Edward A. Thompson

Edward Arthur Thompson (born May 22, 1914 in Waterford , Ireland , † January 1, 1994 in Nottingham ) was an ancient historian from Ireland .

Life

Thompson's ancestors were of Irish Scottish descent. He studied at Trinity College in Dublin , where he also taught from 1939 to 1941. In 1941 he moved to Swansea , 1945 to London and 1948 to the University of Nottingham , where he taught ancient history until his retirement in 1979.

Thompson's research focus was late antiquity and, above all, the history of the Great Migration . His work in this field was considered fundamental for a long time and some of them are still of some importance today. Thompson, who dealt with late antiquity long before other Anglo-American historians, wrote works on Ammianus Marcellinus , Attila , the Goths in Gaul and Spain, and the end of the Western Roman Empire . Thompson, who always saw himself as a political person, had been a Marxist since the 1940s , but resigned from the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1956 in protest against the invasion of Soviet and allied troops in Hungary . The theory of historical materialism influenced his work in the sense that Thompson considered social and economic aspects more than other researchers and paid great attention to social changes, for example in the context of the Great Migration.

As the first professor at Nottingham University, he was a Fellow of the British Academy since 1964 . In the same year he married his second wife Hazel Casken, with whom he had a daughter; he had been divorced in 1958 from his first wife, Thelma Phelps, with whom he had two children. Thompson was also a member and chairman of the Editorial Committee of Nottingham Medieval Studies , for which he wrote several articles. He also worked on the important Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire , for which he mainly wrote articles about Germanic personalities.

Fonts (selection)

• The historical work of Ammianus Marcellinus. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1947.
• A History of Attila and the Huns. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1948 (several reprints; in Italian: Storia di Attila e degli Unni (= Le piccole storie illustrate. Vol. 121, ZDB -ID 2489827-2 ). Sansoni, Florence 1963; Revised as: The Huns. Blackwell , Oxford et al. 1996, ISBN 0-631-15899-5 ).
• The Early Germans. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1965.
• The Goths in Spain. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1969 (Special edition for Sandpiper Books. Clarendon Press Oxford 2000, ISBN 0-19-814271-4 ).
• Romans and Barbarians. The Decline of the Western Empire. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison WI 1982, ISBN 0-299-08700-X (Reprinted ibid. 2002, ISBN 0-299-08704-2 ).
• Who was Saint Patrick? Boydell Press, Woodbridge 1985, ISBN 0-85115-428-X .

literature

• Robert A. Markus: Thompson, Edward Arthur, 1914–1994. In: Proceedings of the British Academy. Vol. 111, 2001, ISSN  0068-1202 , pp. 679-693 ( digitized version ).

Web links

• Literature by and about Edward A. Thompson in the WorldCat bibliographic database