Gow, Andrew
Andrew Colin Gow, Ph.D.
(Professor)
Ph.D., University of Arizona, History
M.A., University of Toronto, History
B.A., Carleton University, History and German
Arts 337D
University of Alberta
Edmonton AB T6G 2H4
Tel.
Editor-in-chief, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions (www.brill.nl/smrt)
Medieval History: A Digital Introduction for History Students University of Augsburg (translated by Andrew Gow with the support of the German Historical Institute, Washington)
Main Fields: Apocalypticism; religion and culture; history of theology; Christian-Jewish relations; lay Bible-reading and exegesis (later Middle Ages); history of cartography (medieval and early modern Europe); history and historiography of witch-hunting; gender theory and gender history; secularism and secularity My training consists (rather schizophrenically) of a number of quite separate specialities: first in literary formalism, then in the traditions of social history and social theory, then in German Geistesgeschichte and the history of Christianity. This makes me a cultural and intellectual historian with a special interest in literary, social and cultural theory. I am generally interested in popular religion and culture in late medieval and early modern Europe. In my first book, I traced and analyzed the German legend of the Red Jews, an imaginary conflation of the Ten Tribes of Israel with Gog and Magog, the apocalyptic destroyers featured in the books of Ezekiel and Revelation. Recent and/or current projects include a study of imaginary peoples, places, and things on world maps (mappaemundi) from 1200-1700; an investigation of the survival and flourishing in medieval medicine of ancient Greek and Roman belief in the curative and healing powers of blood; and vernacular Bible translation and exegesis before Luther. In 2003, my former M.A. student Lara Apps and I published Male Witches in Early Modern Europe (Manchester UP), which was based in part on her M.A. thesis. My most recent published major article (link below) is on late medieval vernacular Bibles, their readership, their dissemination and their cultural effects -- which includes contributing to the conditions under which the Protestant Reformation 'caught fire' so quickly: e.g., Luther's Bible translation was a hit because burghers had been reading vernacular Bibles and biblical texts for so long, not because they had been denied access to the Bible. The wide distribution and availability of German and other vernacular Bible translations in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with 22 printed full Bible translations into German/Low German/Netherlandish appearing before Luther’s famous Bible translation, has been known to scholars since at least the early eighteenth century, when various works on German Bibles before the Reformation began to appear. However, the existence of such translations did not guarantee that scholars, especially church historians and historians of the Reformation took such Bible translations seriously. My findings also demonstrate how central modes of history-writing participate in myth-making -- sometimes even under the guise of source analysis.
Expertise and Research Interests
-Secularity and secularism in historical perspective -The Hart family in 17th-century Germany, 18th-century England and 18th and 19th-century Lower Canada
Future Research
- A history of Antichrist
Erik Jaegermann, 1997: A Political Luther: The Wittenberg Movement, 1521-22 Melanie Cook, 1998: Virgin Mother: The Medieval Paradox of Mary Steven Tymko, 1999: Public Execution in the Late Middle Ages: The State, the Executed and the Crowd Michael Rutherford, 2000: The Humanist-Scholastic Debate: Philosophy and Rhetoric in the Renaissance and Reformation Troy Gillespie, 2001: Columbanus and the Making of the Middle Ages Mandy Batke, 2002: Margery Kempe and the Baptism of Tears Danielle Klemen, 2006: Daniel Erin, 2007: Positioning a Pre-Millennial Identity Politics: A Structural Analysis of the Rhetorical and Literary Elements Constituting Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth Allison Jones, 2007: Glimpse from the Shade: An Intellectual History of the Sublime in the Work of Friedrich Nietsche Williams Shaw, 2007: The Concept of the Other in Catharism and the Albigensian Crusade Samantha Sheplawy, 2009: Vampire Women and the Female Constitution in Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Biomedical Discourse Abdul Rehman Raheem, 2012: Moriscos and Conversos Graduate students: M.A. Francois Bailleux, 1999: France's Foreign Policies in the 16th Century (now French Army) Lara Apps, 2000: Literally Unthinkable? Male Witches in Early Modern Europe (now Ph.D. student at UofA) Sandro DiMarcello, 2002: The Apocalyptic Thought of Joachim of Fiore (now Ph.D. student at u of Toronto) Robert Desjardins, 2003: The Tropics of Chivalry: How two medieval stories were told by nine twentieth-century historians (finished Ph.D. at UofA, as below) Rev. Tony Maan, 2004: The Lord's Supper in 17th-century Dutch Reformed Popular Piety (finished Ph.D. at UofA, as below) Susan Ma Prem Shya Young, 2007: Disrupting Boundaries: Theurgy, Salvation and Knowledge in De arte cabalistica Rhonda Kronyk (co-supervised with Daniel Woolf), 2007: Gender in 17th-Century English Pamphlets (now Ph.D. student at McGill) Carolyn Salomons, 2007: The Practice of Purity: Christian Identity in Early Modern Spain (now Ph.D. student at Johns Hopkins) Filip Ani, 2008: The Archeology of Conquest (now Ph.D. student at Brown) Daniel Erin, 2009-2011 (QE II M.A. Fellowship): The Historian's Magic: The Performance of a "Primitive" Epistemology Jeremy Fradkin, 2009-2011 (QE II M.A. Fellowship): Godliness with a Difference: Religious Arguments for Tolerance in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England Elham Heidari, 2009-2011. Andrew Dalton, 2010- Francois Pageau, 2010- (Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Master's Scholarship) Kaitlyn Plumb, 2010- (Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Master's Scholarship) Ashley Sims, 2010- (QE II M.A. Fellowship) Jordan LaFleche, 2011- Shaun van Ardenne, 2011- Katrina Witt, 2011- PhD Jolanta Pekacz, Ph.D. 1998 (SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship, SSHRC Post-Doctoral Fellowship) Conservative Tradition in Pre-Revolutionary France: Parisian Salon Woman. Associate Professor of History and Canada Research Chair in European Studies, Dalhousie University Mohamed Hassan Mohamed, Ph.D. 2004 (co-supervised with Guy Thompson; SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship). Born in the Text. The Beyrouk. Assistant Professor of History, University of Windsor Rev. Tony Maan, Ph.D. 2008. Life in the body in early modern religious culture: Dutch Protestant perceptions of materiality and corporeality in the Golden Age. Pastor, Maranatha Christian Reformed Church, Lethbridge, AB Robert Desjardins, Ph.D. 2009 (SSHRC CGS Doctoral Fellowship). Writing and Imagining the Crusade in Fifteenth-Century Burgundy: The Case of the Expedition Narrative in Jean de Wavrin’s Anciennes Chroniques d’Angleterre. Tutor, Effective Writing Centre, University of Alberta Henry Suderman, Ph.D. 2011 (Religious Studies; SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship): Manufacturing Places: Anabaptist origins, Community and Ritual; Visiting Instructor, University of Alberta Erin Garvin, Ph.D. (co-supervised with Selina Stewart), 2011: The Truth is in the Telling: Perikopes in Herodotus' Histories. Visiting Instructor, University of Alberta and Augustana Campus Lara Apps, 2011- (QE II Ph.D. Fellowship) Gendering Unbelief in Enlightenment Europe
Students
Undergraduate research students (B.A. Honours):
Corey Liknes, 1994: The Politics of Piety. The First Doctrinal Controversy of the Evangelical Movement, 1521-22
Tim Chodan, M.A. (co-supervised with Derek Sayer) 1997: The Use and Abuse of Jan Hus (now high school teacher)
Spoken and written: French, German, Spanish
Languages
Read/understood: Latin, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, Dutch, Yiddish, Hebrew
Canadian Historical Association; Canadian Society of Medievalists; Deutscher Mediaevistenverband; Renaissance Society of America; Sixteenth Century Studies Association
Memberships
2008 Mercator Professorship (visiting appointment) awarded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft; held Summer Semester (April-July) 2008 in the Chair for Medieval History, University of Augsburg, Germany 2005-2006 Graduate Students Association Staff Award 2003, Martha Cook Piper Research Award University of Alberta 1998, Faculty of Arts Research Award, Faculty of Arts, University of Alberta
Honors and Awards
(one university-wide award yearly for excellence in graduate supervision and teaching)
General university-wide competition for scholars no more than ten years from Ph.D.; two per year.
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC):The Burghers' Bible. Lay Bible Reading in Late Medieval Europe, $43,000, 2001-2004 Alexander-von-Humboldt-Stiftung: Research Fellow, 2002-
Funding Received
Publications Confronting the Past. Ukraine and its History, 882-2009. A Festschrift in Honour of John-Paul Himka on the Occasion of his 60th Birthday. Published as vol. 35 of the Journal of Ukrainian Studies. Andrew Gow, Roman Senkus, Serhy Yekelchyk, eds. Edmonton, AB: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2011. “The Bible in the Germanic Languages (Middle Ages),” in: The New Cambridge History of the Bible vol. II, eds. E. Ann Matter and Richard Marsden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011 (forthcoming; 7,500 words). “Teaching Method and Theory to History Undergraduates. Intellectual Challenges and Professional Responsibilities,” in History Compass, Volume 8, Issue 3 (March 2010), 258-274 "The Contested History of a Book: The German Bible of the Later Middle Ages and Reformation in Legend, Ideology, and Scholarship," in: The Journal of Hebrew Scripture 9,13 (2009), 1-37. www.arts.ualberta.ca/JHS/abstracts-articles.html#A115 (16,700 words) "Empirical Empire: Eurocentrism and Cosmopolitanism in the 'Last' Mappamundi (Fra Mauro)." Europa im Weltbild des Mittelalters. Kartographische Konzepte. Ed. Ingrid Baumgärtner and Hartmut Kugler. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2008, 259-267. “Das Gefolge des Antichristen: Zur Legende von den „roten Juden“,” in: Der Antichrist. Die Glasmalereien der Marienkirche in Frankfurt (Oder). Ulrich Knefelkamp and Frank Martin, eds. Berlin: Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi an der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften/Leipzig: Edition Leipzig, 2008, 102-112. Mountain Masculinity. The Life and Writing of Nello "Tex" Vernon-Wood in the Canadian Rockies 1906-1938. Eds. Andrew Gow and Julie Rak. Edmonton: Athabasca University Press, 2008 "Wie übergeht oder ignoriert man eschatologisches Gedankengut? Und warum? Und wenn man es einmal übergangen oder verkannt hat, was wären dann konkret die Folgen?"[How does one overlook or ignore eschatological ideas? And why? And having overlooked or misrecognised them, then what?], in: Endzeiten. Eschatologie in den monotheistischen Weltreligionen, Wolfram Brandes and Felicitas Schmieder, eds. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2008, 1-12. Hyphenated Histories. Articulations of Central European Bildung and Slavic Studies in the Contemporary Academy. Ed. Andrew Gow. Leiden: Brill, 2007 "'I had no idea such people were in America!': Cultural Dissemination, Ethno-linguistic Identity and Narratives of Disappearance," in Spaces of Identity Volume 6, Issue 1, April 2006: http://www.yorku.ca/soi/_Vol_6_1/_HTML/Gow.html (3600 words) "Jews and Judaism in Christian End-Time Scenarios: Hard-Wired Hatred or Irenic Itineraries?” (Polish translation with English abstract). Barbarzynca. Pismo Antropologiczne. 10, 2004 Anglo-American Millennialism from Milton to the Millerites. ed. Richard Connors and Andrew Gow. Leiden: Brill, 2004 "Challenging the Protestant Paradigm. Bible Reading in Lay and Urban Contexts of the Later Middle Ages." in: Thomas Heffernan, ed., Scripture and Pluralism. The Study of the Bible in the Religiously Plural Worlds of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Leiden: Brill, 2005 "Fra Mauro and the End of Authority: Legends and Empirical Evidence on the 'Last' Mappamundi." in: Paul Harvey, ed., Mappa Mundi: The Hereford World Map. London: British Library, 2005 "La tradition de «l'Antéchrist» juif en occident et la résistance de l'orthodoxie grecque face à cette légende." in: Mikhail Dmitriev and Daniel Tollet, eds., Les Chrétiens et les Juifs dans les sociétés de rite grec et latin: approche comparative. Paris: Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 2004 "The ultra-orthodox pizza joint and the Scouting room. Enclaves in secular and sacred space as negations/confirmations of dominant institutional cultures." in: Susan Ingram and Markus Reisenleitner, eds., Placing History: Themed Environments, Urban Consumption, and the Public Entertainment Sphere (Orte und ihre Geschichte(n): Themenwelten, urbaner Konsum und die Öffentlichkeit von Freizeit). Vienna: Turia & Kant, 2003, 149-163 The Apocalyptic Year 1000. Religious Expectation and Social Change, 950-1050. ed. Richard Landes, Andrew Gow and David C. Van Meter. Oxford: OUP, 2003 Male Witches in Early Modern Europe. Co-authored with Lara Apps. Manchester: MUP, 2003 "‘Sanguis naturalis’ and ‘sang de miracle’: ancient medicine, ‘supersitition’, and the metaphysics of mediaeval healing miracles." Sudhoffs Archiv fuer Geschichte der Medizin und der Naturwissenschaften. 87, 2 (2003), 129-158 "(En)gendering Evil: Sinful Conceptions of the Antichrist in the Middle Ages and the Reformation." in: Rudolf Suntrup and Jan R. Veenstra (eds.), Medieval to Early Modern Culture–Kultureller Wandel vom Mittelalter zur Frühen Neuzeit, vol. 2. Zuerich: Peter Lang, 2002, 147-158 "Christian Colonialism: Luther's Exegesis of Hebrew Scripture." in: Bast and Gow, eds., Continuity and Change. The Harvest of Late Medieval and Reformation History. Essays in Honor of Heiko Augustinus Oberman on his 70th Birthday. Leiden: Brill, 2000, 229-252 Continuity and Change. The Harvest of Late Medieval and Reformation History. Essays in Honor of Heiko Augustinus Oberman on his 70th Birthday. Robert Bast and Andrew Gow, eds. Leiden: Brill, 2000 "Toleration and Terror. The Jewish Experience in the German-speaking lands, 1400-1800." in: Ladislau Gyemant, ed., European Tradition and Experiences. Cluj-Napoca: Europea, 1999, 12-27 "Gog and Magog on Mappaemundi and Early Printed Maps: Orientalizing Ethnography in the Apocalyptic Tradition." Journal of Early Modern History 2, 1 (1998), 1-28 "Popular Persuasions. Flagellants and the Construction of Sanctity in Latin and Orthodox Christendom." in: Marek Derwich and Mikhail Dmitriev, eds., Fonctions sociales et politiques du culte des saints dans les sociétés de rite grec et latin au Moyen Age et à l'époque moderne. Approche comparative. Actes du deuxième colloque international du L.A.H.R.C.O.R.. Wroclaw: University of Wroclaw, 1997, 405-416 "The Jewish Antichrist in Medieval and Early Modern Germany." Medieval Encounters. 2(3), 1996, 249-8 "Kartenrand, Gesellschaftsrand, Geschichtsrand: Die legendären judei clausi/inclusi auf mittelalterlichen und frühneuzeitlichen Weltkarten." In: Helwig Schmidt-Glinzer, ed., Fördern und Bewahren. Studien zur europäischen Kulturgeschichte der Frühen Neuzeit. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1996, 137-155 Gow, Andrew Colin, The Red Jews: Antisemitism in an Apocalyptic Age, 1200-1600. Leiden: Brill, 1995 with Gordon Griffiths. "Pope Eugenius IV and Jewish Money-Lending in Florence: the case of Salome di Bonaventura during the chancellorship of Leonardo Bruni." Renaissance Quarterly. 47(2) Summer 1994, 282-329 The Reformation: Roots and Ramifications. T&T Clark, 1994; a translation of Heiko A. Oberman, Die Reformation. Von Wittenberg nach Genf, 1986