Professor Alec Ryrie: Why Protestant Missionaries in the Tudor and Stuart Period were More Common, and Less Successful, Than You Think

Event Details

Saturday 29 April, 3 - 4pm, OS.0.01, Michael Berry lecture theatre, Old Sessions House

It’s often said that Christian missions to the non-Christian world in the 16th and 17th centuries were overwhelmingly a Catholic affair, in the Spanish and Portuguese empires. This lecture will show that from the beginning of English expansion across the oceans, there was a persistent Protestant missionary dimension to their imperial projects – above all in North America, but also in the Caribbean, in the Near East and elsewhere. Substantial resource and energy was ploughed into these ventures; but they bore very little fruit. The reasons for this pattern of missionary failure include structural problems, entanglements with the nascent slave trade and with the English conquests of Ireland, and deep-seated convictions about what ‘conversion’ to Protestantism meant and how it might happen. The lecture will tour these problems and argue that the failure of early Protestant missions reveals some important truths about the nature of the period as a whole.

Alec Ryrie is Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University, Professor of Divinity at Gresham College, London, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He is president of the Ecclesiastical History Society and co-editor of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History. His books include The Age of Reformation (2009, 2017), Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (2013), Protestants (2017), Unbelievers (2019), and most recently The English Reformation: A Very Brief History (2020).

Tickets

Tickets are £10 per event. If you are booking 10 or more tickets of any given type (e.g. 10 tickets to one lecture, or 1 ticket to 10 lectures) within a single transaction, then a discount of £2 per ticket will be applied at the checkout, and you will only pay £8 per ticket.

Student discounts

There are a limited number of £2 student tickets available for each talk; these are not available for the tours. To access this discount, please use discount code TUDORSTUD23 when prompted. Please note that student ID must be presented with student tickets on the door of the events.