I have a collection of papers that have been published in various journals over the years that I have made available to download for free via my academia profile. These papers span from the early years of my PhD research to the current time, and cover a wide range of Masonic history, though similar themes can be detected throughout, such as how certain Freemasons contributed to their locality, and how Freemasonry became a force for positive social change, through education in particular.

The papers cover the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which saw Freemasonry transform as a society, the Craft attracting such luminaries as Dr Jean Theophilus Desaguliers and Dr Francis Drake, writers and thinkers who not only shaped Freemasonry, but would help us look at Freemasonry in different ways. I was also attracted to the Romantic poets, whose work also assisted to transform the world around them, and it was no surprise that some of them such as Lord Byron and Thomas De Quincey, were attracted to secret societies and the secret science of symbolism, despite not being Freemasons themselves. Some of the papers also examine work that I have discussed in my books such as The Genesis of Freemasonry, The Liverpool Masonic Rebellion, The York Grand Lodge and more recently, The Lost Rites and Rituals of Freemasonry.

The papers themselves have appeared in such journals as AQC, The Philalethes Journal, Acta Macionica and the Journal for the Historical Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, and I have presented the papers at various conferences, such as the International Byron Conference in Venice in 2007 and the ICHF Conference at Edinburgh in 2009. I have continued to present the papers to many lodges over the years, in the UK, the US, Greece and Belgium, and more recently I presented a number of the papers for the Grand Lodge of Georgia lecture series. To download the papers please click on the titles in blue, which will take you directly to the pdf on my academia profile.

‘The Royal Arch and the Pathway to the Search for Lost Knowledge’, Knight Templar, Vol.LVII, No.6-9, (June-September 2011).

‘Thomas Garnett, the Lodge of Lights, and the Radical Enlightenment’, Philalethes: The Journal of of Masonic Research & Letters, Vol.72, No.4, (Winter 2019), pp.147-174.

‘The Lost Rites of the Age of Enlightenment’, The Transactions of the Leicester Lodge of Research, No.2429, 2018-2019, pp.95-113.

‘Dr. John Theophilus Desaguliers and The Newtonian System of the World’, Philalethes: The Journal of Masonic Research & Letters, Vol.71, No.3, (Summer 2018), pp.94-101.

‘The Warrington Academy and Freemasonry; Education, Charity and Self-help in Warrington during the eighteenth century’, AQC, Vol.130, (2017), pp.77-106.

‘Godfrey Higgins, Anacalypsis, and the York Grand Lodge’, Philalethes: The Journal of Masonic Research & Letters, Volume 68, No.2, (Spring 2015), pp.76-79.

‘Sex, Seduction, and Secret Societies: Byron, the Carbonari and Freemasonry’, Acta Macionica, Vol.27, (2017), pp.85-95.

‘Michael Alexander Gage: The Masonic Rebel and the Liverpool Waterworks Bill’, Liverpool History Journal, Vol.13, (Liverpool History Society, 2014), pp.31-43.

‘Thomas De Quincey: The Opium Eater and the Masonic Text’, AQC, Vol.129, (2016), pp.276-281.

‘Cornerstones and Keystones A Very Public Masonic Ceremony’, Philalethes: The Journal of Masonic Research & Letters, Vol.68, (Winter, 2015), pp.101-105.

‘Dr Francis Drake and The Grand Lodge of All England Held at York’, Philalethes: The Journal of Masonic Research & Letters, Vol.67, (Winter, 2014), pp.6-13.

‘The Liverpool Masonic Rebellion and the Wigan Grand Lodge’, The Historical Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, Vol.160, Liverpool, (2011), pp.67-88.

‘Society in Flux: The Emergence and Rise of Middle Class Civil Society in Nineteenth Century Industrial North West England’, Sheffield Lectures on the History of Freemasonry and Fraternalism, Vol.3, University of Sheffield, (2010), pp.71-99.

‘Freemasonry, industry and charity: the local community and the working man’, The Journal of the Institute of Volunteering Research, Volume 5, Number 1, (2002), pp.33-45.

‘Jimmy Page, Boleskine House and the occult themes found in the British music scene of the 1960s and 1970s’, The Journal of the Boleskine House Foundation, Issue 5, (December 2021), pp.12-15.

‘Freemasonry and the Islamic Mystical Movements of Balkan’, Philalethes: The Journal of Masonic Research & Letters, Vol.74, No.2, (Summer, 2021), pp.67-71.