Paul Slack is Emeritus Professor of Early Modern Social History at Oxford University. He is the author of The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England, (OUP, 1990), and The Invention of Improvement: Information and Material Progress in Seventeenth-Century England, (OUP 2015), which won the Samuel Pepys Prize for 2015. He has been the Editor of the journal Past and Present, is a Fellow of the British Academy, and was Principal of Linacre College, Oxford, until 2010.