Sylvia L. Thrupp: The Chicago Years (1946-61)

Abstract

ylvia Thrupp’s years at the University of Chicago fall to me, as we have divided our exploration of her intellectual-cumprofessional biography. This seems appropriate, as I was a student at Chicago in the 1950s and in those years took several seminars from her when she finally gained full status in the graduate program in History. Her fifteen years at Chicago were the years in which she went from being a player in English medieval economic and social history to the leader of a distinguished team of inter-disciplinary and comparative historians and social scientists who worked to practice as well as preach a new gospel. What we can think of as Thrupp’s medievalist reach in those years would bear fruit in the compilation and editing of two innovative volumes, Change in Medieval Society: Europe North of the Alps, 1050-1500 (1964) and Early Medieval Society (1967); her comparativist reach is still with us as Comparative Studies in Society and History (1958–). We also have Millennial Dreams in Action: Essays in Comparative Study (1962), a volume she edited from the papers of a 1960 conference at Chicago that she organized and over which she presided.1