Bruce Gordon

Office: 409 Prospect

Phone: (203) 432-5303

Bruce Gordon, a native of Canada, 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 biography of John Calvin will appear with Yale University Press in May 2009. His The Swiss Reformation (Manchester University Press, 2002) was the first comprehensive study of the subject and was named an “Outstanding Publication for 2003” by Choice magazine. His first book, Clerical Reformation and the Rural Reformation (1992), examined the creation of the Protestant ministry in Zurich in the sixteenth century. He has edited books on the development of Protestant historical writing, (Protestant History and Identity in Sixteenth Century Europe, Ashgate, 2 vols, 1996); on death and dying (The Place of the Dead in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (with Peter Marshall, Cambridge University Press, 2000), and the Swiss Reformer Heinrich Bullinger (Architect of Reformation, with Emidio Campi, Baker, 2004). He currently heads a project on the Protestant Latin Bible of the sixteenth century funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom. He is preparing a translation and commentary on Ludwig Lavater’s De spectris, the principal sixteenth-century Protestant work on ghosts. He serves on the editorial board of two monograph series: St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History (Ashgate), and Zürcher Beiträge zur Reformationsgeschichte (Theologischer Verlag Zürich).

His research interests range across late-medieval and early-modern religious history, in particular the Swiss and German Reformations, Bibles, devotional literature, early-modern clergy, death and the dead, historical writing and historiography. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

B.A. (Hons) King’s College
M.A. Dalhousie University
Ph.D University of St. Andrews