Fiona McCall

Dr Fiona McCall, D Phil (Oxon, 2008) is an early modern historian specialising in sixteenth and seventeenth-century religious and social history. Her work focuses on anti-clericalism, religious conflict, family and memory within parishes during and after the English Civil war and interregnum. Her book on the experiences of loyalist clergy and their families during this period: Baal's Priests: the Loyalist Clergy and the English Revolution (Ashgate Press, April 2013) was commended by judges of the 2013 Samuel Pepys Prize.

She is Departmental Lecturer in local and social history for the University of Oxford Department of Continuing Education, a fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford and Senior Lecturer in History for the University of Portsmouth

Research Interests

Her current British Academy-funded research investigates religious conflict in English parishes during the period of Godly rule during the Commonwealth and Protectorate period, using quarter sessions and assize records for several counties, loyalist memories and other sources, with a particular interest in loyalist culture and resistance in opposition, developing out of previous research into the loyalist clergy ejected during and after the English Civil Wars. Other areas of interest include women, violence and the challenge to patriarchy during and after the English Civil War, and the long-term effect and memory of Civil War trauma on the family and on society as a whole. She is a collaborator on a Leverhulme-funded project to produce a modern edition of Archbishop Matthew Parker’s 1561 survey of the Elizabethan clergy (Church of England Record Society, forthcoming).

Recent and Forthcoming Publications

Unruly People: Ungodly Religion in the English parish, 1645-1660 (Routledge, under contract)

Church and People in Interregnum Britain, edited collection, editor and author, with introduction by Professor Bernard Capp (University of Warwick) (Palgrave/RHS New Perspectives Series, forthcoming, 2021)

'Outrages in the church: religious violence in the English parish after the English Civil Wars’, in Religion and Conflict in Medieval and Early Modern Worlds, ed. Natasha Hodgson, John McCallum, Nicholas Morton and Amy Fuller (Routledge, forthcoming, 2020)

‘Tolerable and intolerable local practices of religion during the English Interregnum’, in Toleration and Religious Freedom in the Early Modern and Contemporary World, ed. Mariëtta van der Tol, Carys Brown, John Adenitire, Emily S. Kempson (Peter Lang, forthcoming, 2020)

'Women’s experience of violence and suffering as represented in loyalist accounts of the English Civil War’, in Women’s History Review, Vol. 28 (June 2019), pp. 1136-1156

‘A web of crosses and mercies interlaced: breakdown and consolidation of family patterns amongst loyalist Anglicans under the pressures of Civil War’, in Childhood, Youth and Religious Minorities in Early Modern Europe, ed. Lucy Underwood, Tali Berner (Palgrave, 2019)

Continuing civil war by other means: royalist mockery of the interregnum church’, in Mark Knights, Adam Morton (eds), The Power of Laughter and Satire in Early Modern Britain c.1520-1820: Contestation and Construction (Boydell, 2017)