Friday, October 7, 2022 at the Institute for Literary Studies in Budapest: Public Lecture by Alec Ryrie, Durham University.
This lecture will tell the story of the English Reformation, not as it appeared to ecclesiastical or political leaders, but as it appeared to the souls of English people. The soul, which before the Reformation was encased in a comprehensive set of rites and structures designed to carry it to salvation, was now stripped bare and stood alone before God. It was liberating, and it was frightening. The lecture will explore why, in England’s peculiar Reformation, the soul’s drama played out in a different way from all other Protestant countries. When we consider the emotional turmoil to which English Protestant souls were exposed, we can see how this lay the foundation for Pietism and Evangelicalism of later centuries – and also for the Deism and scepticism of the Radical Enlightenment.
Alec Ryrie FBA is Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University, Professor of Divinity at Gresham College, London, President of the UK’s Ecclesiastical History Society and co-editor of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History. He is the author of numerous books on religion in early modern England and Scotland, and on the history of Protestantism more widely: including the prizewinnning Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (2013), Protestants (2017) and Unbelievers (2019). He is currently researching a history of Protestant global missions in the early modern period.
