Professor Peter Marshall

Contact Information:

Room 317
Telephone: 02476 523452
Email: p.marshall@warwick.ac.uk 

Office Hours: N/A: on Research Leave, 2012-13

Academic Profile

I was born and raised in the Orkney Islands, and educated at Kirkwall Grammar School and University College, Oxford, completing a degree in Modern History (I) in 1986 and a D.Phil. in 1990. From 1990 to 1994 I was employed by the English Benedictines to teach history at Ampleforth College on the North Yorkshire Moors, before being appointed to a lectureship at Warwick. I became Senior Lecturer in 2001, Reader in 2004, and Professor in 2006. I have been a PhD examiner at the universities of Aberdeen, Birmingham, Cambridge, De Montfort, Exeter, London, Melbourne, Oxford, Paris, Reading, St Andrews, Sussex and York, and an examiner of taught degrees at the universities of Bristol, Cambridge, Durham, Oxford, Kent, Lancaster and St Andrews. I have served as an Associate Editor for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and on the Committee of the Ecclesiastical History Society, and the Council of the Sixteenth Century Studies Society. I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a member of the AHRC Peer Review College, and of the Council and the Editorial Committee of the Dugdale Society. I am also a founding editor of the monograph series Religious Cultures in the Early Modern World, published by Pickering and Chatto. I sit on the editorial board of Sixteenth Century Journal, and am a co-editor (reviews) of English Historical Review. I regularly review new books for a range of periodicals, including the Times Literary Supplement and The Literary Review.

 

Undergraduate Modules Taught
 
Postgraduate Modules Taught

 

Research

My research interests are in aspects of religious belief and practice in early modern Britain, particularly the cultural and political impact of the English Reformation (on which I published a general survey in 2003, reissued in a revised second edition in 2012: Reformation England 1480-1642). My early doctoral work was on the trials and tribulations of the sixteenth-century parish clergy (The Catholic Priesthood and the English Reformation, 1994), and this fed into a continuing interest in the early evangelical movement, and in conservative resistance to the Henrician Reformation (much of this work is collected in my Religious Identities in Henry VIII's England, 2006). I have also undertaken a broader study of rituals and beliefs surrounding the dead, with a particular focus on changing perceptions of the afterlife, revenants, forms of commemoration and the enactment of memory, culminating in the publication of Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England in 2002. Somewhat to my surprise, these interests steered me in a micro-historical direction: a detailed study of a seventeenth-century Anglo-Irish ghost case, Mother Leakey and the Bishop: A Ghost Story (2007). Writing Mother Leakey strengthened my commitment to communicating the insights of historical research to a wider audience, seen for example in my The Reformation: A Very Short Introduction (2009). (See also my webpage on Public Engagement.) Over the coming years I will be editing the Oxford Illustrated History of the Reformation and writing a cultural-historical study of Luther and the 95 Theses for Oxford University Press, as well as completing a major new history of the English Reformation (Yale University Press).

Research Supervision

I welcome enquiries from potential PhD students in the field of early modern British religious and cultural history. Past and current topics of my doctoral students are: 'The Political Career of Thomas Wriothesley 1505-1550'; 'Commotion Time: the English Risings of 1549'; 'The Compendium Compertorum and the Making of the First Suppression Act'; 'Aspects of Grief in Early Modern England'; 'The Disenchantment of the World? English Ghost Beliefs 1660-1760'; 'Worship and the Senses in England, 1480-1580'; 'The Career of Arthur Hildersham, Puritan Minister'; 'Angels in English Religious Cultures 1500-1700'; 'Music and Religious Identity in Elizabethan England'; 'The Reformation in Cheshire, 1500-1570'; 'Musicians and Social Status in mid- and late-Tudor England'; 'Faith and Fraternity: The London Livery Companies and the Reformation c.1530-1600'; 'Reimagining the Virgin Mary in Reformation England'; 'Clergy Wives in Elizabethan England'; 'Re-examining the Western Rising of 1549'; 'The Theology and Practice of Confirmation in Sixteenth-Century England'

 

Selected Publications

 

i) Authored Books:

The Reformation: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2009)

Mother Leakey and the Bishop: A Ghost Story (Oxford, 2007)

Religious Identities in Henry VIII's England (Aldershot, 2006)

Reformation England 1480-1642 (London, 2003); second edition (London, 2012)

Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford, 2002)

The Catholic Priesthood and the English Reformation (Oxford, 1994)

 

ii) Edited Books:

(with G. Scott), Catholic Gentry in English Society: The Throckmortons of Coughton from Reformation to Emancipation  (Aldershot, 2009)

(with A. Walsham), Angels in the Early Modern World (Cambridge, 2006)

(with A. Ryrie), The Beginnings of English Protestantism (Cambridge, 2002)

(with B. Gordon), The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2000)

The Impact of the English Reformation 1500-1640 (London, 1997)

 

iii) Articles and Essays:

‘“Rather with Papists than with Turks:” The Battle of Lepanto and the Contours of Elizabethan Christendom’, Reformation, 17 (2012), 135-59.

‘Religious Ideology’, in Paulina Kewes, Ian Archer and Felicity Heal (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles (Oxford, 2013), 411-26.

‘Confessionalization, Confessionalism and Confusion in the English Reformation’, in Thomas Mayer (ed.), Reforming Reformation (Farnham, 2012), 43-64.

‘The Naming of Protestant England’, Past and Present 214 (2012)

‘Confessionalization and Community in the Burial of English Catholics, c. 1570-1700’, in N. Lewycky and A. Morton (eds), Getting Along? Religious Identities and Confessional Relations in Early Modern England (Farnham, 2012)

‘Lollards and Protestants Revisited’, in M. Bose and P. Hornbeck (eds), Wycliffite Controversies (Turnhout, 2011)

‘The Guardian Angel in Protestant England’ , in J. Raymond (ed.), Conversations with Angels: Essays Towards a History of Spiritual Communication, 1100-1700 (Basingstoke, 2011)

'The Last Years', in G. M. Logan (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Thomas More (Cambridge, 2011)

‘Catholic and Protestant Hells in Later Reformation England’, in I. Moreira and M. Toscano (eds), Hell and Its Afterlife: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Farnham, 2010)

‘Transformations of the Ghost Story in Post-Reformation England’, in H. Conrad-O’Briain and J. A Stevens (eds), The Ghost Story from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century (Dublin, 2010)

'John Calvin and the English Catholics, c. 1565-1640', Historical Journal, 53 (2010)

‘Ann Jeffries and the Fairies: Folk Belief and the War on Scepticism in Later Stuart England’, in A. McShane and G. Walker (eds), The Extraordinary and the Everyday in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2010)

Faith and Identity in a Warwickshire Family: the Throckmortons and the Reformation, Dugdale Society Occasional Paper No. 49 (2010)

‘The Reformation of Hell? Protestant and Catholic Infernalisms in England, c. 1560-1640’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 61 (2010)

‘The Reformation, Lollardy, and Catholicism’, in K. Cartwright (ed.), A Companion to Tudor Literature (Chichester, 2010)

‘Henry VIII and the Modern Historians: The Making of a Twentieth-Century Reputation’, in M. Rankin, C. Highley and J. King (eds), Henry VIII and his Afterlives: Literature, Politics, and Art (Cambridge, 2009)

‘Crisis of Allegiance: George Throckmorton and Henry Tudor’, in P. Marshall and G. Scott (eds), Catholic Gentry in English Society: The Throckmortons of Coughton from Reformation to Emancipation (Aldershot, 2009)

‘Protestants and Fairies in Early Modern England’, in S. Dixon, D. Freist and M. Greengrass (eds), Living with Religious Diversity in Early-Modern Europe (Aldershot, 2009)

‘(Re)defining the English Reformation’, Journal of British Studies, 48 (2009)

‘Saints and Cinemas: A Man for All Seasons’, in S. Doran and T. Freeman (eds.), Tudors and Stuarts on Film: Historical Perspectives (Basingstoke, 2009)

‘The Making of the Tudor Judas: Trust and Betrayal in the English Reformation’, Reformation, 13 (2008)

‘Betrayers and Betrayal in the Age of William Tyndale’, The Tyndale Society Journal, 34 (2008)

‘“The Greatest Man in Wales:” James ap Gruffydd ap Hywel and the International Opposition to Henry VIII’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 39 (2008)

‘England’, in D. M. Whitford (ed.), Reformation and Early Modern Europe: A Guide to Research (Kirksville, MO, 2008)

‘Religious Exiles and the Tudor State’, in K. Cooper and J. Gregory (eds.), Discipline and Diversity, Studies in Church History, 43 (2007)

'Leaving the World', in P. Matheson (ed.), Reformation Christianity (Minneapolis, 2007)

'Anticlericalism Revested? Expressions of Discontent in Early Tudor England', in C. Burgess and E. Duffy (eds), The Parish in Late Medieval England (Donnington, 2006)

'Angels Around the Deathbed: Variations on a Theme in the English Art of Dying', in P. Marshall and A. Walsham (eds), Angels in the Early Modern World (Cambridge, 2006).

'Piety and Poisoning in Restoration Plymouth', in K. Cooper and J. Gregory (eds.), Elite and Popular Religion, Studies in Church History, 42 (2006)

'Is the Pope Catholic? Henry VIII and the Semantics of Schism', in E. Shagan (ed.), Catholics and the Protestant Nation: Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2005)

'Judgement and Repentance in Tudor Manchester: The Celestial Journey of Ellis Hall', in K. Cooper and J. Gregory (eds.), Retribution, Repentance, and Reconciliation, Studies in Church History, 40 (2004)

‘Forgery and Miracles in the Reign of Henry VIII’, Past and Present, 178 (2003)

‘Deceptive Appearances: Ghosts and Reformers in Elizabethan and Jacobean England’, in H. Parish and W. G. Naphy (eds), Religion and Superstition in Reformation Europe (Manchester, 2002)

‘Evangelical Conversion in the Reign of Henry VIII’, in P. Marshall and A. Ryrie (eds.), The Beginnings of English Protestantism (Cambridge, 2002)

‘The Other Black Legend: The Henrician Reformation and the Spanish People’, English Historical Review, 116 (2001)

‘Mumpsimus and Sumpsimus: The Intellectual Origins of a Henrician Bon Mot’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 52 (2001)

‘"The Map of God’s Word": Geographies of the Afterlife in Tudor and Early Stuart England’, in B. Gordon and P. Marshall (eds.), The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2000)

‘The Company of Heaven: Identity and Sociability in the English Protestant Afterlife, c. 1560-1630’, Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques, 26 (2000)

‘Discord and Stability in an Elizabethan Parish: John Otes and Carnaby 1563-1600’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, 71 (1999)

‘Papist as Heretic: the Burning of John Forest 1538’, Historical Journal, 41 (1998)

‘Fear, Purgatory and Polemic in Reformation England’, in W.G. Naphy and P. Roberts (eds), Fear in Early Modern Society (Manchester, 1997)

‘The Debate over "Unwritten Verities" in Early Reformation England’, in B. Gordon (ed.), Protestant Identity and History in Sixteenth-Century Europe: Volume I The Medieval Inheritance (Aldershot, 1996)

‘The Dispersal of Monastic Patronage in East Yorkshire, c. 1520-1580’, in B. Kümin (ed.), Reformations Old and New: Essays on the Socio-Economic Impact of Religious Change c.1470-1630 (Aldershot, 1996)

‘The Rood of Boxley, the Blood of Hailes and the Defence of the Henrician Church’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 46 (1995)

The Face of the Pastoral Ministry in the East Riding, 1525-1595, Borthwick Paper No. 88 (York, 1995)

 

Peter Marshall

NEWS

15 Feb. 2013: speaker at Symposium in Honour of Patrick Collinson, Trinity College, Cambridge.

1 Jan. 2013: start of appointment as co-editor (reviews) of English Historical Review.

1 Oct. 2012: start of Leverhulme Research Fellowship for 2012-13, to work on new history of the English Reformation.

13 Sep. 2012: Plenary speaker at conference 'Sister Reformations/ Schwesterreformationen', Humboldt University, Berlin

6 Sep. 2012: Plenary speaker at Reformation Studies Colloquium, University of Durham

27-8 August 2012: Conference on Practical Knowledges and Skill in Early Modern England, University of Otago, New Zealand

22 May 2012: The Marjorie Reeves Memorial Lecture, St Anne's College, Oxford

10 May 2012: Plenary Paper at conference of Reformation Research Consortium, University of Oslo

28 March 2012: The St Robert Southwell Lecture, Fordham University, New York.

St Robert Southwell Lecture, March 2012

20 March 2012: The Christopher Durston Memorial Lecture, Peninsula Arts Centre, Plymouth.

5 March 2012: Radio 3 panel discussion on composer William Byrd and Elizabethan Catholicism.

Byrd