Few academics carried the title the Rev Professor with the ebullience of my friend Richard Bonney, who has died aged 70. A historian of ancien regime France and a priest in Leicester, he had a career that took him in unlikely directions, but to each phase he brought focus, intelligence and commitment.
He was born in Sanderstead, Surrey, to Sydney, a technician in the fur trade, and his wife, Helen (nee Johnson). At Whitgift school, Croydon, Richard’s interest in history was ignited by an inspirational teacher, WD Hussey, and he went on to study history at Oxford University, graduating with a congratulatory first in 1968. He was a lecturer in European history at Reading University from 1971 to 1984.
His first book, Political Change in France under Richelieu and Mazarin, 1624-1661, came out in 1978. It analysed more than 1,000 volumes of French state council records covering that period, when France was recovering from its internal divisions and fighting the Thirty Years War. Other works followed, confirming Richard as a leading historian of early modern France; his best known books were The European Dynastic States 1494-1660 (1991) and L’absolutisme (1989).
Richard became a professor at Leicester University in 1984 and was head of the history department there. During that time he became the leader of a European Social Fund project on the origins of the modern state, which established an important database and accompanying volumes on that subject. It was also Richard’s initiative in 1986 to found the Society for the Study of French History, whose journal he edited for a decade and which is his enduring legacy. He continued as professor of modern history at the University of Leicester until 2006, with a visiting professorship at Kyoto University in Japan (2002).
In 1996 Richard’s ordination into the Church of England opened up a second vocation, and his Centre for Religious and Cultural Pluralism in Leicester (1997-2006) put him on the frontline of interfaith relationships. He directed Leicester University’s Institute for the Study of Indo-Pakistan Relations (2001-05) and did more than most to counter simplistic “clash of civilisations” notions between Islam and the west.
His main contacts in this sphere were at the National Defence University in Islamabad, Pakistan, where he lectured and supervised research students and where his personal book collection is now to be based.
In Leicester many may best remember him at St Guthlac’s church in Knighton, where he was curate from 2011, leading its congregation’s successful efforts to become a separate parish in 2016, after which he was its priest in charge.
He is survived by his second wife, Margaret (nee Camsell), by their daughters Katherine, Sarah and Christine, and a son, Alexander, from his first marriage to Clare Tillett, which ended in 1982.
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