Dr Alexandra Gajda FSA FRHistS

I am a scholar of the political, religious and intellectual life of sixteenth and early seventeenth-century England. My first monograph explored the interface between politics and ideas in sixteenth-century England by examining the impact of the career of Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex on late Elizabethan political culture. My current research is centred on the relationship between the religious and constitutional history of the Reformation in the British Isles: I am writing a history of Parliament and the Reformation in sixteenth century England and Wales, and various articles on the relationship of church and state in the sixteenth century.

My research also focuses on early modern historiography and historical thought, and I am engaged in a series of studies of William Camden’s Annals of the Reign of Elizabeth I, the first history of Queen Elizabeth, which continues to shape the narrative of the Queen’s reign to this day. With Henry Woudhuysen, I am editing the letters of the poet and statesman Fulke Greville for the forthcoming edition of Greville’s Complete Works for OUP.

I am currently working on two main projects: the first addresses ideas about the antiquity and authority of Parliament as expressed in polemical debates about the legitimacy of the Protestant Church; the second is a study of travel and the political education of English gentlemen in the Elizabethan and early Stuart period. I am also interested in ideas of statecraft and reason of state in Elizabethan and Jacobean politics.

View all publications on the Faculty of History website