Dr Joshua Rushton

Profile

I am a social and cultural historian of early modern religious life with a focus on Catholicism and Italy. I completed my BA in History and MA in Renaissance Studies and was awarded my PhD by the University of Leeds in November 2023. My doctoral project, funded by the AHRC, examined the relationship between urban devotional life, Catholic Reform, and sacred immanence in the city of Venice. From January 2024, I am a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Leeds where I am primarily focussing on revising my thesis into a monograph under the working title Encountering the Sacred in Early Modern Venice, 1500-1800. In addition to preparing my doctoral research for publication, I am developing a new research focus on Catholicism and the environment in early modern Italy.

My Visiting Research Fellowship at Leeds (and Leeds email access!) ends in January 2025. From September 2024 I am Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Manchester. Please feel free to get in touch with me there at joshua.rushton@manchester.ac.uk or via Twitter @JoshuaRushton8. 

Research interests

My research focuses on understanding how early modern religious change was understood and experienced. I relate my study of early modern Catholicism to broader cultural and spiritual shifts such as changes in Christian worldviews, assumptions about the immanence of the holy, and more recently, transformed ideas about the natural environment. I have broader interests in the history of print, the European Reformations, and environmental humanities. 

Publications 

Journal articles 

• Joshua Rushton, ‘Nourishing Catholic souls in post-Tridentine miracle narratives’, Renaissance Studies (2024 – Early View) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/rest.12943

Book reviews 

• Review of The Inner Life of Catholic Reform: From the Council of Trent to the Enlightenment by Ulrich L. Lehner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), Renaissance Studies (2024 – Early View) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/rest.12930

• Review of Sacred Journeys in the Counter-Reformation: Long-Distance Pilgrimage in Northwest Europe by Elizabeth C. Tingle (Boston: De Gruyter Press, 2020), Social History, 46.4 (2021), 462-464

• Review of Venice’s Secret Service: Organising Intelligence in The Renaissance by Ioanna Iordanou (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), Journal of Intelligence History, 20.2 (2021), 244-246

Public facing articles 

• Joshua Rushton, ‘Reading Love Magic in Sixteenth-Century Italy: The Cases of Andriana Savorgnan and Lucrezia the Greek’, The Enquiring Eye Journal of the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, 1.1 (2017), 40-44

Qualifications

• PhD History
• MA Renaissance Studies
• BA History

Professional memberships

• Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
• Associate Fellow of Advance HE