Geoffrey Rudolph Elton

Sir Geoffrey Rudolph Elton (born August 17, 1921 in Tübingen , † December 4, 1994 in Cambridge , England ; born Gottfried Rudolf Ehrenberg ) was a British historian of German origin. He is best known for his research on the House of Tudor and Thomas Cromwell, 1st Earl of Essex .

biography

Gottfried Rudolf Ehrenberg was born in 1921 as the son of the historians Victor Ehrenberg and Eva Dorothea Sommer . When the father was appointed to the German University in 1929 , the family moved to Prague . Shortly before the German troops marched in, the entire family fled to Great Britain in February 1939. There Ehrenberg went to the Rydal School in Wales . After only two years he got a job as a teacher and assistant in the fields of mathematics , history and German .

He also took correspondence courses at the University of London . There he graduated as an ancient historian in 1943 and joined the British Army in the same year . As a soldier in the 8th Army , he was stationed in Italy from 1944 to 1946 . During this time he changed his name from Gottfried Ehrenberg to the anglicized form Geoffrey Elton. After returning to England, he began his doctorate in early modern history at the University of London. In 1947 he took British citizenship , in 1949 he received his Philosophiae Doctor ( Ph. D. ).

From 1949 taught Elton at the University of Glasgow and later at Clare College of Cambridge University . There he headed the Faculty of Modern History as Regius Professor of Modern History from 1983 to 1988. From 1972 to 1976 he was President of the Royal Historical Society , and from 1981 to 1990 he also worked for the British Academy . In 1975 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Since 1952 he was married to the historian Sheila Lambert. In 1986 he was knighted. He was the uncle of the writer Ben Elton .

plant

Elton initially concentrated on the life and work of Henry VIII , but also worked through parliament in the epoch of Elizabeth I. Over time, he expanded his field of work to the entire Tudor era and was soon also considered an expert in the field of the English Reformation .

Elton became famous when, in his 1953 book The Tudor Revolution in Government, he named Thomas Cromwell as the founder of modern, bureaucratic governance who had ended the medieval way of governance. Before Cromwell, monarchy and monarch were inseparably united and the kingdom was the private property of the king. The administration of office was then in the hands of the court and not divided into different ministries. In the book England Under The Tudors , published in 1955, he developed these theses on the basis of a comprehensive analysis of the sources. It became the best-selling book on the House of Tudor in England. The work The Tudor Constitution , published in 1960, is considered to be one of the standard works on the time of the Tudors. Elton supports John Aylmer's thesis that the constitution under the Tudors mirrors Sparta's mixed constitution .

Elton was considered a conservative (he was a follower of Margaret Thatcher ), both in politics and in applied scientific methods. He was a strong critic of Marxist historians. Above all, he turned against the thesis that the English Civil War was triggered by socio-economic changes. Rather, it was triggered by the weak regiment of the House of Stuart .

Elton rejected postmodernism and was considered an important representative of traditional methods. In the mid-1960s, he was the focus of a dispute among British historians. In doing so, Elton defended traditional approaches to historical science, as formulated by Leopold von Ranke in the 19th century, against the views of Edward Hallett Carr . Elton's The Practice of History is the answer to Carr's What is History? .

Works

• Annual bibliography of British and Irish history , Brighton, Sussex [England]: Harvester Press; Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press for the Royal Historical Society, 1976.
• 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
• England Under The Tudors. London: Methuen, 1955, revised edition 1974.
• The English. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.
• English law in the sixteenth century: reform in an age of change. London: Seldon Society, 1979
• FW Maitland. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985.
• Henry VIII. An essay in revision. London: Historical Association by Routledge & K. Paul, 1962.
• Modern Historians on British History, 1485-1945. A Critical Bibliography. London, Methuen, 1970.
• The Parliament of England, 1559-1581. Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
• Policy and Police: the Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Thomas Cromwell , Cambridge University Press, 1973.
• Political History: Principles and Practice , London: Penguin Press, 1970.
• The Practice of History. London: Fontana Press, 1967.
• The Reformation , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958.
• Reformation Europe, 1517-1559. New York: Harper & Row, 1963.
• Reform and Reformation: England 1509-1558 , London: Arnold, 1977.
• Reform and Renewal: Thomas Cromwell and the Common Weal , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1973. ISBN 0-521-20054-7
• Renaissance and Reformation, 1300-1640 , edited by GR Elton New York: Macmillan 1968.
• Return to Essentials: Some Reflections on the Present State of Historical Study , Cambridge University Press, 1991.
• Star Chamber Stories. London: Methuen, 1958.
• Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government: Papers and Reviews, 1946-1972 , 4 volumes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974-1992.
• The Tudor Constitution: Documents and Commentary , Cambridge University Press, 1960.
• The Tudor Revolution in Government: Administrative Changes in the Reign of Henry VIII , Cambridge University Press, 1953.
• Which Road to the Past? Two Views of History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983 (written in collaboration with Robert Fogel )

literature

• Werner Röder; Herbert A. Strauss (Ed.): International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933–1945 . Volume 2.1. Munich: Saur 1983. ISBN 3-598-10089-2 , pp. 261f.
• Patrick Collinson: Geoffrey Rudolph Elton, 1921–1994 . In: Proceedings of the British Academy . tape 94 , 1997, pp. 429-455 ( thebritishacademy.ac.uk [PDF]).

Web links

• Literature by and about Geoffrey Rudolph Elton in the catalog of the German National Library
• Defender of the Faith Geoffrey Elton and the Philosophy of History
• The Elton / Ehrenberg Papers