Following a BA in Medieval Studies and Archaeology (Unuiversity of Wales, Lampeter, UK, 2001), an MA in Early Medieval Studies (University of York, UK, 2003) and an MA in Maritime Archaeology (University of Southampton, UK, 2006), Thom Gobbitt joined the University of Leeds and was awarded his PhD in Medieval Studies in 2010. His doctoral research was conducted under the Production and Use of English Manuscripts, 1060 to 1220 project. Since 2012 he has researched at the Austrian Academy of the Sciences on various projects, including his FWF Lise Meitner project, which examined the production and use of the manuscripts of the version of the Lombard laws known in the modern day as the Liber Papiensis in the long eleventh century (No. M1698, 2014-16), and his FWF Standalone project focusing on the manuscripts and book cultures of the Edictus langobardorum in the long tenth century (No. P-29968, 2017-20).
His research stands at the intersection of the History of Early Medieval Law and the History of the Book, focusing on the early medieval Leges barbarorum and in particular the Lombard laws and Carolingian capitularies relating to Italy, from the seventh to the early-thirteenth centuries. His research considers scribes and readers in the transmission of laws, capitularies and legal commentaries in their manuscript contexts, and the use of materiality, mise-en-page and paratext to influence how readers understand and interact with the legal content. Thom is currently a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC-funded PresentDead project, where he is investigating the representation of the dead and the reopening of graves in a range of early medieval texts. He is also interested in medievalism and gamification, and in addition to studying the depiction of the medieval past in tabletop games he is currently developing a tabletop role-play game based on the Lombard laws.