keynes', in Writing, Kingship and Power in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. by Rory Naismith and David A. Woodman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. xv-xxx.

The Diplomas of King Aethelred The Unready (978–1016): A Study in Their Use as Historical Evidence, 1980 Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources, 1983 (trans., author of intro and notes, with M. Lapidge) Facsimiles of Anglo-Saxon Charters, 1991 The Liber Vitae of the New Minster and Hyde Abbey Winchester, 1996