Robin Briggs says in his bio sketch: At Oxford, my principal tutor was Christopher Hill, but I was also much influenced by Richard Cobb and Maurice Keen. Although my original intention was to do research on English history, when I was elected to a Fellowship at All Souls in 1964, John Habbakuk persuaded me to shift to French history, and I became a kind of foreign member of the Annales school under the guidance of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. Ultimately my interests took me to the histoire des mentalités, in particular the relationship between the Catholic Reform movement and popular religion. This later led me into the history of witchcraft, although I have always maintained a very general interest in the political, social, and intellectual history of France over the period from the Renaissance to the Revolution. This has included some work on the history of applied science, lately extending to the technical aspects of French naval history.
For my whole career I have been a Fellow of All Souls, since 1976 in conjunction with a Special University Lectureship, and have taught in Oxford. I’ve been a Visiting Professor at Paris IV-Sorbonne and at the Collège de France.
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