Dr Elizabeth Foyster

Director of Studies for History

College Teaching Officer

t: (01223) 333236

e: eaf21@cam.ac.uk

I’m a historian, and I’m particularly interested in the social history of the family.  I ‘did’ the Tudors and Stuarts for A’ level, and I had the irritating habit of always asking my teachers whether the monarchs had happy childhoods, if they loved their wives, got on with their brothers and sisters, and so on.  I then had an inspiring teacher of history at university who taught a course on the history of the family, and from then on I was hooked.  I came to realise that ideas about childhood, marriage, sexual relationships, parenting, old age, death and dying have all changed over time, and so have histories that can be discovered and explored.  I’ve always been interested in finding out about human relationships (what makes people fall in love; why some marriages work and others go so wrong; whether there are fundamental differences between men and women, other than biological ones; what influences children’s behaviour and what we remember from childhood).  As a historian, I also want to know whether people experienced family life differently in the past from us today.  On a more trivial level, I’m a pretty nosey person, and history lets me poke into other people’s personal lives!  The result has been that I’ve written articles and books about childhood, masculinity, marital violence, and widowhood. I’ve stuck with the early modern period that I started to study at school, but I’ve also moved forward to think about these issues over the eighteenth- and into early nineteenth-century Britain.

What makes Clare College such a good place to study your subject?

I think Clare is a great reminder to social historians that the built environment does not always shape human behaviour.  The buildings may be old, but the people are not stuffy.  Instead, I’ve found Clare students and fellows to be open-minded and friendly people with whom to work.  Given that history is a subject that lends itself to discussion and debate, this is very important.  The Clare history fellows are specialists in a range of historical periods and places, but as with other colleges, Clare students have supervisions with history lecturers across the University.  During the academic year we have a range of events and seminars that bring all the Clare historians together.  Clare is a stimulating place to develop historical knowledge, and a supportive community in which to test out new ideas.  1st year historians living in Memorial Court at Clare also find that they have the significant advantage of being able to literally fall out of bed into one of the best libraries in the world, and that they are within a five minute walk of the History Faculty (a bonus for 9am lectures).

Main Publications:

Manhood in Early Modern England

(1999)

Marital Violence: An English Family History, 1660-1857 (2005)

The Family in Early Modern England (ed. with H Barry) (2007)