BA, MSt, DPhil (Oxford)
Kirsten Macfarlane is an Associate Professor of Early Modern Christianities at the Faculty of Theology and Religion, as well as a Fellow and Tutor at Keble College.
Her research interests lie at the intersection of religious, cultural, and intellectual history in the period from the Reformation to the early Enlightenment. She 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. She is particularly interested in the early modern study of Hebrew, Judaism, and Jewish literature by Reformed Protestant scholars.
Research interests: history of biblical scholarship, translation, and exegesis; Jewish-Christian relations; confessional identity and theological controversy; the relationship between ‘elite’ (neo-Latin) and ‘popular’ (vernacular) forms of religion and piety in the early modern period