The Spark of the Reformation: 500th anniversary of Robert Barnes' Sermon

'Casting the First Stone of England’s Reformation: Christmas Eve 1525 in St Edward’s, Cambridge'

On Christmas Eve 1525, an Augustinian friar named Robert Barnes preached a sermon in St Edward’s Church. What he said was provocative, but it was the context that made it explosive. It not only led to his arrest and imprisonment, a dramatic escape after faking suicide, setting him on the road that would end with burning at the stake fifteen years later. It also set in train a sequence of events that made it possible for Henry VIII to break Catholic England and begin to build something new in its place, eventually taking England’s religion somewhere that would have appalled both the friar and the king.

Alec Ryrie is Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University and a Fellow of the British Academy. Since reading History at Trinity Hall (1990-3), he studied at St Andrews and Oxford, taught at the University of Birmingham, and has been Professor of Divinity at Gresham College, London and President of the Ecclesiastical History Society. He is author of a series of books on the Reformation in England and Scotland and on the history of Christianity up to modern times, including Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (2013), Protestants (2017), Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt (2019) and The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It (2025).

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