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Ian Mortimer (born 22 September 1967 in Petts Wood, England, UK) is a British historian. He was educated at Eastbourne College, the University of Exeter (BA, PhD) and University College London (MA). Between 1993 and 2003 he worked for several major research institutions, including the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, and the universities of Exeter and Reading. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

He is best known for his book The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England, first published in the UK in 2008, which became a Sunday Times bestseller in paperback in 2010. He has also written a sequence of biographies of medieval political leaders: first Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March, then Edward III, Henry IV and 1415, a year in the life of Henry V. In particular he is well-known for pioneering the argument that Edward II did not die in Berkeley castle in 1327 in his first two books and an article in the English Historical Review. A synopsis is available here.

He also has carried out research into the social history of early modern medicine. His essay 'The Triumph of the Doctors' was awarded the 2004 Alexander Prize by the Royal Historical Society. In this essay he demonstrated that ill and injured people close to death shifted their hopes of physical salvation from an exclusively religious source of healing power (God, or Christ) to a predominantly human one (physicians and surgeons) over the period 1615—70, and argued that this shift of outlook was among the most profound changes western society has ever experienced.

He is the nephew of the British tennis player Angela Mortimer. He lives on Dartmoor, in Devon, England.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Ian Mortimer", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0