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David Wootton (historian)

British historian of science

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 2, 2026
Entity authorityQ25640630 ↗
Source-derived summary

David Richard John Wootton (born 15 January 1952) is a British historian. He is Anniversary Professor of History at the University of York.

He has given the Raleigh Lecture at the British Academy (2008); the Carlyle Lectures at the University of Oxford (2014); the Benedict Lectures at Boston University (2014); and the Besterman Lecture at Oxford University (2017).

Books

Paolo Sarpi: Between Renaissance and Enlightenment (1983) 2002 pbk edition; (See Paolo Sarpi.)

Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates (2006)

Galileo: Watcher of the Skies (2010) (See Galileo Galilei.)

The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution (2015): finalist for the Cundill History Prize, 2016.

Power, Pleasure, and Profit: Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison (2018)

References

External links

Contributions at the London Review of Books

Contributions at the TLS

Interview in The Guardian about Bad Medicine and the development of medicine (April 2008)

Machiavelli: Devil or Democrat? on Radio 4 (November 2013)

Lecture on Galileo (January 2015)

Besterman Lecture on Adam Smith and famine (May 2017)

Lecture on Virtue (May 2019)

The Fable of the Bees — In Our Time (October 2018). For numerous other appearance on In Our Time, see List of In Our Time Programmes.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “David Wootton (historian)” is british historian of science. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through David, Wootton and historian, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA useful biographical orientation record, particularly for establishing names, roles and a first chronology. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1952, 2008, 2014, 2017—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1952-01-15. For this dossier, David, Wootton and historian is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “british historian of science” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q25640630. VIAF identifies the subject as 9867233. The Library of Congress control number is n82120832. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1952, 2008, 2014 and 2017.

Critical limits

A concise life account rarely captures disputed attribution, private networks or the changing language used to describe a career. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
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Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “David Wootton (historian)”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow David Wootton (historian) primary sources, David Wootton (historian) archive and David research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “David Wootton (historian)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.