Yale Divinity School
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Bruce Gordon
Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History
bruce.gordon@yale.edu
B.A. (Hons) King’s College
M.A. Dalhousie University
Ph.D University of St. Andrews.
Presbyterian
A native of Canada, Bruce Gordon taught from 1994 to 2008 at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, where he was professor of modern history and deputy director of the St Andrews Reformation Institute. His research focuses on European religious cultures of the late-medieval and early-modern periods, with a focus on the Reformation in German-speaking lands. He is the author of Calvin (Yale University Press, 2009), a biography that seeks to put the life of the influential reformer in the context of the sixteenth-century world. It is a study of Calvin’s character, his extensive web of personal contacts, and of the complexities of church reform and theological exchange in the Reformation. The Swiss Reformation (Manchester, 2002) (an “Outstanding Publication” for 2003 by Choice magazine) studies the emergence of the Reformation in the multi-lingual world of the Swiss Confederation and its influence across Europe in the sixteenth century. His first book, Clerical Reformation and the Rural Reformation (1992), examined the creation of the Protestant ministry in Zurich and its numerous parishes. In addition, he has edited books on the development of Protestant historical writing, the place of the dead in late-medieval and early-modern society, and the Swiss Reformer Heinrich Bullinger. He was the principal investigator of a major grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom on Protestant Latin Bibles of the Sixteenth Century. This project explores the new translations of the Old and New Testaments into Latin during the Reformation and the questions they raise concerning translation, authority, identity, and theology. These Bibles map many of the crucial debates within the new churches. He teaches courses on the Reformation, the culture of death in medieval and early-modern Europe, historiography of early-modern religion, Calvin, and interpretations of medieval religion in literature and film. He teaches in the History department and the Renaissance Studies program, of which he will be acting chair in 2011. He is on the editorial board of two monograph series: St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History (Ashgate), and Zürcher Beiträge zur Reformationsgeschichte (Theologischer Verlag Zürich), and is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.