[1] Born in Manchester, Reuter attended a grammar school in Newcastle and studied at Cambridge University.

After a ten years lecturing at the University of Exeter, Reuter spent more than a decade as a Mitarbeiter (academic staff member) at the Monumenta Germaniae Historica in Munich, where he worked on editing the letters of the twelfth-century abbot Wibald of Corvey and (with Dr. Gabriel Silagi) produced the database for a concordance to the work of the medieval canonist Gratian.

Among his contributions in this area were numerous book reviews in German and British publications, a translation of Gerd Tellenbach's monograph on the history of the church in the High Middle Ages (The Church in Western Europe from the tenth to the early twelfth century, Cambridge, 1993) and the posthumous editing and publishing of his mentor Karl Leyser's papers (Communications and Power in Medieval Europe, 2 vols., Hambledon & London, 1992).

His own monograph, Germany in the Early Middle Ages, 800–1056 (Harlow, Essex & New York, 1991) remains a standard English-language survey of the subject.

[3] The collection Challenging the Boundaries of Medieval History: The Legacy of Timothy Reuter, edited by Patricia Skinner, was published in 2009 as volume 22 in the University of York Studies in the Early Middle Ages (Brepols, Turnhout, Belgium).