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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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”