Keith Vivian Thomas

Professor Keith Vivian Thomas is an honorary fellow at All Souls College at Oxford. Throughout his career he has taught at Oxford, where he became President of Corpus Christi in 1986 and Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University in 1988. Thomas is eminent among contemporary authorities on the social and intellectual history of England between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. His research focuses on the historical ethnography of early modern England. He has written books on the religious beliefs of the period and their relationship to magic, witchcraft and astrology; and on attitudes to animals, landscape and the natural world. His essays discuss such subjects as Civil War sects; Thomas Hobbes; literacy and numeracy; work and leisure; cleanliness; sexual morality; casuistry; utopianism; attitudes to women, children, youth and the elderly; manners and bodily comportment; laughter and jokes; attitudes to the past; and the relationship between history, literature and social anthropology. He is currently writing a book on the ends of life in early modern England.