Gifford Lecture Series 2025 | Prof Alexandra Walsham | Religious Movements

The University of Edinburgh is delighted to host Professor Alexandra Walsham for the 2025 Gifford Lectures Series.

Mobility is both a central feature of human experience and a rich metaphor for the dynamic role that religion plays in the making of history. In our globalised world, people, objects, organisms and ideas travel through space and time at speed. These movements help to create opportunities, foster relationships, and forge identities, but they are also a perennial source of unease, anxiety, and danger. The turbulence that surrounds us in everyday life is mirrored by the turmoil that so many feel inside.

The Gifford Lectures 2025 are a series of variations on these resonant themes in the context of the profound theological, social, and cultural upheavals associated with the Reformations. Ranging across the period between 1500 and 1800, they explore the piety, ethics, and politics of physical movement in tandem with the internal transformations that took place within hearts and souls, bodies and minds. By probing the connections between motion and emotion in early modern Christianity, they seek to illuminate larger questions about the origin, agency, and impact of religious change.

Professor Alexandra Walsham is the 1930 Professor of Modern History and a Fellow of Emmanuel College at the University of Cambridge. Her research centres on the religious and cultural history of early modern Britain and she has published extensively in this field. Her books include The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (2011), joint winner of the Wolfson History Prize, and Generations: Age, Ancestry and Memory in the English Reformations (2023), which arose from the Ford Lectures delivered at the University of Oxford in 2018. She has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 2009 and was appointed a CBE for services to History in 2017. She served as editor of the journal Past and Present for a decade and is currently President of the Historical Association.

The Royal Society of Edinburgh will host a Seminar on Wednesday 21st May as part of the Gifford Lecture Series.
This will take place in-person at the RSE and involves an in-depth panel discussion on Professor Alexandra Walsham’s 2025 Gifford Lecture series on religious movements in early modern Christian history.

The seminar will be chaired by Professor Mona Siddiqui, OBE, FRSE, Professor of Islamic and Interreligious Studies, University of Edinburgh, VP International, RSE

To attend this aspect of the event, you book separately via the following link:
RSE Gifford Seminar | Motion and emotion in early modern Christian history Tickets, Wed 21 May 2025 at 18:00 | Eventbrite

There is also the opportunity to join online.