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Turncoats and Opportunists

Alexandra Walsham: Francis Walsingham, 5 July 2012

The Queen’s Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I 
by John Cooper.
Faber, 400 pp., £9.99, July 2012, 978 0 571 21827 1
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... From the moment he died in April 1590, Francis Walsingham, principal secretary to Elizabeth I, has been the subject of competing myths. Catholics greeted the demise of a relentless opponent with relief and applause, and circulated lurid providential stories about the appalling stench that came from his corpse, which allegedly poisoned one of his pall-bearers ...

Trickes of the Clergye

Alexandra Walsham: Atheistical Thoughts, 25 April 2024

Atheists and Atheism before the Enlightenment: The English and Scottish Experience 
by Michael Hunter.
Cambridge, 223 pp., £30, July 2023, 978 1 009 26877 6
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... In​ 1607 John Derpier, an argumentative Wiltshire gentleman, was hauled before an ecclesiastical court for publicly proclaiming ‘the most hereticall & damnable opinion (that there was noe god & noe resurrection, & that men died a death like beastes)’. Derpier’s audacity was compounded by the fact that he had made his assertion in a church and in the hearing of the impressionable youth of the parish ...

Killing Stones

Keith Thomas: Holy Places, 19 May 2011

The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland 
by Alexandra Walsham.
Oxford, 637 pp., £35, February 2011, 978 0 19 924355 6
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... alternative to faith’. This is the influential master narrative to whose attempted demolition Alexandra Walsham has devoted much of her brilliant academic career. She is the first woman to hold the Cambridge chair of modern history and one of the youngest fellows of the British Academy. Her prolific writings are notable for their ...

Saints on Sundays, Devils All the Week After

Patrick Collinson: London Burnings, 19 September 2002

The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England 
by Peter Lake and Michael Questier.
Yale, 731 pp., £30, February 2002, 0 300 08884 1
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... out of the Foxeian martyrological workshop were available to illustrate such a rare event. Alexandra Walsham has already passed this way in her ground-breaking Providence in Early Modern England (1999) and other publications similarly focused on cheap print. Belief in divine providence as the explanatory motor of fortune and misfortune was not the ...

At the House of Mr Frog

Malcolm Gaskill: Puritanism, 18 March 2021

The Puritans: A Transatlantic History 
by David D. Hall.
Princeton, 517 pp., £20, May 2021, 978 0 691 20337 9
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The Journey to the Mayflower: God’s Outlaws and the Invention of Freedom 
by Stephen Tomkins.
Hodder, 372 pp., £12.99, February 2021, 978 1 4736 4911 8
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... dimension is crucial to understanding puritanism. Collinson thought so, and so do his disciples Alexandra Walsham, Peter Marshall and Peter Lake. The inner turmoil of a man like Wigglesworth should make puritans natural subjects for the ‘emotional turn’ in history. Puritans, we now acknowledge, wept as sermons melted their hearts and abased ...

Shriek before lift-off

Malcolm Gaskill: Could nuns fly?, 9 May 2024

They Flew: A History of the Impossible 
by Carlos Eire.
Yale, 492 pp., £30, November 2023, 978 0 300 25980 3
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Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa 
by Anthony Grafton.
Allen Lane, 289 pp., £30, January, 978 1 84614 363 2
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... mystical experiences inevitable, even for uncompromising puritans. The doctrine of providence, as Alexandra Walsham has shown in Providence in Early Modern England (1999), formed the backbone of Protestant popular culture in England, manifested in cheap printed works reporting secret murderers confounded by divine intervention and condemned witches ...

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