Dr. Graeme Murdock

Associate Professor in European History

Research Interests

My focus of research is the religious life of Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I study the history of Calvinism or Reformed religion in trans-national contexts. I have analysed the Reformation in Hungary and Transylvania and examined relations between the diverse confessional communities of Central Europe. I have also analysed the character of Reformed religion within French-speaking communities, considering different themes including popular religious violence and the application of programmes of moral and social discipline.

Select Publications

Books

The Cambridge History of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1452-1918. Volume 1 (1452-1792), (eds) Graeme Murdock and Howard Louthan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2026 forthcoming).
Cultures of Calvinism in Early Modern Europe, (eds) Graeme Murdock and Crawford Gribben (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).
A Companion to the Reformation in Central Europe, (eds) Graeme Murdock and Howard Louthan (Leiden: Brill, 2015).
Ritual and Violence: Natalie Zemon Davis and Early Modern France. Past and Present Supplement 7, (eds) Graeme Murdock, Penny Roberts, Andrew Spicer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Beyond Calvin: The intellectual, political and cultural world of Europe’s Reformed churches, c.1540-1620 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004).
Confessional identity in East-Central Europe, (eds) Graeme Murdock, Maria Crăciun, and Ovidiu Ghitta (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).
Calvinism on the Frontier: International Calvinism and the Reformed church of Hungary and Transylvania, c.1600-1660 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000).

Articles

'Religious communities after the Reformation' in Patrick Lantschner and Maarten Prak (eds), The Cambridge Urban History of Europe. Volume II Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025).
'On preaching from Isaiah against drunkenness in late seventeenth-century Debrecen’ in Yudha Thianto (ed.), The Old Testament, Calvin, and the Reformed Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 2024).
'Religion and Violence. Geneva's Just War' in Gianmarco Braghi, Davide Dainese (eds), War and Peace in the Religious Conflicts of the Long Sixteenth Century (Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2023).
‘Work, morality, and discipline in sixteenth-century Geneva' in Gabor Almási and Giorgio Liuzzi (eds), Rethinking the work ethic in premodern Europe (London: Palgrave, 2023).
'The aural and symbolic presence of Bibles in early Hungarian-speaking Calvinism' in Elizabeth Dillenburg, Howard Louthan, and Drew B. Thomas (eds), Print Culture at the Crossroads. The Book and Central Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2021).
'Religious life in rural Geneva' in Jon Balserak (ed.), The Reformation in Geneva (Leiden: Brill, 2021).
'The Dancing Calvinists of Montauban: Testing the boundaries of a Reformed community in the 1590s in France' in Karen Spierling, Erik de Boer, and Ward Holder (eds), Emancipating Calvin: Culture and Confessional Identity in Francophone Reformed Communities (Leiden: Brill, 2018).
'Do good fences make good neighbours? Living with heretics in early modern Savoy', Katsumi Fukasawa, Benjamin J. Kaplan, and Pierre-Yves Beuarepaire (eds), Religious Interactions in Europe and the Mediterranean World. Coexistence and Dialogue from the Twelfth to the Twentieth Centuries (London, Routledge, 2017).
‘Bibles in Central and Eastern European Vernaculars to c. 1750’ in Euan Cameron (ed.), New Cambridge History of the Bible vol. 3, c. 1450- c. 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
'Geographies of the Protestant Reformation' in Ulinka Rublack, The Oxford Handbook of the Protestant Reformations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
'Reformed Orthodoxy in East-Central Europe' in Herman Selderhuis (ed.), A Companion to Reformed Orthodoxy (Leiden: Brill, 2013).
'Multiconfessionalism in Transylvania' in Thomas Max Safley (ed.), A Companion to Multiconfessionalism in the Early Modern World (Leiden: Brill, 2011).
‘The Elders' Gaze: Women and Consistorial Discipline in Late Sixteenth-Century France’ in Amy Nelson Burnett (ed.), John Calvin, Myth and Reality. Impact and Images of Geneva's Reformer (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2011).
‘Responses to Habsburg persecution of Protestants in seventeenth-century Hungary’, Austrian History Yearbook 40 (2009).
‘Freely elected in fear: Princely elections and political power in early seventeenth-century Transylvania’ Journal of Early Modern History 7 (2003).
‘Dressed to repress?: Protestant clergy dress and the regulation of morality in early modern Europe’, Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture 2 (2000).
‘The Importance of Being Josiah: An Image of Calvinist Identity’, Sixteenth Century Journal 29 (1998).

Teaching and Supervision

I teach a variety of undergraduate modules on European history including ‘Europe Divided, 1480-1620’, ‘Cultures of Violence in the Reformation’, ‘Histories of Transylvania’, ‘Europe Reformed, 1540-1600’ and a Trinity Elective module ‘Ages of Empire’. At postgraduate level I supervise research projects on a variety of aspects of the religious and cultural history of early modern Europe.