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Sharon Turner (24 September 1768 – 13 February 1847) was an English historian.
Turner became a solicitor but left the profession after he became interested in the study of Icelandic and Anglo-Saxon literature. He settled himself in Red Lion Square near the British Museum, staying there for sixteen years. When his friend Isaac D'Israeli left the synagogue after a dispute with the rabbi, Turner persuaded him to have his children, including the future Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, baptised in the Church of England, to give them a better chance in life.
Some of his manuscripts were written almost illegibly in the margins of letters, on the inside covers of magazines, or on discarded wax paper. His publisher sent him clean paper but Turner did not use it.
Britain at the time of original publication was involved in wars Napoleonic Wars and the idea of the Norman yoke (Anglo-Saxon liberty versus Norman despotism) had been around since the seventeenth century. Turner demonstrated Anglo-Saxon liberty "in the shape of a good constitution, temperate kingship, the witenagemot, and general principles of freedom". Turner researched extensively the collections in the British Museum and the Cotton library of Sir Robert Cotton. In doing so he obtained a working knowledge of Old English.
The History had a profound impact on historiography for the succeeding fifty years. Robert Southey said that "so much new information was probably never laid before the public in any one historical publication".Rev. Charles Cuthbert Southey (ed.), The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey. Volume II (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1850), p. 342. However, the Edinburgh Review in 1804 criticised Turner for a lack of discrimination and for the romantic parts of the work.
Sir Walter Scott acknowledged his debt to Turner for his historical work in his Dedicatory Epistle to his novel Ivanhoe.Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 16. In 1981 J. W. Burrow said Turner produced "the first modern full-length history of Saxon England … It was a genuinely pioneering work, and was much admired, and not without reason".J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent. Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 116–117.
He contributed articles on English history to Rees's Cyclopædia, but the titles are not known.
Against the emergence of the French Consulate, Turner promoted the notion of Anglo-Saxon liberty as opposed to Norman tyranny (strong since the 17th century).
Turner also authored a Sacred History of the World, a translation of Beowulf and a poem on Richard III.
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