Reformation Studies Colloquium 2012

So, this was the week of the “Reformation Studies Colloquium” in Durham. I’ve seldom been to a better organised and catered conference! It was good to meet new people and to spend time with people interested in the history of the long Reformation – the bulk of whom come from a very different perspective to my own.

My own paper was entitled “Betraying the Reformation? John Knox’s Doctrine of Predestination in the Hands of the Seventeenth Century Federalists”. It was generally well received. Hopefully I’ll expand on the paper and turn it into an article for publication – but we shall see! The core of the paper was relatively uncontroversial in this setting, namely that the Torrance/Bell “Knox against the Knoxians” thesis is, well, wrong. Perhaps more interestingly in the secondary literature there is also a strong “Knox against Knox” stream of thought which argues that the thoughts Knox expresses in An Answer to a Great Number of Blasphemous Cavillations Written by an Anabaptist, and Adversary to God’s Eternal Predestination (1560) are not true to the teachings of his other writings . Needless to say I was arguing against that!

I’m also now four weeks away from submitting my doctoral dissertation with the viva tentatively scheduled for December. So a few weeks of frantically checking and rechecking footnote references lie ahead!