Christopher haigh biography

Christopher Haigh is a.
About the Author Christopher Haigh is Tutor in Modern History at Christ Church, Oxford and Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Oxford.
Christopher Haigh is a British historian specialising in religion and politics around the English Reformation.

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Elizabeth I

March 19, 2011

This is one of the shortest of the various books I have read about Elizabeth I, and also one of the best. Haigh eschews the usual chronology of her life and reign and instead concentrates on her relations with the various centres of power: the church, the nobility, the Council, her own court, parliament, the military, and the people, dealing with each separately over the 44 years from late 1558 to early 1603.

I learned a lot from this revisionist account. The standard picture of Elizabeth as heroine of Protestantism doesn't sit well with her recorded restraint of the puritans, her refusal to persecute the Catholics to the extent that her Protestant advisers wanted, and indeed her flirtations with potential Catholic husbands. Indeed, Haigh points out convincingly that the Council was much more Protestant than the Queen, to the point of orchestrating demonstrations of popular and political enthusiasm for Protestantism to try and keep her in line; Elizabeth found it very difficult to make a firm choice - witness her vacillation over execcuting Mary Queen

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Elizabeth I by Christopher Haigh

Elizabeth I by Christopher Haigh is the second book I read by him, first being English Reformations (see review linked at the end of the post). He says that this book is not a biography as it deals with different aspects of her reign, but I’ve included it in the biographies as it seems easier to find and it was also how the Tutor categorized it.

I mentioned that Haigh is analysing Elizabeth’s reign on topics, starting with the succession (as in hers), the church, the nobility, the council, the court, the parliament, the military, and the people. He mentions at the end of the book that is ‘almost impossible to write a balanced study of Elizabeth I. The historiographical tradition is so laudatory that it is hard to avoid either floating with the current of applauding opinion or creating an unseemly splash by swimming too energetically agaist it’. He is not one of those who applaud Elizabeth and this is why his work is so important. In other books, the less than savoury details (including a book I finished recently) are bru

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Christopher Haigh

British historian

Christopher Haigh is a British historian specialising in religion and politics around the English Reformation. Until his retirement in 2009, he was Student and Tutor in Modern History at Christ Church, Oxford and University Lecturer at Oxford University. He was educated at Churchill College, Cambridge and the University of Manchester. Haigh was a very influential revisionist in Tudor historiography and on the English Reformation. Haigh's writings mostly demonstrated that, contrary to orthodox understandings of the English Reformation, religious reform was extremely complex and varied considerably at a parish level.^[1] Haigh has also been noted for his work in diminishing the significance attributed to anticlericalism prior to 1530.^[2]^[3] His revisionism formed part of a broader wave in Tudor historiography with other historians such as Eamon Duffy.

Works

Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire, Cambridge University Press, 1975
The English Reformation Revised, Cambridge University Press,