In Remembrance of Lois Green Schwoerer (June 4, 1927 – August 10, 2025)

I am deeply saddened to report that Lois Green Schwoerer, Elmer Louis Kayser Professor of History Emerita at The George Washington University passed away on August 10, 2025. She was 98 years old. Lois was keenly involved in the North American Conference Studies on British Studies throughout her professional career and served as President from 1987 to 1989. She also served on the board of the American Friends of the Institute of Historical Research for many years. I first met Lois in 1987, not long after I had arrived in the United States. She was a formidable scholar with a sharp intellect – “not one to suffer fools willingly,” one colleague recently said to me – and initially I wondered what she would make of this young upstart from overseas. But Lois was extremely kind and welcoming to me from the beginning, easing my transition into North American academic culture. I was privileged to be invited to write an essay for her festschrift – Politics and the Political Imagination in Later Stuart Britain (Boydell and Brewer Press, 1997), edited by Howard Nenner – and I got to know Lois well during a couple of extended periods at the Folger Shakespeare Library in the early years of this century. We later came to collaborate, after a fashion, on issues concerning the right to bear arms in seventeenth-century England (and how the English context to the US Second Amendment has been seriously misunderstood), though the drive here came from Lois, who felt passionately about the issue and prompted me to become more engaged given my own knowledge of the English sources – “who else knows the archives as you do?”, she once wrote to me encouragingly. We exchanged numerous emails, Lois put me in touch with other scholars and lawyers working on this topic, and we both signed up to an amicus brief brought before the Supreme Court about the Heller case of 2008.

Lois was born in Roanoke, Virginia, but grew up in New York City, where she attended Hunter College High School. She earned her B.A. degree from Smith College in 1949 (graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa), and pursued her graduate work at Bryn Mawr College, where she worked with Caroline Robbins, receiving her M.A. in 1952 and her Ph.D. in 1956. She taught briefly at Bryn Mawr and then the University of Pittsburgh, before taking up a position at George Washington University in 1956, the first woman in the History Department. She reached the rank of full professor in 1976, served as Chair of the Department from 1979 to 1981, and was appointed the Elmer Louis Kayser Professor of History in 1992. Lois was a pioneer in promoting the field of women’s history at GWU: she was a member of the Founding Committee that created the Women’s Studies program in 1975, established an M.A. degree in Women’s Studies, and added a course on the History of European Women to the University’s curriculum. In 1988 she received the Award for Outstanding Contribution to the University in recognition for her service and achievements. Following Lois’s retirement in 1996, students, friends and family established the Lois G. Schwoerer Graduate Fellowship in Eary Modern English and European History, and in 2002 GWU awarded her an Honorary Degree of Letters.  

Lois published five major monographs. Her first book, "No Standing Armies!" The Anti-Standing Army Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), won the annual prize of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians for the best book by a woman historian. For me, Lois’s masterpiece was her The Declaration of Rights, 1689 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), a deeply contextualized study of one of the most important constitutional documents in English history – a model of its kind, multi-dimensional and wide-ranging, which received an honorable mention for the NACBS’s John Ben Snow prize. Lois followed with her Lady Rachel Russell "One of the Best of Women" (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), tying together her interests in women’s history and the politics of Restoration England, and then The Ingenious Mr. Henry Care: Restoration Publicist (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), developing her interests in Restoration journalism and political propaganda – again, two deeply contextualized studies that are about so much more than the named individuals in the title. Lois’s final book was Gun Culture in Early Modern England (University of Virginia Press, 2016), published when she was 89, highlighting the extent to which she continued to be research active well into retirement. In addition, Lois edited a collection of essays on the Glorious Revolution, The Revolution of 1688-1689: Changing Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 1992), and co-edited (with John Pocock and Gordon Schochet) The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1993). Lois also published some fifty articles, too many to list here, but some of my favourites include: “Seventeenth-Century English Women Engraved in Stone?”, Albion, 16:4 (1984), 389-403; “The Trial of Lord William Russell (1683): Judicial Murder?”, Journal of Legal History, 9:2 (1988-9), 142-68, and “To Hold and Bear Arms: The English Perspective,” Chicago-Kent Law Review, 76 (2000), 27-60.

Lois’s scholarly achievements were recognized by the award of a number of prestigious fellowships: from the American Philosophical Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Henry Huntington Library (in one email to me Lois described the Huntington as ‘a lifelong friend’), the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation. She was elected a fellow of the Royal Historical Society of Great Britain in 1980 and was a founding member of the Center for the History of Political Thought at the Folger Shakespeare Library, serving on its steering committee between 1982 and 1997. She was also a member of Yale University’s Committee on Parliamentary History from 2002 to 2007.

When doing research for this remembrance, I learned that Lois was an avid sailor, along with her husband Frank (who died in 2000), and won the Severn Sailing Association MS Regatta in 1984. She also enjoyed playing tennis, something I did know; when I was teaching at the Folger in 2003 Lois had advised me just how good a tennis player Elizabeth Eisenstein was.

My own work has been deeply influenced and inspired by Lois’s. Over the years, we had many lively discussions about our interpretations of late seventeenth-century England, often agreeing, sometimes not – though she relished the debate. There is one further debt I need to acknowledge. Lois briefly took over the task of editing the Roger Morrice Entring Book – a manuscript political journal/diary from the 1680s – following the death of Douglas Lacey, who had begun the project. It was too large an undertaking for one person, given the volume of material and the impenetrable shorthand. After Lacey, and then Lois, the baton was passed to Robin Gwynn in New Zealand, who made further headway until his retirement from academia. In the end it took a team of six editors, including myself, led by Mark Goldie of Churchill College Cambridge, and backed up by a host of research assistants and specialists, to produce a multi-volume critical edition of the Morrice Entring Books (The Boydell Press, 2007, 2009). The team remain deeply indebted to Lois for her stewardship of the materials that she acquired from Lacey and for her support of our endeavors in bringing the project to fruition.      

In reviewing my communications with Lois over the years, I found an email from her from October 2018, when she was 91, informing me that at her recent annual physical her doctor had predicted she would live to be 100 and probably beyond. Sadly, she did not quite make it. Everyone I have heard from has spoken with great fondness about Lois – and tremendous admiration for her academic and intellectual achievements. Let me quote from just one email I received, which came from her former student Melinda Zook. “I have lots of fond memories of Lois (and some amusing ones)”, Melinda wrote, “but I think what she taught me was pretty simple: to be generous with your time, especially to those who need you most, graduate students, young faculty, and faculty who are struggling. Lois was simply a great mentor to all.”

Lois is survived by a son, Dr. John Schwoerer of Storrs, CT, and two grandchildren, Emma Schwoerer of Stamford, CT, and Charles Schwoerer of New York, NY.

Tim Harris, Brown University