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. His most recent book is John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion(Princeton 2016), which looks 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). 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. He is currently completing a biography of the Swiss reformer Huldrych Zwingli for Yale University Press. 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).  

Books

1.  John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion: A Biography (Princeton 2016)

2.  Shaping the Bible in the Reformation. Books, Scholars and Their Readers in the Sixteenth Century, ed with Matthew McLean (Brill, 2012)

3.  Calvin. 1509‐1564 (Yale University Press, 2009)

4.  Architect of Reformation. An Introduction to Heinrich Bullinger, 1504‐1575,
co-ed. (Baker Academic, 2004)

5.  Translation and Edition of Hans R. Guggisberg, Sebastian Castellio. Defender
of Religious Toleration (Ashgate Press, 2003)

6.  The Swiss Reformation (Manchester University Press, 2002)

7.  The Place of the Dead in Late Mediaeval and Early Modern Europe, ed. with Peter Marshall (Cambridge University Press, 2000)

8.  Protestant History and Identity in Sixteenth‐Century Europe, 2 vols., ed.
(Scolar Press, 1996)

9.  Clerical Discipline and the Rural Reformation. The Synod in Zurich, 1532‐1580
(Peter Lang, Zürcher Beiträge zur Reformationsgeschichte, vol. 16, Bern, 1992)