Jonathan Sheehan

This page reflects a scholar's association with the Folger Institute. Records before 2008 are in the process of being added to Folgerpedia.

Long-term fellowship

Sacrifice: Theology and the Human Sciences in Early Modern Europe (ACLS/Burkhardt Fellow, 2011-2012)

For many years, historians have traced the origins of the human sciences to a gradual secularization of knowledge in the wake of the Scientific Revolution. This project entirely recasts this history. It argues that it was in the domain of theology that these disciplines first took form. Specifically, they took form in the unusual theology of the seventeenth century, when the engines of polemic drove scholars to mobilize arguments from (modern) disciplines as various as legal history, comparative anthropology, geography, and even natural history. The problem of sacrifice concentrated all these currents as a nucleus around which the intellectual, religious, and political problems of the day coalesced; through it, we can reveal anew the history of both the human sciences and theology.