Between Scholarship and Church Politics

The son of a yeoman, John Prideaux rose to occupy high office in the University of Oxford and the church - rector of Exeter College, Oxford, regius professor of divinity, bishop of Worcester - as a result of his intellectual power, ambition, scholarship, and capacity for hard work, becoming a key figure in early Stuart political and church history.

John Maddicott took his BA from Worcester College, Oxford, in 1964 and was elected to a Fellowship and Tutorship in Modern History at Exeter College in 1969, a position which he held until his retirement in 2005. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1996 and gave the Ford Lectures at Oxford in 2004, subsequently published in 2010. He was a Visiting Professor at the University of South Carolina in 1982. Maddicott has written extensively on Anglo-Saxon history and on English social and political history, mainly of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.