Thomas F. Mayer

Thomas F. Mayer (September 10, 1951 – January 20, 2014) was an American historian and a longtime professor of history at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois.

Thomas Mayer was born on September 10, 1951, in Moline, Illinois, to Herbert T. Mayer, and Arline Knepper Mayer. He received his master's degree in medieval history at Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, and his Ph.D. in Tudor/Stuart history at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Mayer taught modern history at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. He was the first American scholar to be granted access to the Vatican's Archives of the Holy Office in 1997, and the same year, he started the Center for the Study of the Christian Millennium at Augustana College. In his honor, Augustana College created the Thomas F. Mayer Research Prize, an annual award granted to an outstanding student whose senior research project is both interdisciplinary and based on the careful analysis of sources. 

Mayer was also a distinguished visiting fellow at the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, inaugurating its 50th year.

Mayer's research was funded multiple times by Mellon Foundation, and in 1989, Mayer was named an Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow at Harvard and spent the 1989-1990 academic year at Harvard as a Mellon Fellow, writing a book and teaching a course on Renaissance biography. His researches have concentrated, above all, on the religious and political history of the European sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In particular, he published several studies on Cardinal Reginald Pole and edited five volumes of Pole's correspondence. The Galileo case was also at the center of his studies and he also wrote a study of the early 16th-century political thinker, Thomas Starkey.

In 2009, Mayer consulted on the PBS documentary, Michelangelo Revealed (directed by Fabrizio Ruggirello, written by Vania Del Borgo, narrated by Liev Schreiber, and featuring Giulio Baraldi, Antonio Forcellino, and Valerio Malorni.)

Mayer received a number of academic honors. He was a fellow of the Royal Historical Society; a Mellon fellow at Harvard; a fellow of Villa I Tatti: The Harvard University Center for the Study of the Italian Renaissance, and of the American Academy in Rome. He also won the Carl S. Meyer Prize, Sixteenth Century Studies Conference.

• Reginald Pole: Prince and Prophet, Cambridge University Press; 1st edition (July 30, 2007)
• A Reluctant Author: Cardinal Pole and His Manuscripts (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society), Amer Philosophical Society (October 1, 1999)
• Reforming Reformation (Catholic Christendom, 1300-1700), Routledge; 1st edition (December 28, 2012)
• Analytical Marxism (Contemporary Social Theory), SAGE Publications, Inc (June 1, 1994)
• The Roman Inquisition: A Papal Bureaucracy and Its Laws in the Age of Galileo, University of Pennsylvania Press (February 19, 2013)
• The Trial of Galileo, 1612-1633 Paperback, University of Toronto Press, Higher Education Division (October 1, 2012)
• The Roman Inquisition: Trying Galileo, University of Pennsylvania Press (April 15, 2015)

In addition, he contributed to stories that ran in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and numerous scholarly journals.

Mayer married Jan Popehn on August 13, 1983, on the University of Minnesota campus. They had one daughter, Molly Elisabeth.

Mayer passed away on January 20, 2014, at the Clarissa C. Cook Hospice House in Bettendorf, Iowa, after a year-and-a-half-long struggle with cancer.