Biography

Dr Fiona McCall, D Phil (Oxon, 2008) 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, April 2013) was commended by judges of the 2013 Samuel Pepys Prize.  She is a collaborator on a Leverhulme-funded project to produce a modern edition of Archbishop Matthew Parker’s 1561 survey of the Elizabethan clergy (Church of England Record Society, forthcoming).  She is also Departmental Lecturer in local and social history for the University of Oxford Department of Continuing Education and a fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford. 

Research interests

My current research investigates religious conflict in English parishes during the period of Godly rule during the Commonwealth and Protectorate period, using legal records for several counties, loyalist memories and other sources, with a particular interest in loyalist culture and resistance in opposition, developing out of my previous research into the loyalist clergy ejected during and after the English Civil Wars on which I published a book, Baal's Priests: the Loyalist Clergy and the English Revolution (2013). My published chapters and articles since then have looked at toleration of religious difference and prosecution of religious offences during the interregnum, religious violence, women's experience of violence during the Civil War, and at royalist satire against the interregnum church. Other current areas of interest include women, violence and the challenge to patriarchy during and after the English Civil War, and the long-term effect and memory of Civil War trauma on the family and on society as a whole.  In 2021 I published an edited collection for the RHS Historical Perspectives Series entitled Church and People in Interregnum Britain bringing together the work of historians of religion and society during the 1640s and 1650s. I am also involved with work to produce a published version and a database of the Parker Certificates summarising the status of the Elizabethan clergy around 1561.