Dr Lucy Wooding
Dr Lucy Wooding
- Langford Fellow and Tutor in History
- Fellow Archivist
- Welfare Dean
Profile
I read history as an undergraduate at Magdalen College Oxford, where I also completed my DPhil under the supervision of Dr Susan Brigden. I was a lecturer first at Queen’s University Belfast, and then at King’s College London, where I became Reader in History in 2015. I joined the college as Langford Fellow and Tutor in History in October 2016.
College teaching
At undergraduate level I teach a range of courses on late medieval and early modern British and European history, including the further subject ‘Literature and Politics in Early Modern England’, the optional subject ‘Witchcraft and Witch-hunting in Early Modern Europe’, the interdisciplinary paper ‘A Flame of Fire: reading, reform and salvation in late medieval England’ and the special subject ‘The Trial of the Tudor State: Politics, Religion and Culture 1540-1560’. At postgraduate level I teach for the early modern strand of the MSt and supervise a range of research projects connected with late medieval and early modern political, religious and cultural history.
- Research
My research revolves around different aspects of the English Reformation, including both its political resonance and its cultural impact. I am fascinated by the disjunction and interaction between theological and political formulations of faith and the social reality of religious belief and practice. At the moment I am particularly interested in the relationship between different forms of religious media, how they were shaped by both political intervention and popular reception, and how they were framed by the cultural continuities between the late medieval and early modern periods. I am especially in thrall to the increasingly creative encounters between the study of history and the study of literature, and beguiled by the ways in which works of fiction could serve as a conduit for late medieval and early modern thought about religion, politics, and society.
- Select publications
Henry VIII (Routledge Historical Biographies, 2008; second edition, 2015)
‘“So sholde lewde men lerne by ymages”: Religious Imagery and Bible Learning’, in The English Bible in the Early Modern World, ed. R. Armstrong and T. Ó hAnnracháin (Brill, 2018)
‘Erasmus and the Politics of Translation’ in Translating Christianity, ed. S. Ditchfield, C. Methuen, and A. Spicer (Studies in Church History, 53, 2017)
‘Reading the Crucifixion in Tudor England’, in Discovering the Riches of the Word: Religious Reading in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. S. Corbellini, M. Hoogvliet, and B. Ramakers (Brill, 2014)
‘Catholicism, the Printed Book and the Marian Restoration’, in A Companion to the Early Printed Book in Britain 1476-1558, ed. V. Gillespie and S. Powell (Boydell and Brewer, 2014)