Margaret Spufford

Spufford's next book, The World of Rural Dissenters, 1520-1725, was published in 1995.

Honor Margaret Spufford, (née Clark; 10 December 1935 – 6 March 2014), known as Margaret Spufford, was a British academic and historian.

Spufford was born Honor Margaret Clark in Cheshire on 10 December 1935.

Her parents, Mary (née Johnson) and Leslie Marshall Clark, were scientists.

Her older Sister Jean Grove was a glaciologist.

During her childhood, Margaret was educated at home by her mother.

During World War II, she lived in the Welsh borders to be safer from the threat of bombing.

In 1953, with the death of her father, the family moved to Cambridge.

There, she attended the sixth form of Cambridge High School for Girls, a grammar school.

In 1956, she matriculated into Newnham College, a women-only constituent college of the University of Cambridge.

Due to ill health she left university without completing her degree.

For all her adult life she suffered from early onset osteoporosis.

Although her first fracture was at the age of 17, the disease was not diagnosed until she was 31.

She later returned to university and studied in the Department for English Local History at the University of Leicester.

Spufford started publishing in 1960 and had already published two smaller books and ten articles before her most influential book Contrasting Communities was published in 1974.

It has been kept continuously in print ever since.

It changed the way that historians looked at local communities in early modern England.

She graduated in 1963 with a Master of Arts (MA) degree, having achieved a distinction.

Spufford began her academic career as a research fellow at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, in 1969.

She remained to complete post-graduate research and completed her Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree in 1970.

After three years at the University of Cambridge, she joined Keele University as an honorary lecturer and senior research fellow where she stayed for the rest of the 1970s.

In 1980, she returned to Newnham College, Cambridge as a fellow and college lecturer in history.

She was initially also a senior research associate at the History faculty.

Her next important book, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth Century England, was published in 1981 and it too has been kept continuously in print ever since It made people aware of the extent of literacy in rural England and what there was for rural readers to read.

As a consequence it brought to the attention of historians of English literature the immense quantity of ephemeral literature that underpinned the literary cannon.

She later extended her work on education and literacy from rural England to other parts of Europe.

Her next landmark book, The Great Reclothing of Rural England, came out in 1984.

It brought the attention of historians to the chapmen who toured rural England before the proliferation of shops, carrying with them the essential linens for clothing and a range of haberdashery and other small objects, including small books.

This has produced similar studies in other parts of Europe.

In 1985, she gave up her official Fellowship and was appointed a bye-fellow because her blood pressure became labile, which meant she could no longer commit herself to continue teaching undergraduates on a regular basis.

She continued teaching a large group of doctoral students, who called themselves 'The Spuffordians' and came to her from as far away as Canada, California, Australia and Japan because of her reputation, based on her publications.

She was Professor of Social and Local History at the University of Roehampton from 1994 to 2001.

After a year at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Wassenaar, she was appointed Research Professor in Social and Local History at the University of Roehampton in 1994.

Her Poverty Portrayed also appeared in 1995.

She retired in 2001.

She spent two terms in Japan, the second as guest of the Japan Academy, overseeing a cooperative research project on local history in Japan.

The resulting publication of a series of volumes, is currently (March 2015) in progress.

Her thesis was titled People, Land & Literacy in Cambridgeshire in the 16th & 17th Centuries.

She herself contributed an introductory chapter, a small book in itself, summarising her particular views on the importance of religion in the 16th and 17th centuries.

It was an attempt with a number of her research students to look at the continuity and social range of dissent in rural England from the Lollards to the early 18th century.