Alec Ryrie was born in London and grew up in Washington DC. He graduated from Cambridge University with a double First in History and received a doctorate in Theology from Oxford University. He is Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University and a licensed minister in his local church. An expert on the Reformation in England and Scotland, he is the author of the prizewinning Being Protestant in Reformation Britain and The Sorcerer's Tale: Faith and Fraud in Tudor England and is co-editor of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History.