Lawrence Stone's papers

 Lawrence Stone’s papers

Back in the autumn of 2007, I made an enquiry about the location of the late Lawrence Stone’s papers on the discussion page of the H-Albion site. I was prompted to do so by my curiosity about the sources for a number of statistical claims made in his 1965 book, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641. There were, for example, no printed or unprinted sources cited for his calculations on the landed incomes and manorial holdings of the peerage or on their profits from office. In a work making such important assertions this struck me as decidedly odd. I had thought that his historical papers might have been deposited in the library of Princeton University or in the holdings of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center of which he had been head until his retírement in 1990. I was wrong in this supposition. In the event, I received two partially informative replies.

Dror Warrman replied on 7th September, 2007 to the effect that:

After Lawrence Stone died, I spent a week with his wife, Jeanne Fawtier Stone, sorting out his home and university offices -- books, papers, etc. I do not recall seeing book drafts, or indeed too many papers overall; and I do have some recollection of a conversation about how he did not like to keep too many papers around. We actually put aside some interesting personal letters (including a sizzling one from Tawney), which Jeanne wanted to consider for possible publication. But Jeanne died not too many months later, and I don't know what became of these papers. Dror Wahrman

Christopher R. Friedrichs made a much longer explanation on 9th September, 2007:

Although I am not a regular participant in h-albion, my attention has been drawn to the recent exchange of messages about the papers of Lawrence Stone. As anybody interested in this matter is likely to know, Lawrence Stone was the director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University from the time the center was founded in 1968 until his retirement in 1990. It seems that during this period many of of the letters Lawrence Stone wrote or received in regard to academic matters were rather informally consolidated with those of the Center. When I attended the conference honoring Theodore Rabb at Princeton in 2003, I was quite startled to hear in passing that in order to make room for more recent files the early files of the Davis Center had recently been discarded. Only a handful of letters written by Lawrence Stone which happened to catch the eye of those who were removing the files were preserved. Among these was a letter of recommendation which Lawrence Stone had written on behalf of John H. Elliott. (The letter was in fact read aloud at the conference since Professor Elliott was the keynote speaker.) But participants in the conference were told that most correspondence of this sort located in the Davis Center files had been discarded. Professor Anthony Grafton was the director of the Davis Center at the time the decision was made to dispose of the Center's early files. He would be the obvious person to contact for any information about the disposition of the Davis Center files and of any letters and papers of Lawrence Stone which were included among those files. As for any other papers of Lawrence Stone, one might address inquiries to his daughter Elizabeth C. Stone, a noted archeologist and Professor of Anthropology at Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, NY. Quite possibly she would have some information about the fate of her father's papers.

I did, in fact, send an e-mail to Elizabeth Stone asking where her father’s papers might be but never got a reply.

The interesting point remains that what I was seeking related to Stone’s working papers, i.e. to his transcripts of documents, to his working notes and calculations, to the formulation of his estimates. To the best of my current knowledge, these were destroyed on his instructions towards the end of his life so that his works might be judged on their merits. This is very puzzling.