Joan Thirsk was the leading British early modern agrarian historian of her era, as well as an important social and economic historian.
16 Facts About Joan Thirsk
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Joan Thirsk's work highlighted the regional differences in agricultural practices in England.
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Joan Thirsk had an interest in food history and local English history, in particular of Hadlow, Kent.
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Joan Thirsk's father was the steward of a club in central London, and her mother had worked as a dressmaker.
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Joan Thirsk studied at Primrose Hill Primary and Camden School, and pursued a university degree in German and French in 1941 at Westfield College.
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Joan Thirsk was posted to Bletchley Park as an intelligence analyst, providing information that assisted Hut 6 in the breaking of the Enigma ciphers.
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Jimmy and Joan Thirsk married in September 1945 and moved to London, where Jimmy returned to his job as a librarian and Joan Thirsk resumed her studies.
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Joan Thirsk was later senior research fellow at the University of Leicester from 1951 to 1965, and reader in economic history at Oxford University between 1965 and 1983.
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Joan Thirsk was the editor of The Agrarian History of England and Wales from 1964 to 1972 and in 1974 was appointed general editor of the series.
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Joan Thirsk was appointed a Fellow of the British Academy in 1974, elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1982, and made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993.
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Early in her career, Joan Thirsk focused her research on farming in Kesteven, in the south-western division of Lincolnshire.
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Joan Thirsk noticed that each part of the district had its own agricultural dynamic, depending on whether its inhabitants farmed on clay, limestone, or the edge of the fen.
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Joan Thirsk noticed how cloth-making and hand-knitting in proto-industrialisation were more prevalent in regions where pastoralism played an important part.
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Joan Thirsk set out to understand how these products were manufactured and marketed, what this revealed about economic innovation, how it impacted employment and productivity, and its subsequent influence on family and national incomes.
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Joan Thirsk noted that women historians have been prominent in new academic endeavours, but that once these ventures were established, men inevitably came to control these fields.
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Joan Thirsk advised on the curation of an exhibition: Fooles and Fricasees: Food in Shakespeare's England at the Folger Shakespeare Library in 1999, contributing an essay: Food in Shakespeare's England to the catalogue.