Mother Leakey and the Bishop

In this remarkable piece of historical detective work, Peter Marshall sets out to discover the intriguing links between sightings of the ghost of an old woman in the small English coastal town of Minehead in the 1630s and the hanging of a disgraced Protestant bishop in Dublin several years later.

Peter Marshall is Professor of History at the University of Warwick and co-editor of The English Historical Review. He has published widely on many aspects of the religious culture of early modern Europe, particularly in the British Isles, and his books include Mother Leakey and the Bishop: A Ghost Story (2007), The Reformation: A Very Short Introduction (2009) and Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation (2017).

What a surprisingly wonderful read! With this work, Peter Marshall has written one of the best narratives on seventeenth-century English history, bringing together the small world of a Somerset fishing village with the larger worlds of Sir Thomas Wentworth, Archbishop Laud, and even Charles I. Journal of British Studies An engaging and ambitious work...a remarkable achievement...thought-provoking and enjoyable. Tom Webster, Histoire Sociale-Social History, 42 [This] will appeal to the divergent fields of academic history and broader reading without either boring the academic or patronizing the general reader. Tom Webster, Histoire Sociale-Social History, 42 This is as fine an example of microhistory as is likely to be written. Craig Herline, Church History and Religious Culture Hugely enjoyable feat of historical reconstruction...intiricate story told with hilarious elegance. London Review of Books It is an ugly story but Marshall's way of telling it is irresistible and richly informative. Sunday Times. John Carey. ...an engaging and ambitious work... that will appeal to the divergent fields of academic history and broader reading without either boring the academic or patronizing the general reader... a remarkable achievement... thought-provoking and enjoyable. Histoire Sociale - Social History, 42. Tom Webster.