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)
Editorial assistant: Basit Iqbal (biqbal@ualberta.ca)
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: My most recent published 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. Luther himself had claimed (polemically) that the Bible had been entirely unknown and unavailable when he was a young man. The rather dispassionate scholarship of the eighteenth century, which included important works on pre-Reformation German Bibles by orthodox Lutheran divines, gave way in the second half of the nineteenth century to a rather bitter polemical discourse in the context of the Kulturkampf in Germany. Luther the linguistic genius and Luther the theological hero were the protagonists on one side; the late medieval Bible, on which Luther drew heavily for his own translation, was on the other. Not so much a Catholic-Lutheran debate as an ideological one about the place, value and influence of medieval piety and culture (and their relation to German national culture) was played out by prominent church historians. By the eve of WWII, German Bible scholarship had become a more clear-eyed exercise in historical evaluation--yet immediately after the war, in the context of the Cold War and the construction of a lineage of democratic and liberty-oriented values for Christian western Europe, the Luther Bible began to loom ever larger, especially in textbooks and general surveys, as a turning point in the history of western culture. Since the 1990s, more specialized and careful assessments of the importance of pre-Reformation German Bibles have prevailed, perhaps as part of a general re-evaluation of medieval culture and piety from perspectives informed more by anthropology and literary theory than by ideological polemic. 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
Apocalypticism
Popular 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
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.
- Synagogues: Destroyed, Recycled, Desecrated. Collaborative research project with Prof. Dr. Johannes Heil, Hochschule fuer juedische Studien, Heidelberg, and Prof. Dr. Rainer Kampling, Freie Universitaet, Berlin
Future Research
- The Hart family in 17th-century Germany, 18th-century England and 18th and 19th-century Lower Canada
- 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 Graduate students: M.A. Francois Bailleux, 1999: France's Foreign Policies in the 16th Century Lara Apps, 2000: Literally Unthinkable? Male Witches in Early Modern Europe Sandro DiMarcello, 2002: The Apocalyptic Thought of Joachim of Fiore Robert Desjardins, 2003: The Tropics of Chivalry: How two medieval stories were told by nine twentieth-century historians Rev. Tony Maan, 2004: The Lord's Supper in 17th-century Dutch Reformed Popular Piety 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 Carolyn Salomons, 2007: The Practice of Purity: Christian Identity in Early Modern Spain Filip Ani, 2008: The Archeology of Conquest PhD 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" Sessional lecturer in History, King's University College (Edmonton) and University of Alberta Mohamed Mohamed, Ph.D. 2004 (co-supervised with Guy Thompson). "Born in the Text. The Beyrouk" Assistant Professor of History, University of Windsor Jolanta Pekacz, Ph.D.1998. "Conservative Tradition in Pre-Revolutionary France: Parisian Salon Woman" Associate Professor of History and Canada Research Chair in European Studies, Dalhousie University Robert Desjardins, Ph.D. candidate, 2004- Burgundian Crusading Literature and Ideology Henry Suderman, Ph.D. candidate (Religious Studies), 2008- Early Anabaptist Concepts of Space and Sacrality
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
Spoken and written: French, German, Spanish
Languages
Read/understood: Latin, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, Dutch, Yiddish, Hebrew
Memberships
Canadian Society of Medievalists
Fruehe Neuzeit Interdisziplinaer
Medieval Academy of America
Renaissance Society of America
Sixteenth Century Studies Association
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
Honors and Awards
(one university-wide award yearly for excellence in graduate supervision and teaching)
2003, Martha Cook Piper Research Award University of Alberta
General university-wide competition for scholars no more than ten years from Ph.D.; two per year.
1998, Faculty of Arts Research Award, Faculty of Arts, University of Alberta
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC):The Burghers' Bible. Lay Bible Reading in Late Medieval Europe, $43,000, from Mar 31, 2001 to Mar 31, 2004 Alexander-von-Humboldt-Stiftung: Research Fellow, 2002-
Funding Received
Publications "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) 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 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) "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, 2007