Blair Worden


Alastair Blair Worden,, usually cited as Blair Worden, is a historian, among the leading authorities on the period of the English Civil War and on relations between literature and history more generally in the early modern period.

Education and career

He matriculated as an undergraduate at Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1963. After spending a year as a visiting student at Harvard he began graduate research at Oxford in 1967. During and after his doctoral studies he held a research fellowship at Pembroke College, Cambridge. After a period as a Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford, teaching History, he took up a position as a Professor at Royal Holloway, University of London. In 1997 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, and in 1999 he delivered the British Academy's Raleigh Lecture on History. As of 2011 he is an Emeritus Fellow of St Edmund Hall. He is well known for his revolutionary article "Oliver Cromwell and the Sin of Achan", which changed established historical perceptions about what exactly caused Oliver Cromwell to reject the offer of the Crown.

Books

The Rump Parliament 1648–53 ;
  • Edmund Ludlow: A Voyce from the Watchtower History and Imagination: essays in honour of H. R. Trevor-Roper Stuart England Roundhead reputations: the English Civil Wars and the passions of posterity The English Civil Wars 1640–1660 ;

Selected articles and chapters