Alexandra Walsham is Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Emmanuel College. She served as Chair of the Faculty of History between 2019 and 2022. She was an undergraduate and Masters student at the University of Melbourne before coming to Trinity College, Cambridge, for her PhD. After a Research Fellowship at Emmanuel College, she taught at the University of Exeter for fourteen years before returning to Cambridge in 2010. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2009 and of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2013. She was appointed a CBE for services to History in the Queen's Birthday Honours 2017.

Professor Walsham's research interests fall within the field of the religious and cultural history of early modern Britain and focus on the immediate impact and long-term repercussions of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations set within their European context. She has published extensively on a range of themes, including post-Reformation Roman Catholicism; religious tolerance and intolerance between 1500 and 1700; providence, miracles and the supernatural in post-Reformation society and culture; the history of the book, the advent of printing, and the interconnections between oral, visual and written culture; religion and the landscape; the memory of the Reformation; age, ancestry and the relationship between religious and generational change. Her research has been supported by grants from the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust, which awarded her a Major Research Fellowship for 2015-2018. She was Principal Investigator of the AHRC project 'Remembering the Reformation' between 2016 and 2019. Professor Walsham was co-editor of the journal Past and Present for a decade and sits on the editorial boards of several other journals. She has held Visiting Fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC, the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, All Souls College, Oxford, and the Goethe University in Frankfurt. She is currently president of the Historical Association.

Professor Walsham's books include Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Royal Historical Society, 1993); Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford UP, 1999). Winner of the Longman-History Today Prize 2000 and the American Historical Association’s Morris D. Forkosch Prize 2000; Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England 1500-1700 (Manchester UP, 2006); The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford UP, 2011), which was joint winner of the Wolfson History Prize 2011, winner of the American Historical Association's Leo Gershoy Award 2011, and winner of the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference Roland H. Bainton Prize 2011; Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain (Ashgate, 2014); and most recently, Generations: Age, Ancestry and Memory in the English Reformations (Oxford UP, 2023), which arose from her Ford Lectures delivered at the University of Oxford in 2018. 

 'Taming the Tongue'

Wednesday 22 May at 5.00pm, Emeleus Lecture Theatre, Lanyon Building

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the tongue was a source of profound ambivalence: it was perceived as both an organ of human eloquence and an instrument of iniquity and misrule. This lecture examines how and why the early modern church and state sought to govern and regulate speech and the ways in which the Reformation and the religious divisions it fomented at once energised and complicated this endeavour. It explores the renewed preoccupation with ‘the sins of the tongue’ that marked early modern English society alongside contemporary thinking about the virtues and value of remaining silent.

 'Telling the Truth'

The second lecture investigates how the imperative to tell the truth shaped social relations in the aftermath of the Reformation. It considers the Christian duty of fraternal correction and the Protestant doctrine of charitable reproof alongside the practice of passionate religious evangelism. It highlights the renewed emphasis that rival churches placed on openly confessing one’s faith and bearing audible witness to its truth despite the threat of persecution. Correspondingly, it analyses the anxieties that surrounded certain forms of silence, including dissimulation, equivocation, and mental reservation. It dissects the worries that surrounded the disjuncture between words and deeds and the problem of reconciling the demands of conscience with maintaining cordial relationships with neighbours and acquaintances who adhered to different faiths.

 'Exchanging Words'

Friday 24 May at 5.00pm, Emeleus Lecture Theatre, Lanyon Building

Taking as its point of departure the phrase ‘exchanging words’, this lecture examines what contemporaries meant when they complained that they were subject to ‘the persecution of the tongue’, before turning to explore the significance of the derogatory religious nicknames that proliferated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The defamatory speeches that people uttered against their neighbours not only ruffled feathers in local communities; they also led to cases in the church and civil courts, the records of which allow us to trace the linguistic contours of religious coexistence at the grassroots. The final section of the lecture investigates public disputes and dialogues as mechanisms for restoring unity, achieving reconciliation, and facilitating the triumph of the truth.

 'Talking Toleration'

Saturday 25 May at 11.00am, Emeleus Lecture Theatre, Lanyon Building

The centre of the gravity of the final lecture is the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It seeks to delineate social and cultural shifts that were reconfiguring what it meant to coexist with religious difference. It traces a series of discourses and practices that have frequently been linked with a diminution of the tensions associated with England’s long Reformation and the rise of ‘toleration’. It considers the evolving connotations of ‘charity’ and ‘civility’ in tandem with new styles of speech, talk and conversation, especially the premium placed on courtesy and politeness. It argues that we must attend to the changing character and tone as well as the content of verbal exchange. If language helped people to come to terms with the religious diversity surrounding them, it also served to perpetuate forms of religious exclusion. It retained a capacity to ratchet up the polemical temperature of interconfessional relations and to precipitate conflict and violence.