Arnold Hunt

Research Associate Professor

Arnold Hunt is a historian of early modern Britain. From 2005 to 2015 he was a Curator of Manuscripts at the British Library, in London, with responsibility for historical manuscripts and archives from 1600 to the present day. From 2015 to 2019 he was a Lecturer in Early Modern British History at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Girton College.

 

His book The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audiences 1590-1640 was published by Cambridge University Press in 2010. It has been described as ‘a brilliant and original re-examination of the importance of preaching in later Reformation England .. an exceptionally stimulating discussion of what came to fill people’s minds after the statues had been burned and the altars stripped’ (Peter Marshall, TLS), and was awarded the Whitfield Prize by the Royal Historical Society in 2010. He is currently working on a second book, provisionally entitled Protestant Bodies: The Social Life of Gestures in the English Reformation, to be published by Cambridge University Press. He is also editing a volume of John Donne’s sermons for Oxford University Press. This includes the sermons that Donne preached in his London parish of St Dunstan’s in the West, and will be part of the new Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne, the first time that the sermons have been published in a critical edition with full explanatory notes.

 

He is planning another book, provisionally entitled Unorthodox London: An Alternative History of Modern Faith. This will explore the history of religion in nineteenth-century London, and show how the modern city creates new opportunities for religious innovation and experimentation.