[3][7] Spufford began her academic career as a research fellow at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, in 1969.
[1] 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.
[3] 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.
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 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[9] It made people aware of the extent of literacy in rural England and what there was for rural readers to read.
[11] 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.
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.
She wrote a notable book, Celebration,[15] on the problem of pain and Christian belief, out of her own experience and that of her daughter.
Television and radio programmes resulted and she was frequently asked to preach, mostly in the Cambridge area, including leading Good Friday meditations, to speak at Diocesan clergy gatherings, to Ordinands, and to trainee doctors and nurses.
[17] She then became too ill to complete the revision of her Clothing of the Common Sort which was prepared for publication by her co-author, Dr Susan Mee, the last of her many research students.
[2] In the 1996 New Year Honours, she was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) 'For services to Social History and to Higher Education for People with Disabilities'.
In 2018 a festschrift was published in her honour: Trevor Dean, Glyn Parry, Edward Vallance, eds.
Faith, Place and People in Early Modern England: Essays in Honour of Margaret Spufford.