Following fifteen years working as a staff tutor, based in Bristol, I relocated to the main campus at Walton Hall in 2010, where I am a senior lecturer in the Department of History. In all that time, I have been involved in various ways in the production and presentation of a wide variety of modules that reflect my own eclectic interests. These include a third-level interdisciplinary module on the Renaissance and a second-level module on the social history of medicine, a new field of scholarly interest in the department. I am currently chairing the production of a new level-one, interdisciplinary module on material culture entitled Making Sense of Things (A151), first due for presentation in May 2012.
In terms of research, I have an active interest across a wide range of areas, including various aspects of the religious, political and cultural history of early modern medicine in Britain and Europe. I am currently completing two books on these themes. The first, entitled The Miraculous Conformist: Valentine Greatrakes (1629-1683), the Body Pollitic and the Politics of Healing in Restoration Britain, charts the career of a celebrated Irish miracle healer in the 1660s and its relationship to wider themes of political authority and religious, scientific and medical debate in the second half of the seventeenth century. The second, provisionally entitled Medicine and the Politics of Healing in Seventeenth-Century Britain, focuses on the relationship between medicine, religion and politics in the seventeenth century, and a re-examination of earlier claims that medical reform and change in this period was largely inspired by the puritan revolution of mid-century. Much of the research for this work relates to a larger, ongoing project to create an interactive and comprehensive database of medical practitioners in early modern England, Ireland and Wales (c.1500-c.1750), for which I am currently seeking external funding.
I am also very keenly engaged with the history of witchcraft in early modern England. Recent publications reflect this interest. In 2003, I edited and annotated a collection of witchcraft treatises and pamphlets as part of a six-volume edition published by Pickering & Chatto, and two years later was responsible for a new, annotated edition of Daniel Defoe's A System of Magick (1727), as part of a new edition of the complete works of the author. More recently, in 2007 appeared two essays, one on the historiography of witchcraft in a collection edited by Jonathan Barry and Owen Davies (and published by Palgrave Macmillan), the other on 'Medicine, Witchcraft and the Politics of Healing in Late-Seventeenth-Century England', in O.P.Grell and A.Cunningham (eds), Medicine and Religion in Enlightenment Europe (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007). Two further bibliographic essays concerned with witchcraft's relationship to medicine and science are due to appear in 2012 in B.Levack (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America (Oxford, OUP).
Witchcraft, medicine and natural magic in the early modern period. Currently preparing a book on the 17th-century Irish miracle healer, Valentine Greatrakes.
Peter Elmer (1986), The Library of Dr John Webster: The Making of a Seventeenth-Century Radical, The Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, ISBN: 0 85484 054 0, 275 pp.
(i) Peter Elmer (1989), 'Medicine, Religion and the Puritan Revolution' in Roger French and Andrew Wear (eds), The Medical Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, pp.10-45, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,. ISBN: 0 521 35510 9.
(ii) Peter Elmer (1996), '"Saints or Sorcerers": Quakerism, Demonology and the Decline of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century England' in Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester and Gareth Roberts (eds), Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief, pp.145-79, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, ISBN: 0 521 55224 9 (hardback); 0 521 63875 5 (paperback, 1998).
(iii) Peter Elmer (2001), 'Towards a Politics of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe', in Stuart Clark (ed), Languages of Witchcraft: Narrative, Ideology and Meaning in Early Modern Culture, pp.101-18, Houndmills, Basingstoke, MacMillan Press, ISBN: 0-333-79348-X (hardback); 0-333-79349-8 (paperback).
Peter Elmer (1981), 'Medicine, Science and the Quakers: the Puritanism-Science Debate Reconsidered', Journal of the Friends Historical Society, pp.265-86, vol.54.
See also Open Research Online for further details of Peter Elmer's research publications.
