Professor Alexandra Walsham Lecture Six: Movements

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 sixth and final lecture, titled: Movements.

The concluding instalment of this series draws together the threads woven through the previous ones by examining the religious movements that drove the successive phases of Reformation itself. It provides a snapshot of three moments in early modern Christian history in which individuals driven by strong convictions coalesced into groups intent upon achieving radical social and spiritual goals. It progresses from the Anabaptist kingdom of Munster of 1534-5 to the explosion of sects in Civil War Britain, before turning to Methodism as the epitome of eighteenth-century evangelical heart religion. By teasing out further links between motion and emotion, it hopes to open a window into when religious movements emerge and why people unite to transform the present and reshape the future.

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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