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Lucy Wooding

British historian

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 11, 2026
Entity authorityQ130469132
Source-derived summary

Lucy Elizabeth Catherine Wooding (also Kostyanovsky) is a British historian of Tudor England. She is Professor of History at the University of Oxford and Langford Fellow and Tutor in History at Lincoln College.

Academic career

Wooding completed her undergraduate and doctoral degrees at Magdalen College, Oxford, where her doctoral supervisor was Susan Brigden. After completing her DPhil in 1994 she became a lecturer at Queen's University Belfast, before moving to King's College London in 1995. She became Reader in History at King's in 2015 before she joined Lincoln College in October 2016, succeeding her former supervisor Brigden as the college's tutor in early modern history. She was awarded the Title of Distinction of Professor of History by the University of Oxford in October 2024.

Wooding has served as Fellow Archivist and Welfare Dean for Lincoln College since 2021 and as Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Faculty of History from 2022 to 2025.

She is an elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS).

Research

Wooding's doctoral research focused on Catholic theology during the English Reformation, and she published her first monograph on this topic, Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England, in 2000. Her second book, published in 2009, was a biography of Henry VIII. Reformation historian Peter Marshall called the book "the best general biography of Henry VIII in nearly half a century".

Editorial summary

“Lucy Wooding” enters the record as british historian. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Lucy, Wooding and British can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewStrongest as a route into the people, institutions and dated events that shaped the subject’s public record. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1994, 1995, 2015, 2016—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Lucy, Wooding and British.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Lucy Wooding” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Lucy, Wooding and British provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q130469132. VIAF identifies the subject as 56785135. The Library of Congress control number is n00086867. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1994, 1995, 2015 and 2016.

Critical limits

Public reputation and documentary evidence do not always develop together; absence from a summary is not evidence of historical absence. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. 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.

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  • Building a first chronology
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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 “Lucy Wooding”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Lucy Wooding primary sources, Lucy Wooding archive and Lucy 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 Lucy Wooding” 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.