Wietse de Boer

Contact

• deboerwt@muohio.edu
• Office: Room 274 Upham Hall
• 513-529-5146
• Office hours: M 1:30-3, R 10:30-12

Titles

• Associate Professor of History
• Director of Graduate Studies in History

Education

• PhD 1995, Erasmus University Rotterdam
• MA, University of Amsterdam
• BA, University of Amsterdam

Teaching and Research Interests

• Renaissance Europe
• Reformation Europe
• Italian cultural history

Recently taught graduate courses

• HST 453/553 Italian Counter-Reformation
• HST 720 Graduate Colloquium: Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe
• HST 794 History and Theories

Current/recent graduate student research

• Robert Clines, “By Virtue of the Senses: Ignatian Aestheticism and the Origins of Sense Application in the First Decades of the Gesu in Rome,” 2009
• Bradley J. Mollmann, “Seeking the Supernatural: The Exorcisms of John Darrell and the Formation of an Orthodox Identity in Early Modern England,” 2008

Selected Publications

• (forthcoming) “An Uneasy Reunion: The Catholic World in Reformation Studies.”  Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte/Archive for Reformation History 100 (2009), 360-81.
• “At Heresy’s Door: Borromeo, Penance and Religious Boundaries in Early Modern Europe,” A New History of Penance, ed. Abigail Firey, Brill, 2008
• “Spirits of Love: Castiglione and Neoplatonic Discourses of Vision.” In Spirits Unseen: The Representation of Subtle Bodies in Early Modern European Culture, ed. Christine Göttler and Wolfgang Neuber, Intersections. Yearbook for Early Modern Studies 9 (2007), 121-40.
• “Nobility Contested: Notes on the Expurgation of Castiglione’s Cortegiano.”  In Chiesa cattolica e mondo moderno. Scritti in onore di Paolo Prodi, ed. Adriano Prosperi, Pierangelo Schiera, and Gabriella Zarri.  Bologna: il Mulino, 2007, 65-84.
• The Conquest of the Soul: Confession, Discipline, and Public Order in Counter-Reformation Milan, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, Brill, 2001
• Editor and Introduction, Johan Huizinga, Le immagini della storia. Scritti 1905-1941 [History and Its Images: Essays, 1905-41], Einaudi, 1993

Selected Grants and Awards

• Visiting Professorship, The Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti, 2009
• Rome Prize Fellowship, American Academy in Rome, 2003

Work in Progress

Dr. De Boer teaches courses on Renaissance and Reformation Europe, as well as the graduate course on Theories of History. He has two book projects in progress. Castiglione and the Crisis of the Renaissance is a study of Baldassarre Castiglione (1478-1529) and his cultural milieu. The Education of the Senses: The Body, Perception and Behavior in Counter-Reformation Italy is an interdisciplinary study of the five senses in early modern culture. It investigates modes, discourses and practices of perception in connection with codes of conduct, spiritual practice, literary representation, and artistic expression.