Speaker

Diarmaid MacCulloch

Diarmaid MacCulloch

British historian of Christianity, emeritus professor of the History of the Church at the University of Oxford and senior research fellow there. His books span the full arc of Western Christian history, from Thomas Cranmer and the English Reformation to a global history of Christianity and, most recently, a history of sex and Christianity from antiquity to the present.

MacCulloch’s reputation rests on works of exceptional range and original scholarship. His biography Thomas Cranmer (1996) is widely regarded as a model of the form. Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490–1700 (2003) became the standard single-volume account. A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009) won the Cundill Prize. Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2025) surveys two millennia of Christian thought and practice on sex, marriage, celibacy, and sexuality, drawing on his career-long access to church archives and primary sources across many languages.

Core positions

Christianity’s egalitarian impulse — expressed in baptism, in Paul’s mutuality-of-bodies passage in 1 Corinthians 7, in the female mystics of the medieval West — was genuine but almost always suppressed. The 12th century was a decisive turning point: shifting Eucharistic theology drove clerical celibacy, which in turn reshaped marriage theology and catalysed the great cathedral-building and parish-system innovations. The Protestant Reformation’s deepest sexual revolution was not doctrinal but structural — requiring clergy to marry and installing the clerical household as the model of Christian life, destroying the monastery as a competing ideal. On homosexuality, MacCulloch insists that Foucault’s narrative of a 19th-century invention is a category error: equal, lifelong same-sex partnerships appear in ancient sources; the classical unequal, age-structured institution is a different phenomenon. The historian’s role, in his view, is to unsettle settled facts — the epistemic hygiene that keeps human societies sane.

In the wiki