Lawrence Stone Biography

British historian, born in Epsom, Surrey, educated at the Sorbonne and at Christ Church, Oxford. From 1963 to 1990 he was Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University. An Elizabethan: Sir Horatio Palavicino (1956), a study of its subject's career in commerce and espionage, displayed the meticulous scholarship and attention to the domestic and personal dimensions of history for which Stone became widely noted. A succession of subsequent works on the altering structures of social organization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries included The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (1965) and The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529–1642 (1972). Among Stone's later works, which have shown an intensified concern to define social values with reference to individual cases, are The Family: Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (1977), An Open Elite? England, 1530–1880 (1984), and Road to Divorce: England, 1530–1987 (1990).