General sixteenth century

Since becoming editor of the Oxford DNB in January 2000 I've always had a soft spot for the DNB's first editor, Leslie Stephen. For all our paraphernalia of word-processors, databases, e-mails and FAXes, I've realized when reading his correspondence how frequently the same editorial problems reappear. Our working lives have been transformed by them in many respects for the better, and have made it much easier to produce the Dictionary, but such devices haven't changed the essentials. Of these there are four: to choose the right biographical subjects; to choose the right people to write about them; to ensure that the article which results is clear, interesting, concise and the right length; and to negotiate all this without sacrificing such goodwill as is compatible with the first three. I have often sympathized with Stephen in his difficulties, and I admire what he achieved, for it seems to me that he got the DNB on the right pragmatic and inclusive yet scholarly footing.

I have been thinking a lot about this recently because at the Guild Church of St Andrew, near Chancery Lane station in London, at 5.30 on Thursday 6 November I will be giving the latest annual lecture in the series commemorating my predecessor, Colin Matthew. I have chosen to call it '"A slice of their lives". Editing the DNB, 1882-1999'; the lecture is open to all, and readers of this message (and anyone else, for that matter) will be welcome there. Colin shared my respect for Stephen, for he chose to build what is now the Oxford DNB on Stephen's foundations, and included in the new dictionary all the subjects in the old. Furthermore, he aimed to follow Stephen's liberal and inclusive policy when selecting new subjects - a policy which was eroded somewhat in the DNB 's early-twentieth-century chronological supplements. The Oxford DNB also follows its predecessor in espousing a judiciously pragmatic scholarship. Stephen marshalled much scholarship in the DNB, which should perhaps now be seen as a training-ground for the new academic professionalism, in the study of both history and literature.

The scholarship of the old dictionary was on full display in its seventeenth-century articles, with big articles from Samuel Rawson Gardiner and Sir Charles Firth, but it was also evident in the Tudor period, the penultimate among the Oxford DNB's research areas in the extended tour I've been conducting in these messages during the past year or so (the last stop in the tour will be the medieval area next month). We define the Tudor area as including roughly those born after 1460 and dying before about 1620. Here the DNB benefited from such major historians as Canon Richard Watson Dixon, then a leading expert on the history of the reformation church, and James Gairdner, co-editor of the monumental Letters and papers, foreign and domestic, of the reign of Henry VIII (1862-1932), with the young A.F. Pollard cutting his teeth as an assistant editor. Gairdner had a phenomenal command of source material, and Pollard too had wide-ranging knowledge of available printed sources; many of the DNB's Tudor articles therefore displayed a new scope and depth. The second editor of the Dictionary Sidney Lee wrote several elegant major articles, including those on Edward VI, Mary I and Sir Francis Walsingham. Many of the DNB's Irish articles were produced by that fine historian Robert Dunlop, and drew upon information subsequently destroyed during the Irish Civil War. With some 2,100 entries, coverage of the Tudors, excluding artistic, business, literary, medical and scientific figures, accounted for about eight per cent of the DNB 's entire content. For the Tudor period the Oxford DNB has been in good hands. Work began on it in 1998 with Dr Felicity Heal as consultant editor. Dr Henry Summerson, who was among the Oxford DNB's first intake of five research editors in 1993, has been research editor for the medieval area ever since, but his talents extend to the Tudor period as well: more on him next month. In 1998 Dr John Cooper, whose Propaganda and the Tudor State. Political Culture in the West Country was published by OUP this year, became research editor for the Tudor period, leaving us in 2001. He was replaced by Dr Alan Bryson, who had just completed his doctoral research at St Andrews on mid-Tudor clienteles, court-county relations and the social dynamic of high politics. To Alan I owe a wealth of material for this message - the latest among his many and diverse services to the Dictionary. From our academic powerhouse at 37a St Giles', the Tudor period also received valuable help from research editors in other areas: Drs Michael Bevan, Matthew Kilburn, Vivienne Larminie, Anita McConnell, Annette Peach and Deborah Graham.

The old dictionary's big Tudor articles are most valuable today for what they say about late-Victorian scholarly interests. For they saw the Tudor period as leading up to their present in three important respects: as creating the English protestant establishment ('Bloody Mary' was not at all to their taste), as pioneering the empire overseas with seadogs such Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Ralegh, and as carrying the parliamentary constitution forward to what was seen as its Victorian apogee. They failed to see how selectively moralistic were Tudor politics. Gairdner strikingly displays this in his DNB article on Anne Boleyn, which swallows uncritically the fabricated evidence used to convict her of treason in 1536 concerning her witchcraft, multiple adultery and incest with her brother George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford. Because Henry VIII could do no wrong, Anne Boleyn had to be convicted and executed. In this respect, Gairdner fails to engage with the complexities and ambiguities of the age.

In at least four respects our Tudor articles have greatly improved on what went before. First, we are more objective. The 'losers' of the Reformation period and its aftermath in the old historiography came out badly from the DNB: Catholic figures like Sir Thomas More, John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, Thomas Wriothesley, first earl of Southampton, and Edmund Campion. For the years following the Elizabethan settlement the DNB seemed to assume that the Church of England represented the mainstream, to which 'puritans' were necessarily hostile, whereas no such mainstream yet existed. We also nowadays appreciate more fully the difficulties faced by leading royal servants like Cardinal Thomas Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell, earl of Essex. Our interpretation of Cromwell has transformed, given Sir Geoffrey Elton's Tudor revolution in government and its aftermath. And the growth of 'court studies' has ensured more attention for the personal lives of the monarchs, their wants and needs, foibles, habits and tastes. What is also clearer today is that in the Tudor period England, Scotland and Ireland were still very much engaged with continental Europe in a dense network of trade, international finance, diplomacy, warfare and in the exchange of new technologies and ideas. The Atlantic world and maritime empire is now regarded as more of a seventeenth-century phenomenon.

Our outlook has become less metropolitan than the DNB 's. We have articles by a wide range of scholars working on Irish history and literature and making much use of manuscripts in English and Gaelic, so that the Oxford DNB's perspective on the Tudor conquest of Ireland and the early plantations from 1534 to 1603 is more balanced and subtler. Many of the DNB 's somewhat colourless articles on Scots have been revived wonderfully through modern research. Scotland suffered from the Victorian obsession with romanticising the past, particularly in the light of Sir Walter Scott. Mary queen of Scots suffered as a result of this. Catholic Scotland, like Catholic Ireland, is not now marginalised, while the distinctive societies in different regions receive due weight - above all, the Highlands and Islands, the Channel Isles and the Isle of Man. Even within England our outlook is less centralized. For courtiers and administrators, we give due attention to subjects' local interests and estates, and (in the case of bishops) to diocesan management. Our coverage of the English localities has been expanded through 27 early-modern family articles. All these factors have produced more complex, rounded lives, with space allocated to such topics as political and religious patronage, cultural power, estate management and commercial enterprise. Here too, new research and a desire to get away from nineteenth-century protestant hagiography, along with greater academic rigour, produce finer, truer accounts of lives. Who would have thought a biography of John Knox could be funny?

We also do better in our depth of research across the board, for the DNB 's contributors neglected manuscripts, especially those in local archives (which were only then getting off the ground); even those in the Public Record Office were not consulted to the same degree as printed sources. We now give due attention to wills, which can sometimes transform a life by providing information about family, friends, possessions and even attitudes. And lastly, we have become more inclusive. The DNB's focus on high politics meant that women, merchants and interesting oddities and social outcasts, like visionaries and witches, were under-represented. New research areas often overlooked by DNB - provincial notables, women, witches and social outsiders - have been well-served by enthusiastic contributors. We now include the Essex and North Berwick witches, together with many more immigrants, including protestant refugees, artists, musicians and gun founders, and nobles and clergy notable for estate management and development and as provincial administrators. We acknowledge the key role of women as religious and literary patrons (Katherine Bertie, duchess of Suffolk) or significant political figures in their own right (Katherine Parr and Grace O'Malley). On a rough calculation the proportion of women in the Tudor area has risen from 2.4% to 5.8%.

I began by praising the old dictionary and may now seem to be doing the reverse. But it is no criticism of Leslie Stephen to say that after more than a century things do not look quite the same. I suppose it's unfashionable nowadays to say that historical knowledge advances, but from my perspective progress really does seem to have occurred, and in the Tudor period at least as much as anywhere else.

Brian Harrison