DAVID CRESSY
George III Professor of British History and Humanities Distinguished Professor Emeritus, The Ohio State University
Research Professor in Arts and Humanities, Claremont Graduate University
Education/Degrees:
University of Cambridge (Clare College):
B.A., 1967; M.A., 1971; Ph.D., 1973; Litt. D., 2000
Academic Career:
Research Professor in Arts and Humanities, Claremont Graduate University 2014-
George III Professor of British History, Ohio State University, 2010, emeritus 2012-
Humanities Distinguished Professor of History, Ohio State University, 2007, emeritus 2012-
Professor of History, Ohio State University, 1998 – 2012
Director, West European Studies Program, Ohio State University, 1998-2000
Associate to Full Professor, California State University, Long Beach, 1984-98
Visiting Associate Professor, The Claremont Colleges, 1980-84
Instructor to Assistant Professor, Pitzer College, Claremont, 1970-80
Tutor, Graduate Institute in Liberal Education, St John’s College (Santa Fe and Annapolis), 1973-84
Tutorial Supervisor, Clare, Magdalene and Sidney Sussex Colleges, Cambridge 1968-70
Fellowships and Awards:
Lord Burghley Visiting Fellow, St John’s College, Cambridge, 2022
Fowler Hamilton Visiting Fellow, Christ Church, Oxford, 2017
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 2011-12
All Souls College, Oxford, Visiting Fellow, 2008
Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship, Liguria Study Center, Italy, 2008, 2014
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 2004-05
Huntington Library, Fletcher Jones Distinguished Fellowship, 2003-04
Rockefeller Foundation, Bellagio Residency, Italy, 2003
University of Auckland Foundation Distinguished Visitor, 2003 and 2004
Churchill College, Cambridge, Overseas Fellow, 2000-
La Trobe University, Melbourne, Rio Tinto Distinguished Visiting Fellow, 1999
Trinity College, University of Melbourne, Scholar in Residence, 1999
Huntington Library, Connell Foundation Fellow, 1997
University of Adelaide, Center for British Studies, Visiting Fellow, 1996-97
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 1996
UCLA, Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Associate, 1996-2001
British Academy/Huntington Library travel and research grant, 1993
Phi Beta Kappa University Scholar, CSULB, 1993
St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, Visiting Fellow, 1991
Magdalen College, Oxford, Visiting Fellow, 1990-91
Huntington Library, Mellon Fellow, 1990
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 1990
American Philosophical Society research grant, 1990
Australian National University, Humanities Research Centre, Visiting Fellow, 1988
A.C.L.S. Grant in Aid of Research, 1984
Royal Historical Society, elected Fellow, 1981 –
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 1981
American Antiquarian Society, Daniels Fellowship, 1980
Clare Hall, Cambridge, Visiting Associate, 1978 (life member)
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, 1977-78
Teaching Areas:
British and European History; Social and Cultural History; Early Modern England; Tudor and Stuart Britain; the English Revolution; Reformation, Religion and Society; Western Civilization; Atlantic World. (Teaching Awards, 1985-88, 1992-3, 1996)
Research Areas:
Citizenship and public discourse in early modern England; Cultural stress and religious contest in the reign of Charles I; Seditious and treasonable speech from medieval to modern Britain; Gypsies and marginal people in English and European history; Maritime history, 1550-1750.
Professional Service:
Director, Folger Institute Faculty Seminar on “Rogues and Gypsies,” 2014
Organizer, Huntington Library Conference on “The Reign of Charles I,” 2009
Director, N.E.H. Institute for College and University Teachers on “Cultural Stress from Reformation to Revolution,” Folger Institute, Folger Shakespeare Library, 2003
N.E.H. site reviewer, National Humanities Center, 2003
President, Pacific Coast Conferences on British Studies, 1996-98
Director, N.E.H. Institutes for College and University Teachers on “Society and Religion in Early Modern England,” Claremont Graduate School, 1993 and 1996
Founding convener, The Huntington Library British History Seminar, 1984-94
Publications (Books):
Shipwrecks and the Bounty of the Sea (Oxford University Press: Oxford and New York, 2022), xii + 302 pp.
England’s Islands in a Sea of Troubles (Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2020), xii + 410 pp.
Gypsies: An English History (Oxford University Press: Oxford and New York, 2018), xv + 411pp. (plus paperback 2020)
Charles I and the People of England (Oxford University Press: Oxford and New York, 2015), x + 447 pp. (plus paperback 2018)
Saltpeter, the Mother of Gunpowder (Oxford University Press: Oxford and New York, 2013) xii + 237 pp.
Dangerous Talk: Scandalous, Seditious and Treasonable Speech in Pre-Modern England (Oxford University Press: Oxford and New York, 2010) xiv + 374 pp. (plus paperback 2012)
England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution, 1640-1642 (Oxford University Press: Oxford and New York, 2006, paperback 2008) xiv + 446 pp.
Gunpowder Plots (with Brenda Buchanan, David Cannadine, Justin Champion, Pauline Croft, Antonia Fraser, and Mike Jay. Penguin: London, 2005) ix + 188 pp.
Society and Culture in Early Modern England (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2003) xii + 344 pp.
Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England: Tales of Discord and Dissension (Oxford University Press: Oxford and New York, 2000); paperback edition republished as Agnes Bowker’s Cat: Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford University Press, 2001) xi + 351 pp.
Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion and the Life Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford U. Press: Oxford and New York, 1997, paperback 1999) xv + 641 pp. Winner of the 1998 John Ben Snow Prize of the North American Conference on British Studies, and the 1999 Philip Schaff Prize of the American Society for Church History.
Religion and Society in Early Modern England: A Sourcebook (with Lori Anne Ferrell, Routledge: London and New York, 1996; revised and expanded edn., 2005) x + 254 pp.
Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (Weidenfeld & Nicolson: London; University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989; paperback, Sutton Publishers, 2004) xiv + 271 pp.
Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge and New York, 1987; hard cover and paperback, reissued 2007) xiii + 324 pp.
Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge and New York, 1980; paperback 2006) x + 246 pp.
Education in Tudor and Stuart England (Edward Arnold: London, 1975. and St Martin’s Press: New York, 1975), ix + 141 pp.
Select Articles and Essays:
‘Literacy, Social Structure, and Local Social Dramas’, Local Population Studies, 2021.
‘The Liberty and the London: Fishing for Guns, 1650-1665’, Mariner’s Mirror, 2021.
‘Warfare’, in Lia Markey, ed. Renaissance Invention: Stradanus’s Nova Reperta (Northwestern University Press: Chicago, 2020).
‘Gypsy Voices in the Early Modern Records of English Judicial Courts’, Frühneuzent Info, 2019.
‘Puritan Martyrs in Island Prisons’, Journal of British Studies, 2018.
‘Marginal People in a Stressful Culture: Gypsies and “Counterfeit Egyptians” in Margaret Spufford’s England’, in Trevor Dean, Glyn Parry, and Edward Valance (eds.), Faith, Place, and People in Early Modern England (Boydell: Woodbridge, 2018).
‘Charles I’s Most Loyal Subject: Thomas Harrison and the Sin of Uzzah’, Historical Research, 2018.
“Trouble with Gypsies in Early Modern England,” Historical Journal, 2016.
‘Evangelical Ethnographers and English Gypsies,” Romani Studies, 2016.
“The Death of a Vice-Chancellor: Cambridge 1632,” History of Universities, 2012.
“Demotic Voices and Popular Complaint in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England,” Journal of Early Modern Studies, 2012.
“Saltpetre, State Security, and Vexation in Early Modern England,” Past and Present, 2011 (Winner of the PCCBS prize for best article, 2013).
“Early Modern Space Travel and the English Man in the Moon,” American Historical Review, 2006. (reprinted in J. A. Hayden, ed. Literature in the Age of Celestial Discovery (Palgrave: New York, 2016).
“Remembrancers of the Revolution: Histories and Historiographies of the 1640s,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 2005 (reprinted in Paulina Kewes, ed., The Uses of History in Early Modern England (University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2006).
“Book Burning in Tudor and Stuart England,” Sixteenth Century Journal, 2005.
“Lamentable, Strange, and Wonderful: Headless Monsters in the English Revolution,” in Monstrous Bodies/ Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe, ed. Laura Lunger Knoppers and Joan B. Landes (Cornell University Press: Ithaca, 2004).
“Revolutionary England, 1640-1642,” Past and Present, 2003.
“God’s Time, Rome’s Time, and the Calendar of the English Protestant Regime,” Viator. Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2003.
“The Protestation Protested, 1641 and 1642,” Historical Journal, 2002
“Conflict, consensus and the willingness to wink: the erosion of community in Charles I’s England,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 2000.
“Different kinds of speaking: symbolic violence and secular iconoclasm in early modern England,” in Muriel McClendon, Joseph Ward and Michael MacDonald (eds.), Protestant Identities: Religion, Society and Self-Fashioning in Post-Reformation England (Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1999).
“Gender trouble and cross-dressing in Early Modern England,” Journal of British Studies, 1996
“Private lives, public performance, and rites of passage,” in Adele Seeff and Betty Travitsky (eds.) Attending to Women in Early Modern England (Associated Universities Press, 1994).
“National memory in early modern England,” in John Gillis (ed.), Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton University Press, 1994).
“De la Fiction dans les Archives? Ou le Monstre de 1569,” Annales, E.S.C., 1993.
“Purification, thanksgiving, and the churching of women in post-reformation England,” Past and Present, 1993 (Winner of the 1994 NACBS Love Prize for best article)
“Literacy in context: meaning and measurement in early modern England,” in John Brewer and Roy Porter (eds.), Consumption and the World of Goods (Routledge, New York, 1993)
“The fifth of November remembered,” in Roy Porter (ed.), Myths of the English (Polity Press: Oxford, 1992, paperback 1993; revised and reprinted in Bonfire Night (Penguin, 2005).
“Foucault, Stone, Shakespeare, and Social History,” English Literary Renaissance, 1991.
“The Protestant calendar and the vocabulary of celebration in early modern England,” Journal of British Studies, 1990.
“Death and the social order: the funerary preferences of Elizabethan gentlemen,” Continuity and Change, 1989.
“A drudgery of schoolmasters: the teaching profession in seventeenth century England,” in W. R. Prest (ed.) The Professions in Early Modern England (Croom Helm, New York, 1987)
“Kinship and kin interaction in early modern England,” Past and Present, 1986.
“Books as totems in seventeenth century England and New England,” Journal of Library History (1986) reprinted in Donald G. Davis, Jr. (ed.) Libraries, Books, and Culture (University of Texas, Austin, 1986).
“The vast and furious ocean: the passage to Puritan New England,” New England Quarterly, 1985.
“The seasonality of marriage in Old and New England,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 1985 (reprinted in R. I. Rotberg (ed.), Population History and the Family (MIT Press, 2001).
“A new letter from America: Newfoundland in 1610,” Mariner’s Mirror, 1986.
“The environment for literacy: accomplishment and context in seventeenth century England and New England,” in Daniel P. Resnick (ed.) Literacy in Historical Perspective (Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 1983).
“Apollo and Solomon at the court of Henry VIII” History Today, 1982.
“Binding the Nation: the Association of 1584 and 1696,” in D. Guth and J. McKenna (eds.) Tudor Rule and Revolution: Essays for G.R. Elton (Cambridge University Press, 1982).
“Holbein and the Court of Henry VIII,” J. Paul Getty Museum exhibition brochure and film script, 1982.
“Francis Bacon and the advancement of schooling,” History of European Ideas, 1981.
“The mystery of Francis Drake’s California voyage,” History Today, 1981.
“Vow, covenant and protestation: sources for the history of population and literacy,” The Local Historian, 1980; reprinted in British Isles Family History Newsletter, 1998.
“School and college admission ages in seventeenth century England,” History of Education, 1979 (and debate with Lawrence Stone) .
“Social status and literacy in north-east England 1560- 1630″,” Local Population Studies, 1978.
“Levels of illiteracy in England 1530-1730,” The Historical Journal, 1977 (reprinted in Harvey Graff (ed.) Literacy and Social Development in the West, Cambridge, 1982.
“Literacy in seventeenth century England: more evidence,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 1977 (and debate with Lawrence Stone, 1978).
“Educational opportunity in Tudor and Stuart England,” History of Education Quarterly, 1976.
“Describing the social order of Elizabethan and Stuart England,” Literature and History, 1976.
“Literacy in pre-industrial England,” Societas, 1974.
“Occupations, migration and literacy in east London, 1580- 1640,” Local Population Studies, 1970.
“The social composition of Caius College, Cambridge, 1580-1640,” Past and Present, 1970.