Richard Kieckhefer

Professor of Religion and History

Department of Religious Studies

Office: Crowe Hall, 1860 Campus Drive, 4-141
Phone: (847) 491-2614
E-Mail: kieckhefer@northwestern.edu

Richard Kieckhefer teaches courses on the history of Christianity: the introductory class on the New Testament, and advanced offerings such as Foundations of Christian Thought and Christian Mystical Theology. His ongoing research is largely focused on the history of church architecture and the history of witchcraft and magic, but he works also on topics such as the history of mysticism. His work generally focuses on the late Middle Ages (the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) but extends beyond this period. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and is a Fellow of the Medieval Academy.

He has published six single-authored books. Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu (Chicago, 1984) explores salient themes in late medieval hagiography and relates them to the general religious culture of the era. Repression of Heresy in Medieval Germany (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979), along with an article in The Journal of Ecclesiastical History (1995), makes an argument about the degree to which the machinery of repression became institutionalized in the Middle Ages. His most recent book, Theology in Stone: Church Architecture from Byzantium to Berkeley (Oxford University Press, 2004), gives a framework for analysis of church architecture, its liturgical uses and its theological meanings, and against the background of this analysis it studies a series of case histories.

He has three major books in the history of witchcraft and magic. European Witch Trials: Their Foundations in Popular and Learned Culture, 1300-1500 (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976) explored the relationship between clerical and lay notions of witchcraft in late medieval Europe. Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 1989), an overview, again relates its subject matter to the culture in which it is embedded; along with an article in the American Historical Review (1994), it articulates an argument regarding the sense in which belief in magic counts as "rational." The book has been translated into several foreign languages. Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer's Manual of the Fifteenth Century (Sutton, 1997) includes an edition and a multi-leveled analysis of a particularly interesting text of demonic magic.

His current research interests include the complex relationship of contemplative, theoerotic, and speculative elements in Christian mysticism; the influence of laity on the design of late medieval churches; and the factors responsible for the rise and early spread of witch-hunting.

Back to Faculty List