23 Sept 2025 – The President’s Lecture – Prof. Alexandra Walsham, Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge – Persecution and toleration in England, 1500-1700.
Professor Walsham, a leading expert on the Reformation and early modern England and President of the Historical Association, will explore the complex religious landscape of England between 1500 and 1700. This period was marked by dramatic religious shifts, of course, including the break with Rome under Henry VIII, the Protestant reforms under Elizabeth I, and the Catholic-Protestant tensions that culminated in the English Civil War. Professor Walsham will examine how individuals and communities navigated these changes, balancing religious conviction with the need for social harmony, and how the concepts of persecution and toleration evolved during this turbulent time.
The early modern period is widely regarded as an era of intensified persecution: it bore witness to concerted drives to eliminate religious dissent and to discipline moral and social deviants; it unleashed vicious outbreaks of sectarian violence and precipitated wars of religion; and it left a lasting legacy of hatred and prejudice that led to the formation of distinctive and mutually antagonistic confessional identities. At the same time, it has frequently been identified as the crucible in which a tolerant society was born: it was a time during which old assumptions about the inherent evils of toleration were debated and contested in pulpits, public discourse and celebrated printed texts, in which kings, parliaments and civic magistrates issued famous edicts that permitted and sanctioned the existence of religious minorities, and in which ordinary people found creative ways of coexisting with neighbours who adhered to different faiths. [Cambridge Faculty of History]