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About Me

I’m a historian at Oriel College, Oxford. As a historian of early modern science and society, I’m interested in how academic scholarship fares in the public sphere.

My first book, Inventing Immortality: Heterodoxy and Histories of the Soul in Early Enlightenment England, traces radical thinkers who thought ancient pagans invented the soul. The book argues that the early Enlightenment was shaped as much by the circulation and transformation of knowledge as by new ideas. In the same vein, my latest Historical Journal article follows how ‘sleepy’ eighteenth-century scholarship could become a public sensation. My next project is a new history of public engagement with research that uses archives of early modern public disputations—hugely popular debates, open even to women—to rethink stereotypes about the ivory tower.

Much of my current research centres on the history of astrology, and in particular its changing academic status. In a series of articles I have explored how a discipline once integral to philosophy, astronomy, and medicine was marginalised in early modern universities while flourishing in popular culture. This is the subject of my current project, a trade book entitled RETROGRADE: Power, prediction, and the fate of a science (for more info, contact my agent at Peters Fraser + Dunlop). These interests feed into my collaborative ‘How Sciences End’ project, co-run with Alex Aylward (Oxford) and Joe Martin (Durham).

More broadly, I work on the history of divination and forecasting from the ancient world to the present. With the anthropologist David Zeitlyn, I co-edited Divination, Oracles, & Omens (Bodleian Library Publishing, 2024), which accompanied our Bodleian Library exhibition ‘Oracles, Omens & Answers’ (Dec 2024-Apr 2025). With Zeitlyn, I now lead the TORCH Network, ‘Divination, Oracles, and Omens’. I have written about the role of astrology in the history of epidemiology for Past and Present and in 2023 curated my first exhibition, ‘Plague! at Magdalen: Epidemics and Public Life’. In 2021, I co-organised a conference commemorating the 50th anniversary of Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) and later wrote an article with Jan Machielsen on the book’s legacy, also for Past and Present. With Simon Dolet, I am organising the conference ‘Forecasting the Weather, Between Divination and Science‘, from 8-9 October in Oxford’s Schwarzman Centre. ​

I write regularly for History Today and The Conversation and am one of the authors of A History of Astrology, Divination & Prophecy, published by DK of Penguin Random House. I enjoy contributing to radio and podcasts and give a number of public lectures every year.

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

Recent Publications

‘Divine Legation (1738–41), Public Sensation: William Warburton and the Making of Eighteenth-Century Scholarly Celebrity’, The Historical Journal, online First View.

Inventing Immortality: Heterodoxy and Histories of the Soul in Early Enlightenment England, Oxford Warburg Studies, Oxford University Press, 2026.

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

‘The 18th-Century Search for the Soul’, History Today, 76, no. 10 (October 2026).

‘For thousands of years, solar eclipses have been associated with the fate of rulers’, The Conversation (2026)

‘The dangerous business of predicting the death of popes – a history’, The Conversation (2025)

‘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