Storm's Edge: Life, Death and Magic in the Islands of Orkney
'A surprising page-turner, full of humour and startling details' THE TIMES
'If I read a better history this year, I will be lucky' TOM HOLLAND
'An astonishing tour de force' SPECTATOR
From Peter Marshall, winner of the Wolfson Prize 2018, Storm's Edge is a new history of the Orkney Islands that delves deep into island politics, folk beliefs and community memory on the geographical edge of Britain.
Peter Marshall was born in Orkney. His ancestors were farmers and farm labourers on the northern island of Sanday - where, in 1624, one of them was murdered by a witch. In an expansive and enthralling historical account, Marshall looks afresh at a small group of islands that has been treated as a mere footnote, remote and peripheral, and in doing so invites us to think differently about key events of British history.
With Orkney as our point of departure, Marshall traverses three dramatic centuries of religious, political and economic upheaval: a time when what we think of as modern Scotland, and then modern Britain, was being forged and tested.
Storm's Edge is a magisterial history, a fascinating cultural study and a mighty attestation to the importance of placing the periphery at the centre. Britain is a nation composed of many different islands, but too often we focus on just one. This book offers a radical alternative, encouraging us to reorient the map and travel with Peter Marshall through landscapes of forgotten history.
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Peter Marshall is a Scottish historian and academic who was born and raised in the Orkney Islands. He is Professor of History at the University of Warwick, a Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Marshall won the prestigious Wolfson History Prize in 2018 for his book Heretics and Believers.
Praise for Peter Marshall's Heretics and Believers, winner of the 2018 Wolfson Prize
'Peter Marshall has written a fine history of a momentous time as seen from the bottom up, drawing on a wide range of primary sources and his evident scholarship ... a riveting account of the losers as well, the English zealots and cynics who wanted a better world, or an unchanging one'
Economist
'An eminently readable narrative that avoids flattening out irregularities in the story ... Marshall's analysis, his control of documentary material and his imaginative manoeuvres between the corridors of power and the streets and alehouses is impressive'
Malcolm Gaskill, Financial Times
'A profound book with a light touch - and all the more impressive in that the author is covering almost a century of intellectual, social, and religious history ... It will be a long time before the book is surpassed'
Michael Coren, Globe and Mail
'A magisterial, panoramic and compelling new account of a phenomenon that was never just a top-down, institutionalised and ordered act of state. Peter Marshall reveals how the English Reformation was nurtured within the religious beliefs, culture and polity that it profoundly transformed, and thereby recovers its momentousness'
Mark Greengrass, author of Christendom Destroyed: Europe 1517-1648
'A remarkable book that will, without doubt, become the definitive narrative of the English Reformation for years to come. Marshall writes with deep understanding and great panache, moving us masterfully beyond tired debates about whether the Reformation was 'good' or 'bad' and bringing his subject vividly to life'
Christopher Marsh, author of Popular Religion in Sixteenth-Century England
