Eric Ives

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Eric William Ives (born July 12, 1931 in Romford , Essex , † September 25, 2012 ) was a British historian and author focusing on the Tudor period . His best-known works are the biographies The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (2004) and Lady Jane Gray : A Tudor Mystery (2009), in which he challenged traditional theories and brought new knowledge to light. In 2001 he was awarded the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II .

Life

Youth and education

Eric Ives' family was part of the Plymouth Brethren . His father himself had to leave school at the age of 13 and worked his way up to a responsible position within a company from a humble background. He therefore wanted to give his two sons a good education. Eric Ives developed a keen interest in history early on. After graduating from Brentwood School, he began studying history at Queen Mary College , from which he graduated with honors. He then completed a postgraduate course and obtained the degree of Ph.D. in 1955. with his work Some aspects of the legal profession in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries . It would later form the basis for his book The Common Lawyers of Pre-Reformation England , published in 1983 . He then served from 1955 to 1957 as a flight lieutenant in the Royal Air Force .

Career

In 1957 Ives got a post as a research fellow with the History of Parliament Trust and a year later he became a Fellow of the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham at Stratford-upon-Avon , where he stayed until 1961. In 1962 he got a position at the University of Liverpool , where he lectured in modern history for seven years . It was during this time that his interest in Anne Boleyn began when he was doing research on her alleged lover, William Brereton , to investigate legal bases in England in the 15th and 16th centuries.

In 1969 Ives finally moved to Birmingham and returned to the University of Birmingham, where he would stay until he retired in 1997. Here he deepened his studies on William Brereton and published his first work in 1976, Letters & Accounts of William Brereton . He also researched various interest groups at the court of King Henry VIII. He published his findings in 1979 under the title Faction in Tudor England . Both books formed the basis for his seminal biography Anne Boleyn , which appeared in 1986. In it Ives represented the thesis that it was not Heinrich, but his minister Thomas Cromwell, who was responsible for Anne's fall and for this purpose temporarily allied against her with the conservative nobility. With the biography and his new theories, Ives caused an uproar among his colleagues, u. a. the historians Retha Warnicke and George W. Bernard, which led to a series of discussions and new hypotheses about Anne Boleyn's case.

In 1987 he received a professorship for English history and the office of Dean of the Faculty of Arts , which he held until 1989. During this time he fundamentally reformed the Barber Institute of Fine Arts. He was then appointed as a service chancellor until 1993 and used the office to support the university's first contacts with East Asia . According to his own account, university politics helped him understand how the royal court had functioned under the Tudors. From 1994 until his retirement in 1997 he held the position of head of the Faculty of Modern History, where he made a great contribution to his colleagues and students through original seminars, including on William Shakespeare , and through his demanding but easily understandable lectures popularized.

Ives remained active after his retirement. From 1985 to 2003 he remained chairman of the school governors of the Warwick School and, together with Diane K. Drummond and Leonard Schwarz, wrote a study on Birmingham University, which was published in 2000 under the title The First Civic University: Birmingham, 1880-1980 - An Introductory History appeared. In 2004 Ives' work on Anne Boleyn was reprinted under the title The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn: The Most Happy , this time with new information that Ives had obtained from David Starkey's analysis of Heinrich's inventory . These showed, Ives said, how difficult, even impossible, it was for the queen to have privacy and how unlikely it was that she had actually committed adultery.

In 2009 he published his second, major biography, Lady Jane Gray : A Tudor Mystery . In it he argued that not, as traditionally believed, John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland, the young King Edward VI. had moved to change the line of succession in favor of Jane Gray, but that Eduard acted arbitrarily to exclude his two bastardized half-sisters Maria and Elisabeth from the line of succession. Ives' last book, The Reformation Experience: Living Through the Turbulent 16th Century , was published one month before his death . Unlike colleagues who lamented the decline of the unified Catholic culture, Ives pointed out the merits of the Reformation, including a. to the emergence of the English-language literary culture and the better education of the lower class, who did not understand Latin, through the English-language Bible.

Private life

In 1961 Ives married the teacher Ruth Denham, who tried out his manuscripts and translated foreign language documents for him. The marriage produced two children, Susan and John. After the wedding, Ives turned to the Methodist Church of Great Britain , but eventually became a Baptist . Ives himself was a passionate lay preacher and his faith inspired his book God in History . Both spouses were active members of Castle Hill Baptist Church in Warwick from 1982 . In 2001, Eric Ives was awarded the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to the University of Birmingham and English history . His wife Ruth died in 2004. Eric Ives himself died on September 25, 2012 of complications from a stroke.

Works

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Professor Eric Ives . Telegraph, October 22, 2012, accessed October 6, 2016
  2. ↑ a b c d Richard Cust: Eric Ives obituary . The Guardian, October 30, 2013, accessed October 8, 2016
personal data
SURNAME Ives, Eric
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ives, Eric William (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British historian and author focusing on the Tudor period
DATE OF BIRTH July 12, 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH Romford , Essex
DATE OF DEATH September 25, 2012