Joan Thirsk (1922-2013): An Obituary

Abstract

JOAN THIRSK, THE DOYENNE OF BRITISH rural history, died on October 3, 2013. She was ninety-one. Joan’s record of research and writing lasted for more than sixty years, and she was important to British and continental European historians for several reasons. In her work on the early modern period, she demonstrated the use of a much wider range of documentation than had hitherto been employed to reveal local variations in farming and rural economies and the explanations for them. In particular, she pioneered the use of probate inventories to identify regional farming systems and trace the processes of innovation and saw her methods subsequently expanded upon and computerized. She also opened up a new area of research in the medieval origins of open-field farming when she wrote two articles on the subject in the 1960s, and the rich vein of subsequent historical and archaeological work on the subject owes a great deal to her questioning of the original orthodoxy. At virtually the same time, she also wrote one of the articles that stimulated interest in the linkages between agriculture and industry and consequently opened up the debate around the question of proto-industrialization. More recently, she introduced the concepts of alternative and mainstream agriculture to compare late twentieth-century agricultural changes with similar periods back to the fourteenth century. Her final book, written when she was in her eighties, found her branching out into food history. And all this had to be fitted into a full life of teaching, editing, postgraduate supervision, reviewing, and raising a family. Joan was the daughter of Daisy and William Watkins and was born and raised in North London. After attending the Camden School for Girls she went, in the early years of the Second World War, to Westfield College, University of London, to read French and German. Her undergraduate studies were interrupted after a year by military service and, as a result of her knowledge of German, she became a subaltern in the