Bruce Gordon

A native of Canada, Bruce Gordon taught at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where he was professor of modern history and deputy director of the St Andrews Reformation Studies Institute. He came to Yale in 2008. His research and teaching focus on European religious cultures of the late-medieval and early modern periods, with a particular interest in the Reformation and its reception. In 2021 he published The Oxford Handbook of Calvin and Calvinism (Oxford) and Huldrych Zwingli. God’s Armed Prophet (Yale). The biography of Zwingli explores the roots of the Reformation and the problematic relationship between religion and violence. His John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (Princeton 2016) looks at the reception from the sixteenth century to the age of YouTube of one of the defining works of the Reformation. He is the author of Calvin (Yale, 2009), a biography of the Genevan reformer, and the Swiss Reformation (Manchester, 2002), a Choice Magazine “Outstanding Publication” (2003). His The Bible: A Global History (Basic Books, NY) appeared in September 2024 and was a Publishers Weekly starred review and one of their “Top Ten Religion Books” for 2024. In addition, he has edited books and written widely on early modern history writing, biblical culture, Reformation devotion and spirituality, and the place of the dead in pre-modern culture. He was principal investigator for a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the United Kingdom for a project “Protestant Latin Bibles of the Sixteenth Century”. He received a Horace W. Goldsmith Award from Yale University to develop an online course (MOOC) called ‘A Journey through Western Christianity’, appeared in 2016 from Yale and Coursera. He teaches and supervises graduate students in a broad range of medieval and early modern subjects and their resonances in contemporary historiography and society. He has received honorary degrees from the University of Zurich, Switzerland (2012), and the University of King’s College, Dalhousie, in Canada (2019).  

Read more

• Podcast interview: Prof. Bruce Gordon on the Bible’s changing role

• Bruce Gordon on the multiple lives of Calvin’s ‘Institutes’

• Bruce Gordon: ‘We have to be humble in our approach to the past’

• YDS faculty members win recognition

Books

1. The Bible: A Global History (Basic Books, 2024)
2. Antitrinitarianism and Unitarianism in the Early Modern World (Palgrave, 2024), edited with Kazimierz Bem
3. Huldrych Zwingli. God’s Armed Prophet (Yale 2021)  
4. The Oxford Handbook of Calvin and Calvinism, ed. with Carl R. Trueman (Oxford 2021)
5. John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion: A Biography (Princeton 2016)
6. Following Zwingli: Appling the Past in Reformation Zurich, ed. with Luca Baschera and Christian Moser (Ashgate 2013
7. Shaping the Bible in the Reformation. Books, Scholars and Their Readers in the Sixteenth Century, ed with Matthew McLean (Brill, 2012)
8. Calvin. 1509‐1564 (Yale University Press, 2009)
9. Architect of Reformation. An Introduction to Heinrich Bullinger, 1504‐1575, co-ed. (Baker Academic, 2004)
10. Translation and Edition of Hans R. Guggisberg, Sebastian Castellio. Defender
of Religious Toleration (Ashgate Press, 2003)
11. The Swiss Reformation (Manchester University Press, 2002)
12. The Place of the Dead in Late Mediaeval and Early Modern Europe, ed. with Peter Marshall (Cambridge University Press, 2000)
13. Protestant History and Identity in Sixteenth‐Century Europe, 2 vols., ed.
(Scolar Press, 1996)
14. Clerical Discipline and the Rural Reformation. The Synod in Zurich, 1532‐1580
(Peter Lang, Zürcher Beiträge zur Reformationsgeschichte, vol. 16, Bern, 1992)