Ruth Atherton
is a Lecturer in History at the University of South Wales. She completed her PhD at the University of Birmingham in 2018. She is currently writing her first monograph, looking at the nature of sacramental knowledge that was taught in 16th-century German language catechisms. More broadly, Ruth’s work explores the development of early modern confessional identities, focusing in particular on late medieval and early modern educational development, and religious, social, political and cultural change in the Holy Roman Empire.
Joe Chick
studied Modern History at Corpus Christi College, Oxford in 2004 to 2007 before undertaking the MRes Medieval Studies course at Reading, in which he became interested in medieval social relations through a dissertation on the 1381 revolt in western Suffolk. In 2020 he completed an ESRC-funded PhD project at the University of Warwick, supervised by Beat Kümin, which looked at the monastic town of Reading in the years 1350-1600. He is currently a Research Fellow at Brunel University on an ESRC-funded project called ‘An Institutional History of Internal Communication in the United Kingdom’. His first monograph, entitled Urban Society and Monastic Lordship in Reading, 1350-1600, was published by Boydell & Brewer in 2022.
Heather Cowan
is a PhD student at the University of Liverpool currently working on a thesis entitled ‘Bodies of (Dis)Order: Defining Abortion in Early Modern England’. Heather’s research interests include exploring perceptions of reproductive politics through the lenses of gender, emotion and medicine in early modern England.
Steven M. Foster
is an Associate Lecturer at the ou and a Policy Advisor at hm Treasury. An historian of religion and politics, he was awarded his PhD from the University of Leeds in 2018. He has taught History at the Universities of Leeds and Liverpool. He was previously a Visiting Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern History at the University of Huddersfield and an Associate Lecturer in Parish Church Studies at the University of York. His monograph, “Subject to the Higher Powers”: The Reception of Romans 13:1–7 during the English Reformation (Brill,
Anna French
is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Liverpool, General Secretary of the European Reformation Research Group and Director of the Liverpool Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. She is author of Children of Wrath: Possession, Prophecy and the Young in Early Modern England (2015) and editor of Early Modern Childhood: An Introduction (2019). She is currently working on a forthcoming monograph, Born in Sin: The Spirituality of Pregnancy, Birth and Infancy in Post-Reformation England.
Helen Gair
is a postdoctoral research assistant at Nottingham Trent University, where she recently completed her PhD in History. Her thesis, entitled ‘Discipline, Reformation and Community in Perth, 1577–1600’, explored the exercise of kirk session discipline in Perth, examining the significance of the church elders’ personal networks to their roles, as well as the relationships between the kirk session and the congregation. She has recently co-authored a chapter on ‘The Protestant Clergy and Poor Relief, 1560–1660’, in The Clergy in Early Modern Scotland (2021). Her main research interests are the social and religious history of Reformation-era Scotland.
Susan May
is an art and design historian whose research centres on papal and cardinalate patronage and the visual culture of the late fifteenth century. She takes an interdisciplinary approach, exploring in particular the interface between theology and local, national and international politics. She has published detailed analyses of paintings, sculpture and architecture in Italian cities, addressing issues of humanism, Neoplatonism, cosmology, ecclesiology, civic ritual and the veneration of holy relics. Teaching at all levels at Birmingham School of Art, Birmingham City University, she was course leader of its ma History and Theory in Art and Design.
David Nicoll
completed a PhD at the University of Warwick in 2020, writing his thesis on the figure of Antoine de Crussol, the duc d’Uzès. His primary research considers Protestant noble identity during the French Wars of Religion, while he is also interested in early modern Irish history. He is currently teaching at Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin. Having recently finished up a
Susan Orlik†
completed her PhD at Birmingham in 2018, where she was supervised by Dr Tara Hamling and Dr Jonathan Willis. Its focus was the material evidence of church interiors, which can inform a re-assessment of how the Reformation played out in the parishes. It won the John Grenville Prize for the best History thesis at the University of Birmingham in 2018. After completing her PhD, she continued researching church interiors, focusing on those in Devon and Cornwall; her monograph, Decorating the Parish Church in Post-Reformation England: Interiors, Images and Identity, is forthcoming.
Andrew Pettegree
is Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews and Director of the Universal Short Title Catalogue. He is the author of over a dozen books in the fields of Reformation history and the history of communication, including Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge University Press, 2005), The Book in the Renaissance (Yale University Press, 2010), The Invention of News (Yale University Press, 2014), Brand Luther: 1517, Print and the Making of the Reformation (Penguin, 2015) and The Bookshop of the World: Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age (Yale University Press, 2019). The Library: A Fragile History, co-authored with Arthur der Weduwen, will be published by Profile in 2021.
Alec Ryrie
is Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University, Professor of Divinity at Gresham College, co-editor of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History and a Fellow of the British Academy. His books include The English Reformation (2020), Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt (2019), and Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (2013).
Laura Sangha
is Senior Lecturer in British History 1500–1750 at the University of Exeter. Laura is a historian of English religious cultures in the long reformation, with particular interests in early modern life-writing, beliefs associated with the supernatural, and the social history of theology. She is the author of Angels and Belief in England 1480–1700 (Pickering and Chatto, 2012). Laura has also published on individual devotion (Historical Research, 2019) and ghost beliefs
Andrew Spicer
is Professor of Early Modern European History at Oxford Brookes University, President of the Sixteenth Century Society & Conference and a Literary Director of the Royal Historical Society. He was a founder member of the European Reformation Research Group and its first treasurer. After doctoral research on late sixteenth-century immigrants from France and the Southern Netherlands, his subsequent work has focused on the socio-cultural impact of the Reformation, particularly church architecture, the material culture of worship and sacred space. His forthcoming monograph is titled War, Revolt and Sacred Space: Cambrai and the Southern Netherlands, c.1566–1621.
Elizabeth Tingle
is Professor of History at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. She has written extensively on the Wars of Religion and the Catholic Reformation in France and her latest books are Sacred Journeys: Long Distance Pilgrimage in North-Western Europe in the Counter Reformation, (Medieval Institute Press/De Gruyter, 2020) and together with Philip Booth eds., A Companion to Death, Burial and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe c.1300–c.1700: 94 (Brill, 2021). She is currently working on cathedral chapters in early modern France.