Academic & Teaching staff

Dr Anthony Wright

Professor of Ecclesiastical History

+44 (0)113 34 33606

Biography

Undergraduate study at Merton College, Oxford; Postgraduate Research Scholar at the British School at Rome; Junior Research Fellow at Brasenose College, Oxford; on the staff of the School of History since 1974 (as Lecturer, 1974, Senior Lecturer, 1992, Reader, 2001). Visiting Research Fellow, Jesuit Historical Institute, Rome, autumn 2002.

F.R.Hist.S., and member (former national committee member) Ecclesiastical History Society; Visiting Fellow, Edinburgh University (1983); member of the Accademia di San Carlo, Milan. AHRC Peer Review panellist.

Research interests

History of the Church; History of Church-State relations
History of the Papacy; History of the Counter-Reformation
History of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits)
History of Early Modern Europe, especially Italy and Spain
General Editor, Longman History of the Papacy, (now published by Pearson Education, it will run to three volumes when complete.)

Current Research Project

The genesis of French Jansenism

This research project aims to result in a book demonstrating the gradual division of the French Catholic Reform movement, often associated with those known as the 'devots', during the first half of the seventeenth century; and the reasons for that. Such division was emerging before the publication in France (1641) of the posthumous 'Augustinus' of Jansenius, not simply as a sequel to that. Those who were already distinguishing themselves from other 'devots' before that date were thus not yet identifiable as Jansenists, even if in many cases associated with the controversial development of the Port-Royal communities. Rather, the initial defining sentiment was an increasing reserve about the Jesuit involvement in Catholic Reform within France, interpreted by Jesuits themselves, both in the kingdom and beyond, as an alarming hostility.

To trace this evolution, the 'long decade' from the death of the founder of the French Oratory, Berulle, in 1629, to the deaths of Richelieu and Louis XIII (1642-3) has been studied. Archival sources in Rome, at the central Jesuit archive, and in Paris, at the Bibliotheque de Port-Royal, have been studied during two periods of research leave, the second of which was British Academy funded. Since the emergence of Jansenism, within Early Modern Catholicism, was to have such long-lasting and wide-ranging disruptive effects, not confined solely to France, but having an obvious intensity and eventual political as well as religious impact there, the importance of its original gestation seems undoubted. The project thus contributes to the historical debate on the nature of French Catholic Reform and the identity of French Catholicism.

This research has been supported by the British Academy.

Postgraduate Supervision

I am currently supervising Mark Lilley's PhD project on the editing of Augustine's 'City of God' by Juan Luis Vives

Teaching

Undergraduate Modules

Hist 2070: The Counter-Reformation, c.1500-c.1570
Hist 2071: Catholic Europe, c.1570-1648
Hist 3703: The English Reign of Philip and Mary, 1553/4-1558