Stella Fletcher ~ Honorary Research Fellow

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I have been associated with the University of Warwick throughout my academic career, as undergraduate (BA Hons, History, 1983–6), postgraduate (PhD, History, 1987–91, awarded 1992), research assistant to Prof. Michael Mallett (1991–3), and honorary research fellow of the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance (2002–). My Warwick experiences were recorded for the oral history project Voices of the University; Memories of Warwick 1965-2015.

Between times I was a lecturer in History at King Alfred’s College, Winchester (1993–2001) and have taught at the Universities of Liverpool (2005–9) and Manchester (2002, 2004, 2007–12).

Interests include

Cardinals and other senior clerics; Papal elections; Anglo-Italian cultural connections.

Fellowships and memberships

Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
Sometime member, Ecclesiastical History Society: committee member and honorary secretary (2005–14); historian of the EHS’s first half century (see below).
Sometime member, Society for Renaissance Studies: council member (1996–2010), editor Bulletin of the Society for Renaissance Studies (see below), member of editorial board Renaissance Studies (1996–2005), fellowships officer (2006–9).
Sometime member, Renaissance Society of America

Media

I have extensive experience of broadcasting, particularly on Vatican Radio and BBC Radio and Television, writing and presenting programmes on ecclesiastical history for the former and specialising in papal elections for the latter. I am on the BBC list of conclave experts and in 2013 recorded a podcast on the history of conclaves for the BBC History Magazine.

Publications include:

‘Religion’ in Gordon Campbell, ed., The Oxford History of the Renaissance, Oxford University Press (Oxford University Press, 2023), 87–122.
Ed., Benedictus: A Blest Life. Essays in Honour of Abbot Geoffrey Scott (Weldon Press, 2023).
‘Abbot Edmund Ford, secret agent’, British Catholic History, 35, 4 (2021), 440 – 61.
‘Renaissance cities through Ruskinian eyes: an English architect in Italy in 1902’, in Humfrey Butters and Gabriele Neher, eds, Government and Warfare in Renaissance Tuscany and Venice: Civic Identities and Urban Transformations, (Amsterdam University Press, 2020), 365–84.
‘Caught between fact and fantasy: the Borgia in English literature’, in The Borgia Family: Rumor and Representation, ed. Jennifer Mara DeSilva (Routledge, 2019).
‘Religion’, in Gordon Campbell, ed., Oxford Illustrated History of the Renaissance (Oxford University Press, 2019), 82–116.
The Popes and Britain: a History (I.B. Tauris, 2017).
‘Cardinals and the War of Ferrara’, Royal Studies Journal 4, 2 (2017).
Ed., Roscoe and Italy: The Reception of Italian Renaissance History and Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Ashgate, 2012).
A Very Agreeable Society: The Ecclesiastical History Society, 1961–2011 (EHS, 2011).

Annotated bibliographies for Oxford Bibliographies Online: Renaissance and Reformation (2010–22) http://oxfordbibliographiesonline/renaissance:

Pope Nicholas V; Pope Paul II; Pope Sixtus IV; Pope Innocent VIII; Pope Alexander VI; Cesare Borgia; Lucrezia Borgia; Cardinals; Bishops, 1400–1550; Bishops, 1550–1700; The Medici Family; Cosimo il vecchio de’ Medici; Lorenzo de’ Medici; Girolamo Savonarola; Francesco Guicciardini; Marino Sanudo; The Italian Wars; Italian visitors; Polydore Vergil; Edward IV; Richard III; Margaret Beaufort; Henry VII; Margery Kempe; Cardinal Thomas Wolsey; English Reformation; Edmund Campion; Margaret Clitherow; Concepts of the Renaissance.