Professor of Modern History
Trinity College
Cambridge CB2 1TQ
Biography:
Alexandra Walsham completed a BA and MA at the University of Melbourne before winning a Commonwealth Scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, where she completed her PhD under the supervision of Professor Patrick Collinson. She held a Research Fellowship at Emmanuel College between 1993 and 1996 before being appointed as Lecturer in History at the University of Exeter in 1996. Promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2000 and to a personal chair in Reformation History in 2005, she served as Head of Department at Exeter between 2007 and 2010. She was appointed to the Professorship of Modern History at Cambridge in 2010 and is also a Fellow of Trinity College.
Professor Walsham has been a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society since 1999 and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2009. She serves on the editorial boards of Past and Present and the Royal Historical Society Studies in History series. She is General Editor of the Past and Present Book Series and Past and Present Supplements (OUP) and a Series Editor of Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History (CUP). She has served as a panel member and chair for Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Subject groups/Research projects
Departments and Institutes
Research Interests
Her research interests fall within the field of the religious and cultural history of early modern Britain and focus on the immediate impact and long-term repercussions of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations set within their European context. She has published extensively on a range of themes, including post-Reformation Roman Catholicism; religious tolerance and intolerance between 1500 and 1700; providence, miracles and the supernatural in post-Reformation society and culture; the history of the book, the advent of printing, and the interconnections between oral, visual and written culture; religion and the landscape. She is currently beginning a new project entitled ‘The Reformation of the Generations: Youth, Age and Religious Change in England c. 1500-1700’.
Research Supervision
Professor Walsham is willing to supervise a range of topics in early modern British history, especially religious and ecclesiastical, intellectual and cultural history, at both MPhil and PhD level. She would particularly welcome enquiries about research on the following themes:
the implementation, reception and impact of the Reformation in the British Isles
post-Reformation Roman Catholicism
religious tolerance and intolerance between 1500 and 1700
providence, miracles and the supernatural in post-Reformation society and culture
the history of the book, the advent of printing, and the interconnections between oral, visual and written culture
religion, sacred space and the landscape
religion, healing and medicine
religion and generational change
historical consciousness and the formation of memory
Recent theses completed under her supervision include Tom Blaen (‘Lapidaries in Early Modern Britain’), David Davis ('Printed Images in Elizabethan England'), Hannah Newton (‘The Sick Child in England, c. 1580-1720’), Sarah Scutts (‘Perceptions of the Anglo-Saxon Past in Early Modern Religious Polemical Literature’), Jennifer Evans (‘Aphrodisiacs in Early Modern England’), Sarah Parsons (‘Religious Culture and the Sea in Early Modern England’), and Natasha Mihailovic (‘The Social History of Death in Eighteenth-Century England’). She is currently supervising Erin Walters on ‘Conceptions of the Afterlife in Early Modern England’ and Liesbeth Corens on 'English Catholics in the Southern Netherlands 1660-1720'.
Teaching
Alexandra Walsham teaches a Part II Specified Subject on ‘Persecution and Toleration in Britain 1400-1700’. She contributes lectures for Part I Paper 4 (British Political History 1450-1750) and offers an option on 'Space, Place and Landscape in Early Modern History' to students on the MPhil in Early Modern History.
Key Publications
Books
Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Royal Historical Society Studies in History, 1993)
Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 1999). Winner of the Longman-History Today Prize 2000 and the American Historical Association’s Morris D. Forkosch Prize 2000.
Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England 1500-1700 (Manchester UP, 2006)
The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford UP, 2011). Joint winner of the Wolfson History Prize 2011; winner of the American Historical Association's Leo Gershoy Award 2011;winner of the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference Roland H. Bainton Prize 2011.
Edited Books
ed. with Julia Crick, The Uses of Script and Print 1300-1700 (Cambridge UP, 2004)
ed. with John Chynoweth and Nicholas Orme, Richard Carew, The Survey of Cornwall (Devon and Cornwall Record Society, 2004)
ed. with Peter Marshall, Angels in the Early Modern World (Cambridge UP, 2006)
ed. with E.A. Jones, Syon Abbey and its Books: Reading, Writing and Religion 1400-1700 (Boydell and Brewer, 2010)
ed. Relics and Remains, Past and Present Supplement 5 (Oxford UP, 2010)
Selected Articles
‘“The Fatall Vesper”: Providentialism and Anti-Popery in Late Jacobean London’, Past and Present, no. 144 (1994), pp. 36-87.
‘“Frantick Hacket”: Prophecy, Sorcery, Insanity and the Elizabethan Puritan Movement’, Historical Journal, vol. 41 (1998), pp. 27-66.
‘Vox Piscis: Or, The Book Fish: Providence and the Uses of the Reformation Past in Caroline Cambridge’, English Historical Review, vol. 114 (1999), pp. 574-606.
‘“Domme Preachers”? Post-Reformation English Catholicism and the Culture of Print’, Past and Present, no. 168 (2000), pp. 72-123.
‘Unclasping the Book? Post-Reformation English Catholicism and the Vernacular Bible’, Journal of British Studies, vol. 42, no. 2(2003), pp. 141-67.
‘Miracles and the Counter Reformation Mission to England’, Historical Journal, 46 (2003), pp. 779-815.
‘Translating Trent? English Catholicism and the Counter Reformation’, Historical Research, 78 (2005), pp. 288-310.
‘The Reformation and the Disenchantment of the World Reassessed’, Historical Journal, 51 (2) (2008), 497-528.
‘Invisible Helpers: Angelic Intervention in Early Modern England’, Past and Present, 208 (2010), pp. 77-130. Winner of the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference Harold Grimm Essay Prize 2011.
'The Reformation of the Generations: Youth, Age and Religious Change in England 1500-1700', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series 21 (2011), pp. 93-121.
'History, Memory and the English Reformation', Historical Journal, 55 (2012), 899-938.