John Van Engen
Andrew V. Tackes Professor of History
Field
Medieval Europe
Profile
John Van Engen joined the faculty at Notre Dame in 1977 after receiving his Ph.D. at UCLA in 1976 under the direction of Gerhart Ladner and studying for two years in Heidelberg under Peter Classen. For twelve years (1986-98) Van Engen served as director of Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute. He was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1993-94 and the fall of 1998, a fellow at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center at Princeton University in 1999-2000, and a visiting professor at Harvard University in the fall of 2002. He is also a fellow of the Medieval Academy of America and a corresponding member of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. This year he is the president of the American Society of Church History.
Van Engen is a historian of religious and intellectual life during the European middle ages. Within those thousand years his work has focused especially upon three large areas: renewal during the twelfth century, “Christianization” in Medieval European history broadly, and religious movements in the later middle ages, especially the Devotio Moderna. His books and essays have dealt with monasticism, women’s writing, schools and universities, inquisition, canon law, notions of reform, and medieval religious culture generally. Beyond editing scholarly symposia, he is actively translating medieval texts from Latin and Middle Dutch, and has underway a large edition of core historical materials for the movement called the Devotio Moderna. Over the past twenty years he has supervised twenty doctoral dissertations, with several more underway.
Current Projects
Van Engen has just completed a book on the fifteenth-century Devotio Moderna movement, and will issue a second over the course of the next year. He is translating a previously unknown woman mystic and autobiographer, Alijt Bake (d. 1455), from Middle Dutch. And he has just begun a synthetic work on twelfth-century reform and renewal tentatively entitled The Spirit of the Twelfth Century.
Selected Publications
Rupert of Deutz (1983)
“The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem,” The American Historical Review 91 (1986), pp. 519-52. Ed. (with Michael Signer), Jews and
Christians in Twelfth-Century Europe (2001)
Religion in the History of the Medieval West (2004)
The Modern-Day Devout in the Later Middle Ages: Sisters and Brothers in Communal Life and Private Societies (2008)
“Conclusion, Christendom c. 1100. On the Cusp of the Twelfth Century: Latin Christendom and the Kingdoms of the Christened,” The Cambridge History of Early Medieval Christianity, ed. Thomas Noble and Julia Smith (2008)