William Gibson, Ph.D., D.Litt., F.R.Hist.S., FSA

Emeritus Professor of Ecclesiastical History, former Director of the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History, Oxford Brookes University, member of the Faculty of Theology of the University of Oxford.

Professor Gibson is a scholar of the Church in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and has published widely on the major themes in this period. His principal publications are Church State and Society 1760-1850 (Macmillan, 1994); Religion and Society in England and Wales 1689-1800 (Leicester University Press, 1998); The Church of England 1688-1832: Unity and Accord (Routledge, 2001); Enlightenment Prelate, Benjamin Hoadly (1676-1761) (James Clarke & Co, 2004).

He has also co-edited two collections of essays, Religious Identities in Britain, 1660-1832, edited with Robert Ingram, Ashgate Publishing, 2005 and Religion, Politics and Dissent, 1660-1832, edited with Robert D. Cornwall, Ashgate Publishing, 2010. He is joint editor of two volumes: Oxford Handbook of the British Sermon 1689-1901 (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Ashgate Research Companion to World Methodism (Ashgate Publishing, 2013).

He is editor of the Journal of Religious History, Literature and Culture.

Select Publications

Samuel Wesley & the Crisis of Tory Piety, 1685-1720 (Oxford University Press, 2021)

‘Engines of Tyranny: The Court Sermons of James II’ in W. Gibson and G. Hammond (eds) Religion in Britain 1685-1900, A Festschrift for Peter Nockles, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, vol 97, No 1, 2021

A History of Lambeth Degrees: Sources and Studies (Burgon Society, 2019)

‘Thomas Frederick Tout at Lampeter: the making of a Historian’ in C. Robbins and J. Rosenthal (eds) Thomas Frederick Tour: Refashioning History in the Twentieth Century (Institute of Historical Research, 2019).

''None but Presbyterian Baptism': Samuel and Susanna Wesley, Monarchy and Marriage,' Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society (2018)

W. Gibson and Joanne Begiato, Sex and the Church in the Long Eighteenth Century: Religion, Enlightenment and the Sexual Revolution (I.B. Tauris, 2017).

W. Gibson and J. Morgan-Guy, eds, Religion and Society in the Diocese of St Davids 1485-2011 (Ashgate, 2015).

W. Gibson, ed., George Whitefield Tercentenary Essays (special issue of the Journal of Religious History, Literature and Culture, 2015).

W. Gibson and K. Francis, The Oxford Handbook of the British Sermon 1689-1901 (Oxford, 2012).

‘Mr Wesley’s Business: Debt, Dissenters and Distress, 1705’, Historical Research (2011).

James II and the Trial of the Seven Bishops (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

‘Samuel Wesley’s Conformity Reconsidered’, Methodist History XLVII/2 (January 2009).

Religion and The Enlightenment 1600-1800: Conflict and the Rise of Civic Humanism in Taunton (Peter Lang, 2008).