Nicolai Rubinstein

Rubinstein was born on 13 July 1911 in Berlin, Germany, to Latvian and Hungarian[1] Jewish parents.[2] He studied at the University of Berlin and moved to Florence in Italy in the 1930s, where he was an assistant to Nicola Ottakar.[1]

In 1939, he fled Italy and migrated to England to escape persecution. He lectured at the University of Oxford before becoming a lecturer in history at the University College, Southampton, in 1942. In 1945, he moved to Westfield College, London, to take up a lectureship.[1] He was promoted to a readership in 1962 and to the Professorship of History there in 1965, in which office he remained until he retired in 1978.[3]

As The Guardian wrote in its obituary of him, Rubinstein was "one of the 20th century's most eminent scholars of renaissance Italy".[2] He wrote The Government of Florence under the Medici, 1434–1494 (1966), Florentine Studies: Politics and Society in Renaissance Florence (1968), and The Palazzo Vecchio, 1298–1532: Government, Architecture and Imagery in the Civic Palace of the Florentine Republic (1995). He was the general editor of the Letters of Lorenzo de' Medici and personally edited volumes 3 and 4 in the series.[3] His honours included fellowship of the Royal Historical Society,[3] and of the British Academy (he was elected to the latter in 1971);[1] he also received the British Academy's Serena Medal in 1974.[3] Rubinstein died on 19 August 2002.[1]

• Daniel Waley, "Rubinstein, Nicolai, 1911–2002", Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 124 (2004), pp. 313–330.