Alec Ryrie

Alexander Gray Ryrie^[1] FBA (born 20 August 1971) is a British historian of Protestant Christianity, specializing in the history of England and Scotland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.^[2][3] He was Professor of Divinity at Gresham College from 2018 to 2022.^[3][4] He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2019.

Alec Ryrie FBA
Born	Alexander Gray Ryrie (1971-08-20) 20 August 1971 (age 53) London, England
Spouse	Victoria Ryrie ​ (m. 1995)​
Academic background
Alma mater	Trinity Hall, Cambridge University of St Andrews St Cross College, Oxford
Thesis	English Evangelical Reformers in the Last Years of Henry VIII (2000)
Doctoral advisor	Diarmaid MacCulloch
Academic work
Discipline	History
Sub-discipline	Reformation History of Christianity
Institutions	University of Birmingham Durham University

Biography

Ryrie was born in London, and raised in Washington, DC.^[5] After teaching for a year at a school in rural Zimbabwe,^[6][7] Ryrie read history as an undergraduate at Trinity Hall, Cambridge (BA 1993, MA 1997),^[1] completed a master's in Reformation studies at the University of St Andrews, and in 2000 took a DPhil in theology at St Cross College, Oxford.^[3][8] His doctoral work, examining how early English evangelical reformers operated within the political atmosphere of Henry VIII's reign, was published as The Gospel and Henry VIII.^[3] His supervisor was Diarmaid MacCulloch.^[9]

Ryrie lives in the Pennines with his wife Victoria and their two children, Ben and Adam.^[6] He has been a reader in the Church of England since 1997, and is licensed to the parish of Shotley St John in the diocese of Newcastle.^[3][8]

Career

From 1999 to 2006, he taught in the Department of Modern History at the University of Birmingham, and is Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University, where he has worked since 2007. From 2012 to 2015 he was head of the Department of Theology and Religion.^[8][10] He completed a three-year Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship in 2018.^[3][8]

A Fellow of the Ecclesiastical History Society (President, 2019–21),^[8] Ryrie is co-editor of The Journal of Ecclesiastical History and president of the Church of England Record Society. From 2018-22, he was Gresham Professor of Divinity, having been visiting professor in the History of Religion at Gresham College from 2015 to 2017.^[8]

Between 2015 and 2022, Ryrie delivered 32 lectures at Gresham College, as visiting professor in the History of Religion and Gresham Professor of Divinity. In 2022, he gave the Bampton Lectures, on "The age of Hitler, and how we can escape it."^[11] In 2024 he delivered the Ford Lectures at Oxford University on "The World's Reformation".

Works

• The English Reformation: A Very Brief History (2020)
• Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt (2019)
• Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World (2017)
• Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (2013)
• The Age of Reformation: The Tudor and Stewart Realms 1485-1603 (2009)
• The Sorcerer's Tale: Faith and Fraud in Tudor England (2008)
• The Origins of the Scottish Reformation (2006)
• The Gospel and Henry VIII: Evangelicals in the Early English Reformation (2003)