Kirsten Macfarlane
I am an Associate Professor of Early Modern Religious and Intellectual History at the University of Chicago. My research encompasses the history of both Western Europe and North America in the period from the Reformation to the early Enlightenment. Prior to joining the University of Chicago, I was an Associate Professor at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Keble College (2019-2024), and a Title A Research Fellow (JRF) in Intellectual History at Trinity College, Cambridge University (2017-2019). I have also held Visiting Fellowships at the Houghton Library, Harvard; the Massachusetts Historical Society; the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies; the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences; KU Leuven; and Lund University.
To date, my research has mostly been concerned with the history of biblical scholarship in Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, focussing not just on its production by Latin-speaking scholarly elites, but also on its dissemination across the wider literate lay population and interactions with vernacular religious culture. I’m particularly interested in the early modern study of Hebrew and post-biblical Jewish literature by Reformed Protestant scholars, a topic which is central to my first book on the controversial English Hebraist Hugh Broughton (1549-1612), titled 'Biblical Scholarship in an Age of Controversy: The Polemical World of Hugh Broughton (1549-1612)', published with Oxford University Press in 2021.
In line with these interests, I have co-edited a large volume of essays with Prof Joanna Weinberg and Dr Piet van Boxel on the early modern European reception of the Mishnah. Titled 'The Mishnaic Moment: Jewish Law among Jews and Christians in Early Modern Europe', this volume was published with OUP's Oxford-Warburg Studies series in 2022.
Looking across the Atlantic, I’m also interested in the influence of late sixteenth-century European biblical criticism on colonial North America, and particularly how advances in Hebrew and Greek scholarship in Europe shaped the theological disputes and vernacular literature of New England. Some of this new research will appear in my second book project, which studies the cultish following of Broughton in Jacobean London and seventeenth-century New England, and uses it to offer a new account of the relationship between neo-Latin biblical scholarship, popular piety, and religious culture in this period. Entitled 'Lay Learning and the Bible in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World', this book will appear with OUP in 2024.
I am also a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for Lias, a peer-reviewed journal published by Peeters that provides a platform for the study, edition, and translation of primary texts relating to the intellectual and cultural history of early modern Europe, in any source language. For more details, including information for authors, see: http://poj.peeters-leuven.be/content.php?url=journal&journal_code=LIAS
I have published in a range of journals on topics from John Lightfoot and the Westminster Assembly to infant baptism and New England heterodoxy.
To date, my research has mostly been concerned with the history of biblical scholarship in Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, focussing not just on its production by Latin-speaking scholarly elites, but also on its dissemination across the wider literate lay population and interactions with vernacular religious culture. I’m particularly interested in the early modern study of Hebrew and post-biblical Jewish literature by Reformed Protestant scholars, a topic which is central to my first book on the controversial English Hebraist Hugh Broughton (1549-1612), titled 'Biblical Scholarship in an Age of Controversy: The Polemical World of Hugh Broughton (1549-1612)', published with Oxford University Press in 2021.
In line with these interests, I have co-edited a large volume of essays with Prof Joanna Weinberg and Dr Piet van Boxel on the early modern European reception of the Mishnah. Titled 'The Mishnaic Moment: Jewish Law among Jews and Christians in Early Modern Europe', this volume was published with OUP's Oxford-Warburg Studies series in 2022.
Looking across the Atlantic, I’m also interested in the influence of late sixteenth-century European biblical criticism on colonial North America, and particularly how advances in Hebrew and Greek scholarship in Europe shaped the theological disputes and vernacular literature of New England. Some of this new research will appear in my second book project, which studies the cultish following of Broughton in Jacobean London and seventeenth-century New England, and uses it to offer a new account of the relationship between neo-Latin biblical scholarship, popular piety, and religious culture in this period. Entitled 'Lay Learning and the Bible in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World', this book will appear with OUP in 2024.
I am also a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for Lias, a peer-reviewed journal published by Peeters that provides a platform for the study, edition, and translation of primary texts relating to the intellectual and cultural history of early modern Europe, in any source language. For more details, including information for authors, see: http://poj.peeters-leuven.be/content.php?url=journal&journal_code=LIAS
I have published in a range of journals on topics from John Lightfoot and the Westminster Assembly to infant baptism and New England heterodoxy.
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Publications by Kirsten Macfarlane
"Lay Learning and the Bible in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World" offers an alternative account of popular religion in early modernity by reconstructing a striking and unstudied community of seventeenth-century puritan immigrants to North America. Composed of tradespeople without a university education, this community offers unparalleled evidence for lay engagement with even the most abstruse and challenging concerns of contemporaneous biblical scholarship. Drawing on whatever resources they could find, this group taught themselves the languages of biblical criticism; immersed themselves in the most specialised questions of controversial theology; and then promulgated, through their hard-earned learning, an unprecedentedly inclusive vision of education, society, and the church. By recovering their lives and interests, this book presents a new vision of lay puritanism in the Atlantic world, one marked by far greater ambition, critical thought, and intellectual boldness than ever before suspected.
Building on their research, this article reconstructs the dynamics that generated and sustained interest in 1 Enoch in early modernity. Its starting point is the observation that, in many ways, it is surprising that 1 Enoch attracted much interest from early modern Christians at all. There were several factors—not least the incompatibility of Enochic angelology with early modern angelology—which, on the surface of things, ought to have mitigated against the Syncellus fragments gaining traction in seventeenth-century Europe.
To explain why interest in 1 Enoch prevailed despite these factors, this article offers three observations. Firstly, it expands our understanding of the nature of interest in 1 Enoch prior to 1606. Secondly, it corrects a subtle but far-reaching misinterpretation of Scaliger’s comments on the Syncellus fragments. Finally, it reconstructs three trends which arose after Scaliger’s publication of the fragments and which functioned to perpetuate interest in 1 Enoch. As the conclusion outlines, this account should interest not only scholars of Enoch's afterlives but also historians of scholarship for the light it sheds on the development of biblical criticism before the Enlightenment.
At the time, however, such methods were not simply an academic concern, and they pointed in many directions other than that of secular modernity. Biblical Scholarship in an Age of Controversy establishes previously unknown religious and cultural contexts for the practice of biblical criticism in the early modern period, and reveals the diversity of its effects. The central figure in this story is the itinerant and bitterly divisive English scholar Hugh Broughton (1549-1612), whose prolific writings in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and English offer a new and surprising image of Protestant intellectual culture. In this image, scholarly advances were not impeded but inspired by strict scripturalism; criticism was driven by missionary ideals, even as actual proselytization was sidelined; and learned neo-Latin texts were repackaged to appeal to ordinary believers. Seen through the eyes of Broughton and his neglected colleagues and followers, the complex and unexpected contributions of reformed Protestant intellectuals and laypeople to longer-term religious and cultural change finally become visible.
However, if you are struggling to gain access anyway, please do send me a message and I will provide a PDF copy.
This article provides the first substantial analysis of the genealogies prefixed to the King James Bible (1611), giving an unprecedented account of their contemporary significance and purpose, as well as an examination of the collaboration between the Hebraist Hugh Broughton and the cartographer John Speed that produced them. By placing the diagrams within the context of both Speed and Broughton’s greater interests and projects, as well through the use of several previously unknown drafts, it will show that the genealogies had a very clear polemical function, emerged from a subsidiary of the thriving field of chronology, and can be placed within a longstanding visual tradition capable of explaining many of the peculiarities on which modern scholars have remained silent. Finally, it will argue that the genealogies were an innovative kind of ‘reading technology’ produced through a sophisticated synthesis of sacred and secular scholarship with the aim of distilling and transmitting the products of learned, Latinate scholarship to an unlearned, English readership.
Note: Posting a copy of this paper would infringe the copyright. Please access the paper via the link above, which requires no subscription or log-in. If you still cannot gain access, please email me and I will happily send a pdf.
It is well known that the sixteenth century’s surge of vernacular biblical translation was enabled by a greater knowledge of Greek and Hebrew. But by the century’s end, the most exciting work on these languages had far surpassed issues of comprehension. In the chiefly continental, Latinate world of the most advanced biblical scholarship, scholars studied the Semitic influence on New Testament Greek, explained strange features of the Gospels through post-biblical Judaism, and analysed the historical-philological connections between the Testaments. Despite the significant implications such work had for vernacular translation, the relationship between these two fields has rarely been explored. This article will offer a preliminary study by using new evidence relating to the biblical scholarship and translation efforts of the English Hebraist Hugh Broughton (1549–1612). It will demonstrate how the theories and methods he developed in the course of his own research into Apostolic Greek were not only central to his vision of the English Bible, but also affected such details of translation as style and lexical choice. In doing so it argues that, for Broughton, it was within vernacular translation that the implications of the most innovative contemporary biblical scholarship were applied, explored, and developed further.
Papers by Kirsten Macfarlane
Call for Papers by Kirsten Macfarlane
This one-day workshop aims to gather scholars from different nationalities and disciplines to present the latest research into early modern patristic scholarship, concluding with a keynote lecture by Jean-Louis Quantin (École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris). The organisers now invite applications from scholars at any stage of their career working on early modern patristic scholarship, including graduate students, to deliver papers at this event alongside a group of invited speakers. Papers that explore the reception of the church fathers in times, places, texts and themes that have fallen outside the focus of existing historiography are particularly encouraged.
If you wish to present a twenty-five minute paper at this event, please send a proposal (of no more than 300 words) and a short bio/CV to [email protected] by 1st June 2016. General registration will open in July 2016. The workshop will take place on 23rd September 2016, at Trinity College, Cambridge.
Talks by Kirsten Macfarlane
"Lay Learning and the Bible in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World" offers an alternative account of popular religion in early modernity by reconstructing a striking and unstudied community of seventeenth-century puritan immigrants to North America. Composed of tradespeople without a university education, this community offers unparalleled evidence for lay engagement with even the most abstruse and challenging concerns of contemporaneous biblical scholarship. Drawing on whatever resources they could find, this group taught themselves the languages of biblical criticism; immersed themselves in the most specialised questions of controversial theology; and then promulgated, through their hard-earned learning, an unprecedentedly inclusive vision of education, society, and the church. By recovering their lives and interests, this book presents a new vision of lay puritanism in the Atlantic world, one marked by far greater ambition, critical thought, and intellectual boldness than ever before suspected.
Building on their research, this article reconstructs the dynamics that generated and sustained interest in 1 Enoch in early modernity. Its starting point is the observation that, in many ways, it is surprising that 1 Enoch attracted much interest from early modern Christians at all. There were several factors—not least the incompatibility of Enochic angelology with early modern angelology—which, on the surface of things, ought to have mitigated against the Syncellus fragments gaining traction in seventeenth-century Europe.
To explain why interest in 1 Enoch prevailed despite these factors, this article offers three observations. Firstly, it expands our understanding of the nature of interest in 1 Enoch prior to 1606. Secondly, it corrects a subtle but far-reaching misinterpretation of Scaliger’s comments on the Syncellus fragments. Finally, it reconstructs three trends which arose after Scaliger’s publication of the fragments and which functioned to perpetuate interest in 1 Enoch. As the conclusion outlines, this account should interest not only scholars of Enoch's afterlives but also historians of scholarship for the light it sheds on the development of biblical criticism before the Enlightenment.
At the time, however, such methods were not simply an academic concern, and they pointed in many directions other than that of secular modernity. Biblical Scholarship in an Age of Controversy establishes previously unknown religious and cultural contexts for the practice of biblical criticism in the early modern period, and reveals the diversity of its effects. The central figure in this story is the itinerant and bitterly divisive English scholar Hugh Broughton (1549-1612), whose prolific writings in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and English offer a new and surprising image of Protestant intellectual culture. In this image, scholarly advances were not impeded but inspired by strict scripturalism; criticism was driven by missionary ideals, even as actual proselytization was sidelined; and learned neo-Latin texts were repackaged to appeal to ordinary believers. Seen through the eyes of Broughton and his neglected colleagues and followers, the complex and unexpected contributions of reformed Protestant intellectuals and laypeople to longer-term religious and cultural change finally become visible.
However, if you are struggling to gain access anyway, please do send me a message and I will provide a PDF copy.
This article provides the first substantial analysis of the genealogies prefixed to the King James Bible (1611), giving an unprecedented account of their contemporary significance and purpose, as well as an examination of the collaboration between the Hebraist Hugh Broughton and the cartographer John Speed that produced them. By placing the diagrams within the context of both Speed and Broughton’s greater interests and projects, as well through the use of several previously unknown drafts, it will show that the genealogies had a very clear polemical function, emerged from a subsidiary of the thriving field of chronology, and can be placed within a longstanding visual tradition capable of explaining many of the peculiarities on which modern scholars have remained silent. Finally, it will argue that the genealogies were an innovative kind of ‘reading technology’ produced through a sophisticated synthesis of sacred and secular scholarship with the aim of distilling and transmitting the products of learned, Latinate scholarship to an unlearned, English readership.
Note: Posting a copy of this paper would infringe the copyright. Please access the paper via the link above, which requires no subscription or log-in. If you still cannot gain access, please email me and I will happily send a pdf.
It is well known that the sixteenth century’s surge of vernacular biblical translation was enabled by a greater knowledge of Greek and Hebrew. But by the century’s end, the most exciting work on these languages had far surpassed issues of comprehension. In the chiefly continental, Latinate world of the most advanced biblical scholarship, scholars studied the Semitic influence on New Testament Greek, explained strange features of the Gospels through post-biblical Judaism, and analysed the historical-philological connections between the Testaments. Despite the significant implications such work had for vernacular translation, the relationship between these two fields has rarely been explored. This article will offer a preliminary study by using new evidence relating to the biblical scholarship and translation efforts of the English Hebraist Hugh Broughton (1549–1612). It will demonstrate how the theories and methods he developed in the course of his own research into Apostolic Greek were not only central to his vision of the English Bible, but also affected such details of translation as style and lexical choice. In doing so it argues that, for Broughton, it was within vernacular translation that the implications of the most innovative contemporary biblical scholarship were applied, explored, and developed further.
This one-day workshop aims to gather scholars from different nationalities and disciplines to present the latest research into early modern patristic scholarship, concluding with a keynote lecture by Jean-Louis Quantin (École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris). The organisers now invite applications from scholars at any stage of their career working on early modern patristic scholarship, including graduate students, to deliver papers at this event alongside a group of invited speakers. Papers that explore the reception of the church fathers in times, places, texts and themes that have fallen outside the focus of existing historiography are particularly encouraged.
If you wish to present a twenty-five minute paper at this event, please send a proposal (of no more than 300 words) and a short bio/CV to [email protected] by 1st June 2016. General registration will open in July 2016. The workshop will take place on 23rd September 2016, at Trinity College, Cambridge.