Nationality British Name John Bossy Thesis year 1961 Died October 23, 2015 | Alma mater Cambridge Discipline Historian | |
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Born April 30, 1933 ( 1933-04-30 ) Edmonton, North London Education St Ignatius college, Stamford Hill, North London Thesis title Elizabethan Catholicism: The Link with France Books Christianity in the West - 1400‑1700, Giordano Bruno and the Emba, Under the Molehill, Peace in the post‑Reformation, The English Catholic c | ||
John Antony Bossy FBA (30 April 1933 – 23 October 2015) was a British historian who was a Professor of History at the University of York.
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Career
Bossy was educated at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he was inspired by Walter Ullmann. He lived and lectured in London (1962–66) and Belfast (1966–78) and was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.
Bossy specialised in the history of religion, particularly in that of Christianity during the Reformation period and beyond. According to some commentators, his approach fused together elements of disciplines such as sociology and theology.
His Ph.D. thesis was written on the relations between French and English Catholics during the period of the Renaissance which contained within it the seeds of later work regarding Michel de Castelnau.
He frequently wrote for the London Review of Books and published series of articles in the journals Recusant History and Past & Present. In 1991 The Embassy Affair won the British Crime Writers' Association CWA Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction and (jointly) the Wolfson History Prize.
He moved to the University of York in 1979, where he was professor of History until his retirement in 2000. In 1993 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.