Richard Finn, OP, joined the Dominicans in 1985. He served as Regent of Studies for the English Province from 2008 to 2012, and as Novice Master from 2012 to 2016. Author of Almsgiving in the Later Roman Empire (Oxford University Press, 2006) and Asceticism in the Graeco-Roman World (Cambridge University Press, 2009), he is also the Order's Provincial Archivist in Blackfriars, Oxford.
'While the Dominicans in medieval England have received various degrees of attention over the past decades, this book does a particular service in attending to the less remembered history of the Order from the Reformation onwards. Notably, it also covers the activities of the Province beyond the geographical boundaries of England proper, which includes not only Scotland, Ireland and Wales but also its “homeless” period in the Netherlands and its emergence within various British colonial territories. The scholarship is of a consistently high quality and the research is impressively comprehensive. There is also a welcome determination to bypass flowery narratives of the Order's past in favour of more complicated and occasionally less-harmonious accounts.' Steven Watts, Crandall University 'The scholarship is of a consistently high quality and the research is impressively comprehensive.' Steven Watts, Crandall University 'This is an accessible account of the history of the Order from 1221 until 2021 and one that should attract a great deal of interest from readers. Richard Finn nimbly makes his way through the early history of the English Province, incorporating many of the sources published in the last seventy years. He then significantly expands knowledge of the Order as it strove to deal with the political constraints of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and brings the history of the English Dominicans into the new millennium and lifetime of the author. Finn adopts an even-handed approach to the multiple sources, and is content to let the records speak for themselves. His book offers a very worthy commemoration of the eighth centenary of the Friars' arrival in England.' Michael Robson, St Edmund's College, Cambridge