Gifford Lecture Series 2025: Religious Movements by Prof Alexandra Walsham
12 May @ 5:00 pm - 22 May @ 7:00 pm
A series of six lectures delivered over the course of two weeks covering Motion and Emotion in Early Modern Christian History.
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.
Agenda (all lectures start at 5pm and end at 7pm)
Monday 12 May: Upheavals
Tuesday 13 May: Journeys
Thursday 15 May: Migrations
Monday 19 May: Conversions
Tuesday 20 May: Commotions
Thursday 22 May: Movements
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.