Norman L. Jones (1951-2026): A Remembrance

Norman L. Jones (1951-2026)

Norman L. Jones (1951-2026) Norm Jones—he was never Norman to anyone who knew him – will best be known as one of our most accomplished historians of Tudor and especially Elizabethan history. But he was also one of the most gifted, modest, and gracious people one is likely to meet in academe.

A native of Idaho, Norm attended the College of Southern Idaho before taking his BA at Idaho State University (1972) and his MA at the University of Colorado (1974), then going to Cambridge to work towards his doctorate under the direction of Geoffrey Elton. Elton put him to work on the opening decade of Elizabeth’s reign, encouraging him to examine Sir John Neale’s dominant approach to the parliamentary politics of the day. Norm’s thesis, “Faith by statute: the politics of religion in the parliament of 1559” (1977), effectively punctured Neale’s interpretation of parliamentary factionalism and laid the groundwork for at least three of Norm’s books.

With Elton putting wind in his sails from Cambridge, Norm’s ship was launched and a lifelong friendship well-forged. That amity even survived Norm’s failed attempt to get Sir Geoffrey, as he had become, to ride a horse when he came to visit in the mountains of the American West. It culminated in Norm’s collaboration with his Cambridge classmate David Dean in producing a festschrift for Elton: one of the numerous collaborative projects and publications which Norm invited and in which he excelled.

With Elton’s support, Norm found his first teaching job at Harvard: a sabbatical replacement for Wallace MacCaffrey. But Norm’s love of the West, where his family had long established a successful agri-business, brought him back home in 1978, when he joined the Department of History at Utah State University. He would remain at USU for the rest of his career, teaching broadly in the history of Western Civilizations, Early Modern Europe, and the history of Christianity, serving as Department Chair for eighteen years, and as the Director of General Education and Curricular Integration for four years. Along the way he took time out for research fellowships at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, the University of Geneva, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Huntington Library. His residency as the Lord Burghley Visiting Fellow at St. John's College, Cambridge (Michelmas 2023) was a highlight of his career and the springboard to a new project on Burghley's legacy as Chancellor of the University of Cambridge.

As an historian especially of Elizabethan politics and religion, Norm’s research emanated not necessarily in direct response to established literature, though that was often its outcome. He was essentially and creatively provoked by broad and underlying questions about human behaviour in its religious and political dimensions and at both the elite and quotidian levels. Taking the Age of Elizabeth as his laboratory, he asked first how government worked and how governors managed to govern: a theme centred on the life and career of William Cecil, Lord Burghley and on the operation of Parliament. That broad concern underpinned his first five books: Faith by Statute: Parliament and the Settlement of Religion 1559 (1982), which won the Royal Historical Society’s Whitefield Prize; God and the Moneylenders: Usury and the Law in Early Modern England (Blackwells, 1989); Interest Groups and Legislation in Elizabethan Parliaments: Essays Presented to Sir Geoffrey Elton, a special issue of Parliamentary History, with David Dean (Oxford University Press, 1989); The Parliaments of Elizabethan England , also with David Dean (Blackwells, 1990); and The Birth of the Elizabethan Age (Blackwells, 1993).

Though he returned to his life-long interest in Wiliam Cecil in 2015 in producing Governing by Virtue: Lord Burghley and the Management of Elizabethan England (Oxford University Press, 2015), the balance of Norm’s interests had shifted from the governors and political process to the governed and their reception of government. He began more methodically to explore what ordinary people believed and how they expressed their beliefs at a time of religious change. That underlying question produced The English Reformation: Religion and Cultural Adaptation (Blackwells, 2002); The Elizabethan World, with Susan Doran (Routledge, 2011); and Being Elizabethan: Understanding Shakespeare's Neighbors (Blackwells, 2020). These books, along with more than forty articles he authored on Tudor history, comprise a significant contribution to what we know about early modern England.

Whilst some of these books and a great many articles were sharply focused products of his own research, Norm always envisioned ‘doing history’ as a group activity. He continually brought a great many other, often younger, scholars into the fold, encouraging their participation in discussion groups, conference panels, and publications, and celebrating their success. Along with numerous collaborative essays, his two collaborative volumes with David Dean, one with Susan Doran, and one with Daniel Woolf (Local Identities in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, 2007: a festschrift for Robert Tittler) line the shelf of Norm’s work. His most recent collaboration was with Vanessa Wilkie, on a transcription and analysis of the Huntington Library's Heroica Eulogia.

Many of these achievements will be familiar to anyone who has written or taught the Tudor era. Several of his books, written in a lucid, mid-Atlantic voice, will have lured undergraduates into an appreciation of the field and of the study of History itself. But Norm was a man of many parts, and excelled in other fields as well. A silent partner in his family’s agri-business, Norm always felt deeply rooted in the American West and its agrarian culture. He could drive a harvest combine just as well as he could manage Elizabethan handwriting.

Finally, his interest in undergraduate teaching extended far beyond the history curriculum. In the late 1990s Norm joined the Utah State Regents’ General Education Task Force, and by 2001 he chaired it. As a Senior Fellow of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, he chaired the College Board’s Advanced Placement Higher Education Advisory Committee and served as an educational advisor to a consortium of Western state governors. Nationally, he became a leader in the effort to reform the undergraduate history curriculum, working closely with the Lumina Foundation and the American Historical Association to develop a transformative, outcomes-based reform initiative. In 2013 Norm was awarded a Fulbright to Hong Kong to advise on general education in the higher education curriculum. His deep devotion to students was a hallmark of his career, and garnered tremendous affection from generations of young people. In the 1980s and 1990s, when the tv show Cheers was still part of the culture, students often greeted him with a shout of "Norm!" when he arrived in the classroom, mimicking the well-known greeting to the sitcom character.

As a final word, it’s hard to think of anyone who wore his brilliance with such modesty, grace, and generosity, and who put so many others before himself. Norm leaves his loving wife, Cecile Gilmer, and a host of friends on both sides of the Atlantic.

Susan Cogan and Robert Tittler