Olwen Hufton

Who is Olwen Hufton?

Dame Olwen H. Hufton, DBE, FBA, FRHistS is a historian of early modern Europe and a pioneer of social history and of women's history. Hufton is an expert on Early Modern, western European comparative socio-cultural history with special emphasis on gender, poverty, social relations, religion and work. In 2006 she joined Royal Holloway as a part-time Professorial Research Fellow in the History Department.

Olwen was seven before she saw a banana, at the end of the war. No-one would envy the material constraints of such a childhood, but on one reading it might be deemed good preparation for an historian of poverty. In due course Olwen was awarded a scholarship at a local grammar school, and became the only council house child in her form. She went from there to University College London, where she encountered Alfred Cobban, the great revisionist historian of the French Revolution. It was Cobban who first advanced the view that the life of most French people was little changed by the Revolution, and indeed that the urban poor were worse off as a result of the abolition of the tithe by the National Constituent Assembly, because the tithe funded the charitable work of the church. In this perception lay the seeds of what would prove to be a lifetime's work for Olwen Hufton.