Dr Fiona McCall

Dr Fiona McCall, D Phil (Lady Margaret Hall, 2008) joined the Department for Continuing Education as a part-time departmental lecturer in local history in November.  She 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, 2013) was commended by judges of the 2013 Samuel Pepys Prize.  Her most recently published paper looked at the experiences of clergy in Leicestershire, a county at the heart of Civil War conflict, using parliamentary committee records in the Walker Archive in the Bodleian Library.  A book chapter on royalist humour against the interregnum church and clergy is forthcoming soon.  Her longer-term research project, funded by the British Academy, looks at loyalist resistance to the religious changes of the 1640s and 1650s within individual parishes, using local quarter sessions records and churchwardens’ accounts.  She is also a collaborator with Professor Helen Parish, Dr Felicity Heal and Professor Ralph Houlbrooke on a University of Oxford/University of Reading Leverhulme-funded project to produce a modern edition of Archbishop Matthew Parker’s 1561 survey of the Elizabethan clergy for the Church of England Record Society.  

She has been a tutor for the Department for Continuing Education since 2009, firstly as a weekly class tutor, where she taught courses on the English Civil War, Crime and Punishment and on John Aubrey.  She currently tutors on the Online Advanced Diploma in Local History, where she is very inspired by the diverse talents of the students she teaches from around the globe.  In March she is speaking on   the religious context of the Civil War at the department’s day school, The English Revolution: Social History in a World Turned Upside Down, organised by Dr Jonathan Healey.

 As well as working for the department, she is also a part-time lecturer in early modern history for the University of Portsmouth, for whom she is organising two conferences this year, an interdisciplinary conference to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, Shakespearian Communities (14-16 April 2016) and ‘The People All Changed’: Religion and Society in Britain during the 1650s (15-16 July 2016).  Contributions welcome!  She previously taught sixteenth and seventeenth century history at Newman University in Birmingham and at the University of Reading.  She did her (second) first degree with the Open University, after a first degree in Physics from the University of Durham, when she was a finalist in University Challenge in a year too long ago to mention.  She had a subsequent career as an information manager in industry and as a university librarian.  She is divorced with one son, Thomas, at university.  In what little spare time she has, along with contributing to her own history blog (http://fionamccall.tumblr.com/) is keen on most things cultural, especially art, literature and music, and is looking forward to a tour of Slovakia in the summer with the University of Portsmouth choir.

Publications

Baal’s Priests: the Loyalist Clergy and the English Revolution (Ashgate, 2013), monograph based on my thesis, was published by Ashgate in their St Andrews Studies in Reformation History series.  In October 2013 this book was shortlisted for the Samuel Pepys Prize. 

‘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, forthcoming, 2016)

 ‘Scandalous and malignant?: Settling scores against the Leicestershire clergy after the first Civil War’, Midland History, 40 (2, Autumn 2015), pp. 220–242                                          

‘The Religious Settlement of Elizabeth I: 1559-1571: Did it providing a lasting solution to England’s religious divisions?’, Modern History Review, 17 (3, February 2015), pp. 18-22

 ‘Children of Baal: Clergy Families and Their Memories of Sequestration’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly, 76 (4, 2013), pp. 617-38

The Parker Certificates, Church of England Record Society (forthcoming)

‘The King’s Smuggler: Jane Whorwood, Secret Agent to Charles I’, Oxoniensia, 76 (2011), p. 294 (Book Review)