Religion

‘OH, A paper on Geoffrey and religion’, sneered a friend: ‘that won't take you long!’ But it did: it took ages. For many of us, I am sure, thinking about Elton's work and influence has been an autobiographical experience, surveying our own intellectual development in relation to his. For the first time, I read right through the fat file of twenty-five years of letters from Geoffrey (and I will be quoting from some of them). I recalled the first visit of the man my little daughters called ‘The Teddy Bear’, and how he delighted them with a description of Disneyland. Elton in Disneyland is indeed a thought to conjure with! And I was reminded of all I owed to him. Although this conference has been dubbed ‘Oxford's revenge’ and Geoffrey's graduate students are not giving papers, many here stand in his debt: my own life as a historian was a constant epistolary debate with Geoffrey, and it has been a lengthy and nostalgic business trying to sort it out.