James Tucker
I completed my BA(H) in History at Queen's University
, Canada, in 2005, writing an undergraduate paper on radical protestantism in Italy for Dr James Stayer. That fall I started at the University of Birmingham's Centre for Reformation and Early Modern Studies, where I completed an MA in 2006, writing my dissertation on early French reforming groups. After some time working in Birmingham and London, I started my PhD at Warwick in 2008. My viva was completed in December 2011, and my corrections accepted March 2012.
My Research
My thesis is to be titled "Vrais Chrestiens: Strangers in the martyrologies of Jean Crespin", and is supervised by Dr Penny Roberts. Although generally thought of as a a work of the French Reformed Church, the Livre des Martyrs sees Crespin include many accounts of people executed outside of France, from before the Reformation, or from other denominations than his own. I wish to study the portrayal in Crespin's martyrologies of victims who would be counted as 'strangers'- not members of the French Reformed Church, either for reasons of denomination, or of nationality. The Livre des Martyrs is happy to exclude, for example, Anabaptists from the ranks of its true Christians, but includes Hussites, Lutherans, and Italian spirituali. How did he treat these different groups? Did he portray the Lutherans as profoundly wrong, as he would seem to indicate in his comments on sacramental matters? Or were they part of the same movement as himself, as the inclusion of many Lutherans in the martyrology would suggest? What would a person or group have to do to be included in, or excluded from, the book?
Responsibilities
From 2009-2011, I was one of the post-graduate representatives to the Committee of the Society for the Study of French History. This year I am a seminar tutor for Warwick's first-year course The Medieval World, and lecturing on Religious Minorities for the second year course The European World. I co-organised Warwick's Early Modern Seminar for the academic year 2009-2010, and was also an editor of the History Department's Early Modern Forum.
Scholarships
I have been awarded the 2009 Huguenot Scholarship, which was generously offered by the Huguenot Society of Great Britain and Ireland and the Institute of Historical Research.
Papers
September 2009- "Confessional Argument in Jean Crespin's Livre des Martyrs", at European Reformation Research Group, University of Plymouth.
June 2010- "The Persecutions of the Vaudois in Jean Crespin's Livre des Martyrs, at the Society for the Study of French History Annual Conference, University of Newcastle.
September 2010- "Their Life Preaches: The Vaudois in Crespin's Martyrology" at the Fifth International Huguenot Congress, at the University of Ulster, Magee Campus.
September 2010- "Neither Lutheran nor Heretic: Luther in a Calvinist Martyrology", at the Reformation Studies Colloquium, at the University of St Andrew's, as part of a panel organised with Linda Briggs and Charlotte Mason.
October 2010 "A People and an Infinity: Crespin's Livre des Martyrs and the Vaudois" at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference 2010, in Montreal.
July 2011- ''The Livre des Martyrs and the question of Huguenot Identity'' at the Society for the Study of French History Annual Conference, University of Cambridge.
Contact me:
jameson dot tucker at warwick dot ac dot uk
A copy of the 1561 edition
(Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris)
Title page, 1563 Edition
(Zentralbibliothek Solothurn)