Peter Lake

University Distinguished Professor of History
Professor of the History of Christianity, Divinity School; Martha Rivers Ingram Chair of History

Peter Lake works on post-Reformation English History (mostly in the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods and in the realms of religion, politics and culture). He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the British Academy. In 2010-2011 he gave the Ford Lectures in Oxford. He has written twelve books; (co-authored with Richard Cust) Gentry politics and the politics of religion: Cheshire on the eve of civil war (Manchester University Press, 2020;); (co-authored with Michael Questier) All hail to the Archpriest (Oxford University Press,  2019, Hamlet’s choice: religion and resistance in Shakespeare’s revenge tragedies (Yale University Press, 2020)  How Shakespeare put politics on the stage (Yale University Press, 2016) Bad Queen Bess?: Libels, Secret Histories, and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford University Press, 2015); (co-authored with Isaac Stephens)   Scandal and Religious Identity in Early Stuart England: A Northamptonshire Maid’s Tragedy (The Boydell Press, 2015); (co-authored with Michael Questier) The Trials of Margaret Clitherow: Persecution, Martyrdom and the Politics of Sanctity in Elizabethan England (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011; 2nd revised edition MacMillan, 2019), (also with Michael Questier) The Antichrist's Lewd Hat (Yale University Press, 2002); (Stanford University Press, 2001), Anglicans and Puritans?: Presbyterianism and English Conformist Throught from Whitgift to Hooker (Unwin Hyman, 1988) and Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge University Press, 1982). He is also co-editor of six collections of essays. His book On Laudianism is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. He is currently working on several projects; with Michael Questier,  on a study of Catholic life writing in the post reformation; a book about the origins of the puritan godly life in the period down to 1640, and a book, provisionally entitled Memory, identity and the experience of revolution; Samuel Clarke and the invention of ‘puritanism’, about Samuel Clarke’s collections of godly lives; and a study of the Moretons of Moreton Hall, a Cheshire gentry family of no great apparent importance, but of very considerable interest, at least to him.