Books That Changed Everything

10 history books that changed the way I write - and think

From time to time, a historian will read a book that stops them in their tracks and changes the way they think about everything. Such books are not common; and of course it is perfectly possible for books to be very good and valuable to the researcher without shifting the way we look at the world and our subject. Indeed, some books fall down precisely because they try a bit too hard to be ‘groundbreaking’ and ‘paradigm-shifting’. The reality is that the books that actually do shift paradigms and change worldviews usually do not set out to do so; it is simply that the weight of evidence and depth of insight accumulated by the author turns out to be so convincing that it seeds a wholly new perspective. Furthermore, a book that one author finds to be paradigm-shifting will not be so for other scholars; what stimulates us to think differently is a subjective matter, relative to our existing preconceptions and prejudices, and quite simply whether we have thought before about a particular perspective.

In this post I want to explore how 10 different books have informed and changed the way I personally think about history, in quite fundamental ways. There have, of course, been works of fiction that have affected me just as profoundly – and indeed nonfiction books in fields other than history – but those will need to be considered another time. For now, these are 10 history books (in roughly chronological order of me reading them) that changed everything…

Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (1992)

Up to the age of 13, history was unquestionably my favourite subject at school. Thereafter it continued to be one of my best subjects; but I could not deny that I felt less enthusiasm for the 20th-century political history that was our sole academic diet up to GCSE than I had for the Crusades and the Wars of the Roses. I was eager to ensure I got the highest marks on Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, but I had no desire to read and learn more about them beyond the curriculum. That changed at A Level, where our focus was suddenly on the English and European Reformations. The heady combination of ideology, religion, and strangeness conferred by historical distance meant that the Reformation appealed to me more than any other historical subject I had yet studied.

My teacher quickly recognised this and encouraged me to read Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars, then only recently published. The Stripping of the Altars probably counts as the first academic history book I ever read out of interest and curiosity, out of a desire to understand a period more deeply. And it left a deep impression. Like my history teacher, it imbued me with a deep sympathy for the Catholic perspective on the Reformation; and while I understand now that Duffy’s book provoked a counter-reaction and extensive scholarly debate, I was deeply affected by Duffy’s decision to focus on the evidence for the religion of ordinary people rather than on religious policy. It helped me to realise that I was fundamentally not very interested in political history; all I really cared about was the history of what people believed, which seems to me then and seems to me now what matters most about the past. That remains as true today as it was when I was 17 years old, so I suppose I have Professor Duffy to thank for turning me into a historian of religion and belief.

2. Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists (1999)

Books that change the way you think about something will sometimes leave you raging as much as agreeing; it is not easy to have your cherished assumptions challenged. One of those assumptions I had when I arrived at university was an essentialist, black and white view of the difference between Protestantism and Catholicism. I only came to read Alexandra Walsham’s Church Papists (which was brand new at the time) as a result of procrastination, because I always used to sit in the history section of the college library. I noticed the new book and picked it up out of curiosity while putting off writing an essay, and quickly found myself angered by Walsham’s focus on a group of people who I thought should not have existed – Catholics who outwardly conformed by attending Protestant services. To my mind, post-Reformation English Catholics were the brave recusants – surely these Church Papists had not been real Catholics? But Walsham brilliantly demonstrated that religious history is always more complicated than it first appears – an insight that I have taken with me ever since. Few phrases are more important to the historian than ‘Actually, it’s a bit more complicated than that…’. I owe that awareness of complexity to Professor Walsham.

2. T. P. Wiseman, Unwritten Rome (2008)

My first postgraduate degree was in Classics rather than history, and in the final year of that degree I had to choose a subject for a thesis. I knew I was interested above all in Roman religion, and what fascinated me most about Roman religion was its attachment to tradition – even to the point of perpetuating many rituals whose original significance had long since been forgotten. By a stroke of luck, at this point T. P. Wiseman had just published Unwritten Rome, a book that pioneered a new approach to trying to reconstruct the rites and beliefs of the Romans in the archaic period before any Latin literature was ever written down. This, and Wiseman’s other book Myths of Rome, approached Roman and religion and mythology with such freshness – as if it were a culture being discovered for the first time – and dispelled the inherited idea that Rome was without a mythology or that Roman religion and mythology were borrowings from the Greeks, or that the origins of Roman religion were irrecoverable. Just as importantly, Wiseman painted an extraordinarily compelling picture of archaic Rome as a vibrant Italic city, to be understood in relation to the Etruscans and its other Italic neighbours rather than primarily in relation to Greece. Wiseman’s book inspired me to write a thesis on the archaic cult of Hercules, but more than that it opened my eyes to the possibilities of reconstructing the earliest phases of religious practices via archaeology and philology, even when they are buried under the accumulated baggage of a sophisticated civilisation.

3. Geoffrey Scott, Gothic Rage Undone: English Monks in the Age of Enlightenment (1992)

My interest in English Catholicism after the Reformation had initially been focussed (under Duffy’s inspiration) on the immediate post-Reformation period of the later 16th century, and I imbibed the still prevalent prejudice that the period between the end of persecution of Catholics and the re-establishment of the hierarchy in 1850 wasn’t very interesting. It had been a time of decay, decline and near-disappearance. Reading Geoffrey Scott’s extraordinary book about the English monks of the 18th century (among others) changed my perspective entirely, and convinced me that the 18th century was actually the most interesting period of English Catholic life. Precisely because Catholics were so marginalised, because they were ostensibly so out of step with the mainstream of British culture, I found their negotiation of a place in Enlightenment Britain absolutely fascinating. Monks, in particular, seemed the most counter-cultural people possible in Georgian Britain – and yet they existed, and even made their mark. Scott’s book spoke to a particular fascination at the core of my research agenda across all my writing, which is the continued existence of older modes of thought, belief and existence long after they have ceased to be culturally acceptable or mainstream.

4. Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-Folk in English History (2003)

Another book I came across quite by accident, but which altogether changed the direction of my research and led ultimately to my PhD, was Owen Davies’s Popular Magic. It was the book that convinced me that belief in magic was something that mattered, and something that had a history; it also showed me that the history of magic was more than just witchcraft (a subject I found rather forbidding in and of itself, perhaps because it seemed too much bound up with the history of crime, punishment and law), and it led me to read Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic. It was a few scattered reference to Catholics in Davies’s book that seeded the question in my mind that would become, in time, the subject of my PhD: what did English Catholics think about supernatural beliefs, and why? And how did their approach to the supernatural world differ from the English Protestant mainstream? I don’t think I would ever have expanded my historical interests into the realm of supernatural beliefs beyond religion had I never read Popular Magic.

5. Enid Porter, Cambridgeshire Customs and Folklore (1969)

The books I have listed so far had a more or less revelatory effect on me, but sometimes a book’s influence can be momentous simply because it presents such a perfect model of how to do something. Enid Porter’s Cambridgeshire Customs and Folklore wasn’t exactly revelatory in its content, but it presented me with what I still consider to be a superb model of how to gather and write about folklore. Up to that point, most of the books I had read about regional folklore had been rather slight; but Porter showed it was possible to go very deep indeed when pursuing the most perfect understanding possible of the folklore of a single county. It was this level of detail that inspired me, ultimately, to delve into folklore as a serious discipline myself – which resulted in my books Peterborough Folklore and Suffolk Fairylore, where I aspired to a level of comprehensiveness and completeness of coverage matching Porter’s.

6. Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon (1999)

Ronald Hutton’s The Triumph of the Moon was a book I was vaguely aware of for many years, but since I was not interested in the origins of modern pagan witchcraft (and indeed considered neopaganism rather silly) I saw no reason to read it. And then, for some reason, I found myself reading it in 2011. I don’t think I have ever found a nonfiction book so compelling. Indeed, so intensely did the book preoccupy my thoughts that I was run over by a motorbike in Cambridge while pondering it, and broke my arm. The Triumph of the Moon is, on one level, just a history of a new religious movement – albeit a very in-depth one. But in reality it is a far more important book than that, because it encouraged me to think differently about the concept of authenticity in religion. Again, my existing prejudices were challenged – in this case, the assumption that a religion is only worthy of historical study if its continuity can be authentically traced to a remote historical period. Hutton opened my eyes to the importance of creativity, adaptation and innovation in religion – which I now see is not just a feature of new religious movements, but equally important within religions like Christianity.

7. Antonia Gransden, A History of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds (2007–2015)

There is perhaps nothing methodologically groundbreaking or revelatory about the two volumes of Antonia Gransden’s two volumes on the history of St Edmunds Abbey between 1156 and 1301, but they are quite simply extraordinary in their depth and mastery of the vast source base for this medieval monastery. They represent the culmination of a lifetime’s work on the Abbey that has also been a very important part of my life, and as such they set me a standard to emulate. This was something I tried to do in The Franciscans in Medieval Bury St Edmunds (2023), where I tried to apply the same level of rigour and source analysis I had learned from Gransden. But it is hard to see how anyone will follow her and complete the history of the Abbey up to its dissolution.

8. Alaric Hall, Elves in Anglo-Saxon England (2007)

As I have already mentioned, I love books that give a history to something that no-one would have thought could even have a history. Elves are one of those things – a belief so elusive, and so ephemeral, that firm conclusions about exactly what elves were are difficult to attain. But what we can do, and what Alaric Hall manages to do in this remarkable book, is to meticulously record and analyse all appearances of and references to elves – from place-names to glosses, from materia medica to personal names. Hall’s book does not necessarily lift much of the mystery surrounding elves, but it does create a solid foundation for the further exploration of the subject and a model for a rigorous history of supernatural beings – something I attempted to emulate in Twilight of the Godlings (2023).

9. Miranda Aldhouse-Green, Sacred Britannia (2018)

I remember being very excited to discover that Miranda Aldhouse-Green had written a book covering the totality of Romano-British religion, which is a great passion of mine. Aldhouse-Green managed to bring a fresh perspective to a subject that can quite easily turn into a rather dry catalogue of theonyms, sculpture and inscriptions. What Aldhouse-Green manages to do in Sacred Britannia is put flesh back on the bones of Romano-British religion, making it possible for us to imagine the rites and beliefs of real people, disagreeing with one another, adapting to prevailing cultural trends, and introducing their own creativity to the menagerie of Roman, British and foreign gods.

10. Algirdas Greimas, Of Gods and Men (1985)

When in 2019 I decided to return to Lithuania as a historical subject, I was not quite sure where to begin in expanding my knowledge of Lithuanian religion and belief, and I ended up reading Of Gods and Men by Algirdas Greimas – a series of studies of Lithuanian folklore by a great scholar of the subject. I found the book almost overwhelming in its intensity – the dense web of connections Greimas was able to make, the overpowering and almost terrifying complexity of Lithuanian culture, the tantalising possibility of touching pre-Christian Baltic religion. It was a book that kept me awake at night, that filled me with yearnings I scarcely understood – certainly not what I expected of a book on folklore. And it lighted a fire in me to make Lithuanian culture known to the wider world that simply refuses to go out.