Geoffrey Elton

Sir Geoffrey Rudolph Elton

Early life

Ehrenberg (Elton) was born in Tübingen, Germany. His parents were the Jewish scholars Victor Ehrenberg and Eva Dorothea Sommer.^[1]: 79 In 1929, the Ehrenbergs moved to Prague, Czechoslovakia. In February 1939, the Ehrenbergs fled to Britain. Ehrenberg continued his education at Rydal School, a Methodist school in Wales, starting in 1939.^[1]: 79 After only two years, Ehrenberg was working as a teacher at Rydal and achieved the position of assistant master in mathematics, history and German.^[1]: 79

There, he took courses via correspondence at the

Under the supervision of J. E. Neale, Elton was awarded a PhD for his thesis "Thomas Cromwell, Aspects of his Administrative Work", in which Elton first developed the ideas that he was to pursue for the rest of his life.^[1]: 79 Elton naturalised as a British subject in September 1947.^[2]

Career

Elton taught at the

That change took place in the 1530s and must be regarded as part of a planned revolution. In essence, Elton was arguing that before Cromwell, the realm could be viewed as the King's private estate writ large and that most administration was done by the King's household servants rather than by separate state offices. Cromwell, Henry's chief minister from 1532 to 1540, introduced reforms into the administration that delineated the King's household from the state and created a modern bureaucratic government.[1]^: 80 Cromwell shone Tudor light into the darker corners of the Realm and radically altered the role of Parliament and the competence of Statute. Elton argued that by masterminding such reforms, Cromwell laid the foundations of England's future stability and success.^[5]

Influence

Elton elaborated on his ideas in his 1955 work, the bestselling England under the Tudors, which went through three editions, and his Wiles Lectures, which he published in 1973 as Reform and Renewal: Thomas Cromwell and the Common Weal.^[1]: 80

His thesis has been widely challenged by younger Tudor historians and can no longer be regarded as an orthodoxy, but his contribution to the debate has profoundly influenced subsequent discussion of Tudor government, particularly on the role of Cromwell.^[4]

Historical perspective

Elton was a staunch admirer of

Elton was a strong defender of the traditional methods of history and was appalled by postmodernism, saying, for example, that "we are fighting for the lives of innocent young people beset by devilish tempters who claim to offer higher forms of thought and deeper truths and insights – the intellectual equivalent of crack, in fact. Any acceptance of these theories – even the most gentle or modest bow in their direction – can prove fatal."^[7] Ex-pupils of his such as John Guy claim he did embody a "revisionist streak," reflected both in his work on Cromwell, his attack on John Neale's traditionalist account of Elizabeth I's parliaments, and in his support for a more contingent and political set of causes for the English Civil War of the mid-seventeenth century.

In 1990 Elton was one of the leading historians behind the setting up of the History Curriculum Association. The Association advocated a more knowledge-based history curriculum in schools. It expressed "profound disquiet" at the way history was being taught in the classroom and observed that the integrity of history was threatened. ^[8]

Elton saw the duty of historians as empirically gathering evidence and objectively analysing what the evidence has to say. As a traditionalist, he placed great emphasis on the role of individuals in history instead of abstract, impersonal forces. For instance, his 1963 book Reformation Europe is in large part concerned with the duel between Martin Luther and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Elton objected to cross-disciplinary efforts such as efforts to combine history with anthropology or sociology. He saw political history as the best and most important kind of history. Elton had no use for those who seek history to make myths, to create laws to explain the past, or to produce theories such as Marxism.

Family

Elton was the brother of the education researcher Lewis Elton and the uncle of Lewis's son, the comedian and writer Ben Elton. He married a fellow historian, Sheila Lambert, in 1952. Elton died of a heart attack at his home in Cambridge on 4 December 1994.^[9]

Works

He edited the second edition of the influential collection The Tudor Constitution. In it, he supported

• The Tudor Revolution in Government: Administrative Changes in the Reign of Henry VIII, Cambridge University Press, 1953.
• England Under The Tudors, London: Methuen, 1955, revised edition 1974, third edition 1991.
• ed. The New Cambridge Modern History: Volume 2, The Reformation, 1520-1559, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958; 2nd ed. 1990; excerpt
• Star Chamber Stories, London: Methuen, 1958.
• The Tudor Constitution: Documents and Commentary, Cambridge University Press, 1960; second edition, 1982.
• Henry VIII; An essay In Revision, London: Historical Association by Routledge & K. Paul, 1962.
• Reformation Europe, 1517-1559
  , New York: Harper & Row, 1963.
• The Practice of History, London: Fontana Press, 1967.
• Renaissance and Reformation, 1300–1640, edited by G.R. Elton, New York: Macmillan, 1968.
• The Body of the Whole Realm; Parliament and Representation in Medieval and Tudor England, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1969.
• England, 1200–1640, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969.
• Modern Historians on British History 1485-1945: A Critical Bibliography 1945-1969 (Methuen, 1969), annotated guide to 1000 history books on every major topic, plus book reviews and major scholarly articles. online
• Political History: Principles and Practice, London: Penguin Press/New York: Basic Books, 1970.
• Reform and Renewal: Thomas Cromwell and the Common Weal, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973;
  ISBN 0-521-09809-2
  .
• Policy and Police: the Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Thomas Cromwell, Cambridge University Press, 1973.
• Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government: Papers and Reviews, 1945–1972, 4 volumes, Cambridge University Press, 1974–1992.
• Annual bibliography of British and Irish history, Brighton, Sussex [England]:Harvester Press/Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press for the Royal Historical Society, 1976.
• Reform and Reformation: England 1509–1558, London: Arnold, 1977.
• English Law In The Sixteenth Century : Reform In An Age of Change, London: Selden Society, 1979.
• (co-written with Robert Fogel) Which Road to the Past? Two Views of History, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983
• F.W. Maitland, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985.
• The Parliament of England, 1559–1581, Cambridge University Press, 1986.
• Return to Essentials: Some Reflections on the Present State of Historical Study, Cambridge University Press, 1991.
• Thomas Cromwell, Headstart History Papers (ed. Judith Loades), Ipswich, 1991.
• The English, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.

See also

• A History of England

Notes

References

• Black, Jeremy "Elton, G.R." pages 356–357 from The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, Volume 1, Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999
• Bradshaw, Brenden "The Tudor Commonwealth: Reform and Revision" pages 455–476 from Historical Journal, Volume 22, Issue 2, 1979.
• Coleman, Christopher & Starkey, David (editors) Revolution Reassessed: Revisions in the History of Tudor Government & Administration, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
• Cross, Claire, Loades, David & Scarisbrick, J.J (editors) Law and Government under the Tudors: Essays Presented to Sir Geoffrey Elton, Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge on the Occasion of his Retirement Cambridge University Press, 1988.
• Guth, DeLloyd and McKenna, John (editors) Tudor Rule and Revolution: Essays for G.R Elton from his American Friends, Cambridge University Press, 1982.
• Guy, John "The Tudor Commonwealth: Revising Thomas Cromwell" pages 681–685 from Historical Journal Volume 23, Issue 3, 1980.
• Haigh, Christopher. "Religion" Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Vol. 7 (1997), pp. 281–299 in JSTOR deals with Elton
• Horowitz, M.R. "Which Road to the Past?" History Today, Volume 34, January 1984. pages 5–10
• Jenkins, Keith 'What is History?' From Carr to Elton to Rorty and White London: Routledge, 1995.
• Kenyon, John The History Men, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983.
• Kouri, E.I and Scott, Tom (editors) Politics and Society in Reformation Europe: Essays for Sir Geoffrey Elton on his Sixty-fifth Birthday, London: Macmillan Press, 1986.
• Schlatter, R. Recent Views on British History: Essays on Historical Writing since 1966, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1984.
• Slavin, Arthur J. "G.R. Elton and His Era: Thirty Years On." Albion 15#3 (1983): 207-229.
• Slavin, Arthur. "Telling the Story: G.R Elton and the Tudor Age" Sixteenth Century Journal (1990) 21#2 151–69.
• Slavin Arthur. "G.R. Elton: On Reformation and Revolution" History Teacher, Volume 23, 1990. pp 405–31 in JSTOR
• Transactions of the Royal Historical Society pages 177–336, Volume 7, 1997.
• Williams, Penry and Harriss, Gavin "A Revolution in Tudor History?" Past and Present, Volume 25, 1963. pages 3–58

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Geoffrey Elton.

• Defender of the Faith Geoffrey Elton and the Philosophy of History
• The Elton / Ehrenberg Papers
• Clare College obituary^{[permanent dead link]}
• Works by or about Geoffrey Elton at Internet Archive