Hamm Elliot

EUH 5934 Dr. Harland-Jacobs 30 January 2012 Sir John Huxtable Elliott His Writings and Contributions In many ways, it is impossible to do justice to the impressive life and career of Sir John Huxtable Elliott in a short essay such as this one. Simply listing his countless awards, publications, and honorary titles and degrees would take up most of the space allotted for this short paper (as the pages attached to the end of the essay can attest). Instead of writing a traditional, chronologically-organized biography of this great historian, this essay will focus more directly on the continuities within Elliotts oeuvre. After even a brief scan of Elliotts vita, one would be more than justified in wondering whether there were any continuities to Elliotts work at all. From his first monograph (The Revolt of the Catalans A Study in the Decline of Spain, 1598-1640) in 1963 to today, Elliott has written books on the Count-Duke of Olivares, the intellectual and cultural impact of the New World on Europe, the palace of Philip IV, and a magisterial comparison of the British and Spanish Empires across three centuries, among many other diverse topics. Yet, despite this breathtaking range of publications, this paper argues that there are indeed many important threads. Due to limitations of space, however, this paper will focus on one of the most fundamental continuities in Elliotts work the use of comparative and/or transnational history to elucidate the history of early modern Spain. Elliotts many accomplishments are even more impressive after considering the state of the field of early modern Spanish history in the English-speaking academy, when Elliott was a graduate student at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the early 1950s. Spain for most American and British historians was largely a terra incognita, which, if it brought up any images at all, was of a land filled with sadistic Inquisitors and Don Quixotes. It is telling that at Cambridge, Elliott studied under Sir Herbert