Professor Alexandra Walsham Lecture Five: Commotions

Prof. Alexandra Walsham delivers the 2025 Gifford Lecture Series at the University of Edinburgh, titled: Religious Movements: Motion and Emotion in Early Modern Christian History. This is the fifth of six lectures, titled: Commotions.

The fifth lecture explores the turbulence stirred up by the imposition and spread of religious change. One of the vernacular terms contemporaries used to describe such disturbances was ‘hurly burlies’. Others worried that the world was being turned upside down. From outbreaks of iconoclastic violence and sectarian riots to large scale rebellions, such ‘commotions’ were key elements of the confessional conflicts and wars that engulfed post-Reformation Europe. The antagonisms and passions that underpinned them are another dimension of the flux and instability that characterised societies divided by faith. Simultaneously, this lecture investigates evolving perceptions of the emotional and corporeal experiences of those transported by the Holy Spirit, which were increasingly diagnosed as forms of religious ‘enthusiasm’.

The prestigious Gifford Lectureships, held at the Universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, and St Andrews, have been delivered annually since 1888 by a succession of distinguished international scholars. The Lectureships were established by Adam Lord Gifford (1820-1887) to ‘promote and diffuse the study of Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term – in other words, the knowledge of God’, and have enabled a most notable field of scholars to contribute to the advancement of theological thought. Read more about the Gifford Lectures: https://cahss.ed.ac.uk/news-events/le...

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