Richard Rex profile

Teaching Officers | Reader in Reformation History

Profile

Visit Richard Rex's web site.

Research Interests

Richard Rex's research interests focus on the interaction between religion, politics, and ideas in early modern England and Europe. He is interested in supervising magisterial or doctoral projects on the political, social, and intellectual aspects of English religious history from the late 14th to the early 17th century (including John Wycliffe, Lollardy, early Protestantism, and the English Reformation and its aftermath); and many aspects of the Reformation era in Europe, most especially relating to the interaction of 'humanism' with theology and religion. He would be prepared to supervise studies of French or Italian religious history from the late 15th to the early 17th century.


Additional information

Richard Rex is a Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Queens' College, Cambridge.

Although not a frequent performer in the travelling circus of modern academia, and generally averse to translatlantic flights, he nevertheless makes occasional guest appearances at the Academia Moriae, Amaurote.

Publications

Richard Rex's popular survey, The Tudors, was recently reissued in a revised and beautifully illustrated edition (Amberley, 2009).


His other books include the elegant thematic survey Henry VIII and the English Reformation (2nd edn. Palgrave, 2006)

and the controversial The Lollards (Palgrave, 2002).




'For an extended attempt to explicate the unimportance of Wycliffites (except in the addled minds of literary historians and Protestant ideologues in need of origins), see Richard Rex, The Lollards ( Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002).' (David Aers, Sanctifying Signs, University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), p. 233, note 21.)

Among his recently published articles are the following:

'New Additions on Christopher St German: Law, Politics and Propaganda in the 1530s', Journal of Ecclesiastical History 59 (2008), pp. 281-300

'Humanism and Reformation in England and Scotland'. In Hebrew Bible / Old Testament. The History of its Interpretation. Volume II. From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), pp. 512-535

'Which is Wyche? Lollardy and Sanctity in Lancastrian London'. In Martyrs and Martyrdom in England, c. 1400-1700, ed. Thomas S. Freeman and Thomas F. Mayer (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007), pp. 88-106

As well as writing his own academic books and articles, Richard Rex has translated a number of scholarly books from French, including Yves-Marie Bercé's The Birth of Absolutism: A History of France 1598-1661 (Palgrave, 1995) and Lucien Musset's The Bayeux Tapestry (Boydell, 2005).