Education: I received my B.A. from a small liberal arts college in northern Wisconsin (Northland College) where I pursued a degree in history and social science education with a Native American Studies concentration. I later entered the doctoral program in medieval European history at Northwestern University, where I studied with Robert E. Lerner in History, Richard Kieckhefer in Religion, Barbara Newman in Literature, and Sandra Hindman in Art History. My minor teaching fields of study were early modern European history and the history of India.
Teaching: I consider teaching to be an integral part of my work. I have taught in a very wide variety of settings both within and outside the university. I approach teaching as an interactive process: the ideal class is one in which the members coalesce into a shared learning community and participate fully in the class. I believe that this can be achieved in very large classes as well as in more intimate seminars. I always learn a great deal from my students, and appreciate that, through the classroom, I am able to branch out and devote attention to many areas of interest that lie beyond the boundaries of my own scholarship.
Research Interests: My research lies generally in the area of late medieval religious history, more specifically in Christian-Jewish encounter in Europe. I recently completed a book entitled The Insight of Unbelievers: Nicholas of Lyra and Christian Reading of Jewish Text in the Later Middle Ages (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), which explores the complicated and contradictory attitudes toward Hebrew texts held by a variety of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Christian scholars and shows how Nicholas of Lyra came to serve as an important mediator of Hebrew traditions for Christian Europe. Nicholas, a Franciscan who lived in Paris during the first half of the fourteenth century, composed the most widely used Christian Bible commentary in late medieval and early modern Europe. Active during the period of the first large-scale expulsions of Jews from western Europe, Nicholas employed Hebrew and Jewish tradition extensively in his Bible commentary, and also authored two scholastic treatises long considered by scholars as part of the Christian Adversus Iudaeos ("Anti-Jewish") tradition. The contradictions inherent in Nicholas's various approaches to Jewish teaching and the enthusiastic reception his work received make him an especially useful subject for studying the complexity of Christian relationships with Jews and their texts during the later Middle Ages.
An essay entitled "Literal versus Carnal: George of Siena’s Christian Reading of Jewish Exegesis" (Just out in Jewish Biblical Interpretation and Cultural Exchange: Comparative Exegesis in Context, David Stern & Natalie Dohrmann, eds., University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) highlights a long-forgotten Dominican friar named George Naddi of Siena (d. ca. 1392), master of theology, spiritual director of the Dominican sisters during St. Catherine of Siena's association with the order, and active teacher and administrator for the Dominican province of Rome. George edited a treatise containing 116 prophecies from Jewish Scripture concerning Christ's advent. With its Dominican authorship, fairly extensive argumentation against Jewish biblical interpretation, and a prologue characterizing the Jews as traitors to their own faith, the text appears at first glance to be a model of late-medieval anti-rabbinic polemic. A close reading of the text finds that George utilized this polemic to inculcate a particular approach to the study of the Bible for his students, discouraging overreliance on the popular literal commentary of Nicholas of Lyra, which George seems to have worried was overly dependent on Jewish readings of shared Scripture.
I am currently working on a new book, Banishing Hagar: Medieval Christian Conceptualizations of Jewish Expulsion and Exile. Between the years 1182 and 1492, well over two dozen edicts of expulsion were issued to specific Jewish communities living in western Europe. These expulsions were among the most dramatic manifestations of increasing hostility toward Jews in Latin Christendom. Based on the rhetoric of certain kinds of documents—particularly expulsion decrees and chronicles—scholars have tended to assume that by the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, expulsion of the Jews from Christian society was universally considered a desirable, or at least defensible, act of piety. But such assumptions require closer examination. My preliminary reading of contemporary texts suggests that throughout this period, the Church remained formally committed to a doctrine of toleration developed by St. Augustine in the fourth century, a doctrine that looked to the Jew and to Jewish exile as witness of Christian truth and that assigned to the Jews a distinctive place in salvation history. In this context, expulsion of the Jews was a theologically problematic proposition. Christians felt obliged to justify such policies, casting the Jew, for example, as the biblical Hagar, whose haughty insolence caused her to be banished from the patriarch Abraham’s benevolent protection, or as Cain, condemned to wander the globe in just punishment for the crime of fratricide. This study turns to largely unpublished Christian sermons, treatises, Bible commentaries, scholastic questions, legal decrees and chronicles to uncover and assess some of the ways Christian thinkers understood, justified, and criticized policies of Jewish expulsion in light of certain theological imperatives and to examine the nexus between Augustine’s doctrine of necessary tolerance and emerging policies of absolute intolerance.
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BU Religion Department
BU History Department