Setton, Kenneth Meyer (1914-1995)

Kenneth Meyer Setton (June 17, 1914 – February 18, 1995) was an American historian and an expert on the history of medieval Europe, particularly the Crusades.

Setton's childhood and adolescence were not easy. He supported himself from the age of 13. Setton received his bachelor's degree in 1936 as a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Boston University. He received his master's degree in 1938 and PhD in 1941 at Columbia University. His dissertation Christian Attitude Toward the Emperor in the Fourth Century was written under the direction of Lynn Thorndike. He also received honorary degrees from Boston University and the University of Kiel. He claimed that knowledge of languages is the basis of knowledge of historical science, and he spoke Italian, French, German and Catalan, besides his favorites, Latin and classical Greek.

Setton spent nearly two decades finishing his classic work, the four-volume The Papacy and the Levant, 1204-1571. For the first two published volumes he received the Haskins Medal of the Medieval Academy of America in 1980. He served as the editor-in-chief of the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, published in six volumes from 1969 to 1989.

Setton was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1952. He received the John Frederick Lewis Prize of the Philosophical Society three times: first in 1957 for his work The Byzantine Background to the Italian Renaissance, then in 1984 for his work The Papacy and the Levant, volume 3 and 4 and in 1990 for his work Venice, Austria and the Turks in the 17th Century.

Setton was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1960.

Setton began his teaching career at Boston University and the University of Manitoba. Then he taught at the University of Pennsylvania between 1950 and 1965, succeeding another medievalist, John L. La Monte [pl]. In the period between 1965 and 1968 he taught at the University of Wisconsin, where he was appointed director of the Institute for Research in the Humanities. After 1968 he worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

He had many concurrent appointments, such as director of the library at the University of Pennsylvania, acting director of the Gennadius Library in Greece and Guggenheim Fellow.