Dr Chris R. Langley
Home Institution: Newman University, Birmingham
Visiting Research Fellow February - March 2018
Chris Langley Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at Newman University, Birmingham. He is a historian of religious identity in early-modern Britain and Ireland. He is interested in how contemporaries expressed their religious identity and how they understood Protestantism as a historical, political and liturgical phenomenon. He has published on various aspects of early-modern devotion and identity including his last monograph Worship, Civil War and Community, 1638-1660 and the edition The Minutes of the Synod of Lothian and Tweeddale, 1648-1659. He holds degrees from the University of Birmingham and the University of Aberdeen and is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Higher Education Academy.
While at IASH, he is completing a book on the relationship between the Church and interpersonal charity in seventeenth-century Scotland. This book aims to draw our attention away from institutional forms of charity towards more private types of philanthropy. The project shows how Protestant authorities did little to alter these practices. Instead, they often relied on them as an important source of financial support and information. Unregulated networks of aid continued to be an integral part of Protestant identity and an important method in which members of the laity engaged with, and sometimes influenced, the Church.