Alec Ryrie

Alexander Gray Ryrie (born 20 August 1971) is a British historian of Christianity. He has specialized in the history of Protestantism in England and Scotland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but also works extensively on the history of Christianity across the modern period. He was Professor of Divinity at Gresham College from 2018 to 2022. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2019.

Biography Ryrie was born in London, and raised in Washington, DC. After teaching for a year at a school in rural Zimbabwe, Ryrie read history as an undergraduate at Trinity Hall, Cambridge (BA 1993, MA 1997), His doctoral work, examining how early English evangelical reformers operated within the political atmosphere of Henry VIII's reign, was published as The Gospel and Henry VIII.

Ryrie lives in the Pennines with his wife and their two children, Ben and Adam. He completed a three-year Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship in 2018. In 2024 he delivered the Ford Lectures at Oxford University on "The World's Reformation"; in 2026 delivered the Hulsean Lectures at Cambridge University on "A History of Suffering and Power".

Works The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It (2025) The English Reformation: A Very Brief History (2020) Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt (2019) Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World (2017) Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (2013) The Age of Reformation: The Tudor and Stewart Realms 1485-1603 (2009) The Sorcerer's Tale: Faith and Fraud in Tudor England (2008) The Origins of the Scottish Reformation (2006) The Gospel and Henry VIII: Evangelicals in the Early English Reformation (2003)