Professor
Jane K. Sather Professor of History
I was trained as an historian of early modern Britain, I gradually expanded my interests to become an historian of early modern Europe more broadly, and most generally I think of myself as an historian of religion. My work most often focuses on the contested space of religion in the early modern world.
My most recent book, The Birth of Modern Belief (Princeton, 2018) traced the history of belief in the Christian West from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, revealing for the first time how a distinctively modern category of belief came into being. I focused not on what people believed, which is the normal concern of religious history, but on the more fundamental question of what people took belief to be. My goal was to demonstrate how belief came to occupy such an ambivalent place in the modern world, becoming the essential category by which we express our judgments about science, society, and the sacred, but at the expense of the unique status religion once enjoyed.
My previous book, The Rule of Moderation (Cambridge, 2011), explored how and why the ubiquitous discourse of moderation, the golden mean, and the religious via media in early modern England functioned as an ideology of control and a tool of social, religious, and political power. Before that, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003) explored how ordinary people contributed to the process of religious transformation, not through their own spiritual conversion but through the politics of negotiation for resources with the centralizing Tudor state.
I am now writing a book entitled The Invention of Religion in Early Modern Europe.
Education
PhD, Princeton University, 2000
MA, Princeton University, 1996
AB, Brown University, 1994
Academic Appointments
University of California, Berkeley
Jane K. Sather Professor of History, 2025–
Professor, 2011–
Associate Professor, 2007–2011
Northwestern University
Associate Professor, 2004–2007
Assistant Professor, 2000–2004
Harvard University Society of Fellows
Junior Fellow, 1999–2000
Select Awards
Leo Gershoy Prize in European history from the American Historical Association for The Rule of Moderation
John Ben Snow Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies for The Rule of Modernation
Herbert Baxter Adams Prize in European history from the American Historical Association for Popular Politics and the English Reformation.
Morris D. Forkosch Prize in British History from the American Historical Association for Popular Politics and the English Reformation.
Roland Bainton Prize in History from Sixteenth Century Studies for Popular Politics and the English Reformation.
Whitfield Prize from the Royal Historical Society for Popular Politics and the English Reformation.
E. LeRoy Hall Award for Distinguished Teaching in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Northwestern University, 2005
Representative Publications
 |
The Birth of Modern Belief: Faith and Judgment from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (Princeton, 2018) |
 |
Religion in Tudor England: An Anthology of Primary Sources (co-edited with Debora Shuger; Baylor, 2016) |
 |
The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2011). |
| Catholics and the 'Protestant Nation': Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2005). | |
 |
Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003). |
