Prof Kirsten Macfarlane

I am an Associate Professor of Early Modern Christianities and a Fellow of Keble College. My research interests lie at the intersection of religious, cultural, and intellectual history in the period from the Reformation to the early Enlightenment.

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 its 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)', and 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 series in 2022.

I've also published articles in a range of journals including 'The Library', 'Review of English Studies', 'Reformation', and 'The Journal of Ecclesiastical History'. A regularly updated list of my publications can be found on my Faculty webpage at Oxford:

https://www.theology.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-kirsten-macfarlane