Steven Gunn. The English People at War in the Age of Henry VIII

Three decades of research on the reign of Henry VIII garnered for Steven Gunn the honor of delivering the James Ford Lectures in British History at the University of Oxford (2015). His monograph The English People at War in the Age of Henry VIII, derived from those discourses, bears the characteristics of the Ford lectures: originality, pithiness, and broad interpretation. Gunn dwells more upon people than monarch (though Bluff King Hal gets his due along the way). Society at large, not exclusively a court elite, receives emphasis, complemented by the book’s geographical reach, which ambitiously draws comparison with the wider world across the Channel. In terms of vision, conceptualization, themes, structure, and prose style, Gunn’s work is heir to the scholarship of the late Sir John Hale. Although not quite as enamored with aesthetics as Sir John, Gunn excels at piecing together a mosaic of colorful examples selected from across sixteenth-century Europe, which in turn illustrate his observations. This tapestry-like form of composition intent upon illuminating wider sociocultural dimensions is a common denominator shared in the work of Hale and Gunn. While Hale remains associated with Italy and Gunn with England, both demonstrate how national history is best understood by informed comparisons with other contemporary polities. Gunn contextualizes England, laying out the island culture’s idiosyncrasies as well as how Albion was typical of sixteenth-century Europe

Elite · Historiography · Honor · Interpretation (philosophy · Originality · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Style (visual arts · Anthropology · Classics · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies