Lecturers > John Morrill

Name
Prof. John Morrill

College
Selywn College

What is your field of history?
Early Modern History, especially British and Irish History 1500-1700.

How did you come to specialise in this area?
Brilliant teachers at school and Oxford University.

What sort of source material do you tend to use, and what are its strengths and weaknesses?
Manuscript collections in London, Edinburgh, Dublin and in provincial (local) record offices; printed books available on-line.

Which individuals, events or forces are especially important in your area of history?

• The working through of the Reformation process (wars of religion);
• Ethnic rather than social tensions amongst the peoples of Britain and Ireland;
• The problems arising from a single ruler trying to govern peoples and ‘states’ with separate and antagonist histories.

How has your field developed over the course of your career?
From Marxist, ‘whig’ and positivist approaches to anthropologically-informed, ethnically driven post-revisionist ones with a strong emphasis on the autonomous history of ideas.

Which areas of your field most urgently need further exploration?
The re-integration of political and social/cultural history.
Locating Developments in Britain and Ireland into their Continental European context.

What characterises good history?

• The historian’s passion for her/his subject and ability to communicate that passion;
• Clarity of exposition and analysis;
• Letting the history emerge from the sources, without the historian imposing his/her own ideas.

How did your understanding of history change during your time as a university student?
(In the 1960s) – the chance to engage at first hand with the raw material of the past – especially in my special subject and dissertation in the local history of the English civil war.

Where should somebody interested in your area of history go for further information?
The Oxford Illustrated History of Tudor and Stuart Britain (1996), ed. John Morrill!