Clive Holmes (historian)

[1] He was regarded as a respected senior scholar who had a wide range of research interests,[3][4] some of which included the history of English law, early modern witchcraft, Fens drainage, and colonial North America.

[2] As an obituary in The Telegraph stated, "Holmes was first and foremost a charismatic teacher who inspired generations of students ... he retained an extraordinary zest for communicating ideas in tutorials, seminars, and lectures throughout his long career.

[6] A study of that administrative organisation of counties and its military and political aspects, it made his reputation and drew praise from scholars such as Christopher Hill and J. P.

[7] Historian John Morrill later recognized it as a "penetrating article";[6] it did much to reverse a historiographic current, and fit an overall pattern of Holmes not signing on to fashionable trends.

[5] Exploring the interactions between the thoughts and beliefs of the accused and the English legal structure, Holmes was of the view that any analysis of the persecution of witches had to take gender and misogyny into account.

[2] In 1980, he was named to chair the Provost's Commission on Writing, which sought to improve the level of compositional abilities among undergraduates and compare the effectiveness of such things as Cornell's freshman seminar programme to what other universities were doing.

[7] Among the subjects he taught at Oxford were "Nobility and Gentry in England, 1560–1660", "Commonwealth and Protectorate, 1647–58", and "Law and Legal Institutions in Early Modern Europe".

[14] A conference was held in his honor and a Festschrift subsequently emerged from it, published by Routledge, Revolutionary England, c.1630–c.1660: Essays for Clive Holmes.

[4] He continued to actively research and publish after his retirement; however, a lengthy planned work on the early modern history of the Court of Chancery was never completed.