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Date: June 17, 1999
Lawrence Stone, Social Historian and Founder of Princeton's Davis Center, Dies at 79
PRINCETON, N.J. -- Lawrence Stone, a renowned social historian of early-modern England and founding director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton, died June 16 at his home in Princeton Borough. He was 79 and had been suffering the effects of Parkinson's Disease.
According to Professor Stone, his research interests spanned "the turbulent centuries that carried England from the War of the Roses through the Tudor regime to the Cromwellian Revolution and beyond into the 18th century." His classes at Princeton included an undergraduate course on England from 1470 to 1690 and graduate seminars on the coming of the English Revolution and on England from 1660 to 1770.
Born in Epsom, Surrey, England on December 4, 1919, Stone studied at the Charterhouse School, at the Sorbonne, and at Christ Church, Oxford. His university studies were interrupted by war service as a lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (1940-45). He received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from Oxford in 1946 and remained there until 1962, first as a lecturer at University and Corpus Christi colleges and then as a fellow of Wadham College. In 1960-61, he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Stone joined the Princeton faculty in 1963 as Dodge Professor of History and transferred to emeritus status in 1990. He served as department chair from 1967 to 1970 and in 1968 was named director of the new Davis Center, which was established to develop a focal point for historical research, to encourage innovation and experimentation in teaching, and to stimulate intellectual exchange both within the History Department and between the department and visiting scholars. It supports the Davis Research Seminar, which brings together research scholars from the United States and abroad to work on common problems.
"When Lawrence Stone arrived in Princeton and unpacked his intellectual baggage, he released a fresh set of ideas, which are still buzzing in the air, not merely here but everywhere in the country," said his colleague at Princeton, Robert Darnton. "History, as he presented it to rapt audiences of students and colleagues, cannot be confined to the tiny elite who dominate events. It involves entire populations. To be understood adequately, it requires some mastery of demography, economics, and political science. To be brought alive, it should be narrated in a brisk style, seasoned with amusing anecdotes and provocative arguments -- the more heretical, the better. Lawrence was always in a scrap, always making the fur fly and the ideas soar. He set the pace in what emerged in the 1960s as the new social history, and he remained our pre-eminent historian until the day of his death."
Stone's published works include The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (1965), The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529-1642 (1972), The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (1977), An Open Elite? England, 1540-1880, written in collaboration with his wife, Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone (1984), Uncertain Unions: Marriage in England 1660-1753 (1992), and Broken Lives: Marital Separation and Divorce in England 1660-1857 (1993). Also an authority on English sculpture, he wrote Sculpture in Britain: The Middle Ages (1955).
A member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Professor Stone was also a corresponding fellow of the British Academy. In 1976, he was awarded Princeton's first annual Howard T. Behrman Award for distinguished achievement in the humanities. He received honorary degrees from universities including Princeton, Chicago, Penn, Edinburgh, and Oxford.
Surviving are his wife, Jeanne Fawtier Stone, and two children, Elizabeth C. Stone Zimansky of Stony Brook, N.Y., and Robert Lawrence Fawtier Stone of Manhattan.
At Professor Stone's request, there will be no funeral.
NOTE: A portrait of Lawrence Stone is available via the World Wide Web at http://www.princeton.edu/pr/pictures/99/. Both preview and downloadable versions of the jpeg file are listed by name in the index.