Emma Turnbull

• Anti-popery and anti-Catholicism
• Women’s experiences of the British Civil Wars
• News, print and political agency

My research has been chiefly on the political, religious and intellectual history of England in the first half of the seventeenth century. I am currently finishing a D.Phil on anti-popery in early Stuart England. It explores the relationship between anti-papal ideas and the tensions surrounding Stuart foreign policy, especially relations with Europe’s major Catholic powers. My work seeks to highlight how the binary constructs of anti-papal thought were actually being put to complex, malleable and even irenical political uses in this period.

I am also embarking on a new knowledge exchange project, ‘Women and War: Female Activism during the English Civil War’, in partnership with The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities (TORCH) and The National Trust. The project seeks to innovate the ways that the Trust communicates the powerful stories of women’s activism at a few key Civil War and seventeenth-century properties. I will be applying my knowledge of seventeenth-century religious and political tensions, as well as Civil War historiography, to National Trust collections in order to enrich the historical content offered to visitors as well as provide new public audiences for my research. 

http://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/women-and-war