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Religion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

Christopher Haigh
Christopher Haigh
Affiliation:
The Institute of Historical Research London
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Extract

‘OH, A paper on Geoffrey and religion’, sneered a friend: ‘that won't take you long!’ But it did: it took ages. For many of us, I am sure, thinking about Elton's work and influence has been an autobiographical experience, surveying our own intellectual development in relation to his. For the first time, I read right through the fat file of twenty-five years of letters from Geoffrey (and I will be quoting from some of them). I recalled the first visit of the man my little daughters called ‘The Teddy Bear’, and how he delighted them with a description of Disneyland. Elton in Disneyland is indeed a thought to conjure with! And I was reminded of all I owed to him. Although this conference has been dubbed ‘Oxford's revenge’ and Geoffrey's graduate students are not giving papers, many here stand in his debt: my own life as a historian was a constant epistolary debate with Geoffrey, and it has been a lengthy and nostalgic business trying to sort it out.

Type
The Eltonian Legacy
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 7 , December 1997 , pp. 281 - 299
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1997

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References

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22 Reform and Reformation, 171–2, 282–3, 293. Although Elton hinted from the start that Cromwell may have been genuinely reformist in religion (‘Decline and Fall’, Studies 1 (10), 212 (1951)Google Scholar; Tudors (1955), 151n), he had usually presented Cromwell as a man of ‘essentially secular temper’ (‘Thomas, Cromwell’, Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th edn (1975), II, 749Google Scholar; Tudors (1955), 127, 151). He seems to have been persuaded of Cromwell's religious commitment by DrOliver, John (Reform and Renewal, 26–8, 34)Google Scholar and Dickens, A. G., Thomas Cromwell and the English Reformation (1959)Google Scholar (cf. Elton's, review of Dickens, in The Listener, 31 12 1959, 1167–8Google Scholar; Thomas Cromwell (Bangor, 1991), 35–6, 41)Google Scholar. The new Cromwell was displayed in Reform and Reformation, 171–2, and ‘Redivivus’, Studies 3 (46), 377–8 (1977)Google Scholar, one of the very few examples of Elton recycling paragraphs verbatim.

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28 Reform and Reformation, 370–1.

29 Elton to Haigh, 22 February 1978. Elton did, however, concede ‘that I seem to be arguing backwards from success and offending my own canons of historical investigation’!

30 Reform and Reformation, 388–9.

31 See Elton's review of Williams, Penry, The Tudor Regime (Oxford, 1979)Google Scholar, in Times Literary Supplement, 15 February 1980, 183.

32 ‘Stop press: the latest news is that the Tudor revolution in government may be on the way back’ (‘Revisionism Reassessed: The Tudor Revolution a Generation Later’, Encounter, July–August 1986, 41n.) It was not. Hearing the Tudor revolution defended by two American colleagues ‘made me re-read my first book and I discovered that I had indeed been ready to surrender too soon!’ (Thomas Cromwell, 23n)

33 Reform and Reformation, 168.

34 Elton to Haigh, 16 September 1985.

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49 Tudors (1991), 481. Gf. Thomas Cromwell, 19.

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51 Cambridge Modern (1990), 15. For what follows, cf. Cambridge Modern (1958), 226–50, with Cambridge Modern (1990), 262–87.

52 Cambridge Modern (1958), 244, 250; Cambridge Modern (1990), 284, 287.

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59 Elton to Haigh, 12 January 1992.

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63 According to Plumb, , ‘Social and Economic Status’, 114Google Scholar, ‘certain’ and ‘probable’ Lollards were 8.5 per cent of taxpayers in eighteen mid-Thames parishes (his unreliable category of ‘possible’ Lollards would contribute another 6.5 per cent); Hope, , ‘Lollardy’, 4Google Scholar; Davies, R. G., ‘Lollardy and Locality’, supra, 6th ser., I, 191–212Google Scholar; MacCulloch, Diarmaid, ‘England’, in The Early Reformation in Europe, ed. Pettegree, Andrew (Cambridge, 1992), 172–3Google Scholar.

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70 Litzenberger, Caroline, ‘Local Responses to Changes in Religious Policy Based on Evidence from Gloucestershire Wills (1540–1580)’, Continuity and Change, 8 (1993), 417–39Google Scholar. As in Haigh, Christopher, English Reformations: Religion, Politics and Society under the Tudors (Oxford, 1993), 199–202Google Scholar, I remain cautious about the use of soul-bequests even when a ‘slow Reformation’ view is supported!

71 Dickens, , ‘Early Expansion’, 198–212Google Scholar. Much of the evidence cited there is, it seems to me, stretched well beyond its proper significance. Many modern historians have looser definitions of heresy than early Tudor bishops!

72 Rex, Richard, ‘The New Learning’, JEH, 44 (1993), 26–44Google Scholar; Cross, Claire, ‘Monasticism and Society in the Diocese of York, 1520–1540’, supra, 5th ser., XXXVIII (1988), 131–45Google Scholar; Whiting, Robert, The Blind Devotion of the People: Popular Religion and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 1989)Google Scholar; Hutton, Ronald, ‘The Local Impact of the Tudor Reformations’, in English Reformation Revised, 114–38Google Scholar; Haigh, , English Reformations, esp. 206–13, 244–7Google Scholar. For a recent example of crudity see Whiting, Robert, ‘Local Responses to the Henrician Reformation’, in Reign of Henry VIII, ed. MacCulloch, , 203–26Google Scholar.

73 Brigden, Susan, London and the Reformation (Oxford, 1989), esp. 398–422, 458–87Google Scholar; Duffy, Stripping.

74 Elton to Haigh, 18 November 1993. Cf. Elton's, similar comment that ‘Duffy justly rewrites a history too long dominated by the likes of john Bale and John Foxe, but he too overbalances – in the opposite direction’, JEH, 44 (1993), 721Google Scholar.