John Russell Vincent (20 December 1937 – 18 March 2021)[1] was a British historian and Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge.
Students from the University of Bristol disrupted some of his lectures in 1986 and forced him to take two terms' unpaid leave.
[2] In his book on historiography, An Intelligent Person's Guide to History, Vincent observed that if we went solely by the documentary standards most prized by modern historians nothing would be more historically certain than the existence of actual witches in the Middle Ages, given the large volume of solemnly-sworn testimony available in original documents.
In 1995, Oxford University Press refused at the last minute to publish the book, having commissioned and overseen much of its writing.
[3] A reader's report had described it as being "a sad and bitter diatribe" with a "general absence of the appreciation of the project of social history".