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About Me

I’m a historian at Magdalen College, Oxford. My research interests lie in the history of early modern science, religion, and scholarship. Much of my work explores how scientific and religious ideas, traditions, and institutions worked in tandem to shape historical shifts often said to belong to the so-called ‘disenchantment of the world’.

My first book in this vein, The Mortalism Crisis: Scholarship, Society, and the Soul in Early Enlightenment England, will explore how the immortality of the soul—a topic of mutual natural philosophical and theological interest—was rejected by lay people steeped in popularised scientific, biblical, and historical scholarship, who argued that the very concept of the soul was an artefact of ancient pagan religion rather than true philosophy or theology.

My current research explores the history of astrology and divination. I recently published (with David Zeitlyn) Divination, Oracles, and Omens (Bodleian Library Publishing, 2024), which accompanies our Bodleian Library exhibition ‘Oracles, Omens & Answers‘, which is running until 27 April 2025.

I’m currently working on two books: one on the decline of astrology in early modern England, and the other on the role of astrologers and diviners in the long history of forecasting.

I’m often interviewed on the radio and on podcasts. See, for example, my interview with Infectious Historians, The Secret History of Western Esotericism, and Ancient Futures podcasts.

Some of my academic activities have been undertaken under the name Michelle Aroney.

Recent Publications

A History of Astrology, Divination, and Prophecy, co-authored with Nicholas Campion, et al. (London: DK of Penguin Random House, forthcoming August 2025).

Divination, Oracles, and Omens, edited with David Zeitlyn, Bodleian Library Publishing, 2024.

‘Astrology, Plague, and Prognostication in Early Modern England: A Forgotten Chapter in the History of Public Health’, Past & Present, 263 (2024): 81–124.

‘A Work Out of Time: Religion and the Decline of Magic at Fifty‘, with Jan Machielsen, Past & Present 261, no. 1 (2023): 259–296.

‘Reassessing the Marginalization of Astrology in the Early Modern World‘, The Historical Journal 66 (2023): 1152–1176.

‘The Contribution of the Early Modern Humanities to “Disenchantment”’, Journal of Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 16, no. 3 (2021): 398-405.

‘The Society of Astrologers (c. 1647–1684): Sermons, Feasts, and the Resuscitation of Astrology in Seventeenth-Century London’, The British Journal for the History of Science 54, no. 2 (2021): 133-153.

‘The Pentateuch and the Immortality of the Soul in England and the Dutch Republic: The Confessionalisation of a Claim’, in The Worlds of Knowledge and the Classical Tradition in the Early Modern Age: Comparative Approaches, eds., Ian Maclean and Dmitri Levitin (Brill, 2021).

‘Paganism, Natural Reason, and Immortality: Charles Blount and John Toland’s Histories of the Soul’, Intellectual History Review 31, no. 4 (2021): 563–83.

‘Christian Materialism and the Prospect of Immortality’, 148–61 in Science without God? Rethinking the History of Scientific Naturalism, eds., Peter Harrison and Jon Roberts (Oxford University Press, 2019).

‘Physicians and the Soul: Medicine and Spirituality in Seventeenth-Century England’, 15–28 in Medicine, Health and Being Human, ed. Lesa Scholl (Routledge, 2018).

Short articles:

‘Hopes, fears, and early modern astrology’, History Today, 75, no. 1 (January 2025).

‘Five ways to predict the future from around the world—from spider divination to bibliomancy’, with David Zeitlyn, The Conversation (2025).

‘Bad Omens’, History Today 74, no. 1 (January 2024): https://www.historytoday.com/archive/history-matters/bad-omens-when-astrologers-got-it-wrong

‘Intellectual History and the “Decline of Magic”’, Oxford Centre for Intellectual History Blog (April 2021).

‘Before epidemiologists began modelling disease, it was the job of astrologers’, The Conversation (19 May 2020).

Exhibitions:

‘Oracles, Omens, Answers’, Bodleian Library, Oxford, 6 Dec 2024–27 April 2025, co-curated with the anthropologist David Zeitlyn.

‘Plague! at Magdalen: Epidemics and College Life’, Old Library, Magdalen College, February–July 2023.

Media Coverage

Social Media

@michpfeffer

Country Focus

Europe

Expertise by Geography

England, United Kingdom, Western Europe

Expertise by Chronology

Pre-17th century, 17th century, 18th century, Early Modern

Expertise by Topic

Book History, Libraries & Archives, Medicine, Religion, Science