Robert E. Lerner (born 1940 in New York) is an American medieval historian and professor of history emeritus at Northwestern University.
His major monographs are The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages (1972), The Powers of Prophecy (1983), and The Feast of Saint Abraham (2001).
[3] In addition, he was the co-author of a best-selling Western Civilization textbook, a work translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and Korean.
[5] In the course of his career he has received honours and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation,[6] the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Historisches Kolleg in Munich,[7] the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., and the Max-Planck Gesellschaft of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Lerner recently published a biography of the medieval historian Ernst Kantorowicz and is currently preparing an edition of a treatise written during the Great Schism of the West.