Shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2018
Peter Marshall is professor of history at the University of Warwick, winner of the Harold J. Grimm Prize for Reformation History, and author of numerous books, including The Reformation: A Very Short Introduction. He lives in Leamington Spa, UK.
On Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation:
In writing Heretics and Believers I wanted to take a defining episode of England’s past and invite people to view it in a different way. ‘Narrative’ history sometimes gets criticised as naïve or unambitious, yet I deliberately chose a chronological and descriptive approach in order to underline the interconnectedness, as well as the open-endedness, of events – and to try to capture the lived experience of people with no idea of how things would finally turn out.
The challenge – which I hope I managed to meet – was to acknowledge the complexity without sacrificing clarity. Monarchs, martyrs, bishops and theologians, the great and the (sometimes) good, play their parts in my story. But I also wished to give full voice to the fears and hopes of ordinary women and men. A paradox near the heart of my account is that while English people often experienced religious change as coercive and traumatic, the Reformation simultaneously educated and empowered them, and recast the relationship between rulers and ruled.
I am genuinely surprised to have been short-listed for the Wolfson History Prize, though of course deeply delighted. The dialogue between professional scholarship and reading public that the Prize seeks to promote is one to which I have always been cheerfully and wholeheartedly committed.
