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About Me

I’m currently a Fellow by Examination (JRF) at Magdalen College, Oxford. My research interests lie in the history of early modern science, religion, and scholarship. My research is motivated by the conviction that the humanities, as much as the sciences, have played a key role in many of the developments we associate with modernity.

I am currently working on three projects. The first, an extension of my doctoral research, examines the history of the idea of the soul in early modern England, focusing particularly on the development of the heterodox view that humans did not possess immortal souls. The early modern debate over this issue was an interdisciplinary one: it involved religion, medicine, and natural philosophy, but also historical scholarship.

I am also working on an intellectual biography of William Warburton (1698–1779), a clergyman who became a major celebrity as a result of his controversial claims about the Old Testament. In a highly technical book that became a public sensation, Warburton argued that the absence of teachings about immortality in the Hebrew scriptures paradoxically proved the divine origins of Judaism. I am studying Warburton’s research methods by examining his surviving library and extensive correspondence.

My third key interest is the history of astrology in the early modern world. I’m interested in how astrology, once a vibrant aspect of European cultural and intellectual life, came to be rejected as a superstition outside the bounds of science – a huge shift that remains a major puzzle in the history of science.

My research engages closely with university disputations, and in addition to these projects I will also be preparing a digital edition of the records of Oxford student disputations from the early modern period.

Recent Publications

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

‘Astrology, Plague, and Prognostication in Early Modern England: A Forgotten Chapter in the History of Public Health’, Past & Present, online first view.

‘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, forthcoming 2021).

‘Paganism, Natural Reason, and Immortality: Charles Blount and John Toland’s Histories of the Soul’, Intellectual History Review 2020 (online First View).

‘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:

‘Bad Omens’, History Today 74 (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): https://intellectualhistory.web.ox.ac.uk/article/intellectual-history-and-decline-magic

‘Before epidemiologists began modelling disease, it was the job of astrologers’, The Conversation (19 May 2020): https://theconversation.com/before-epidemiologists-began-modelling-disease-it-was-the-job-of-astrologers-137895

Exhibitions:

‘Oracles, Omens, Answers’, Bodleian Library, Oxford, Dec 2024–May 2025), co-curated with the anthropologist David Zeitlyn

‘Plague! at Magdalen: Epidemics and College Life’, Old Library, Magdalen College, February–July 2023. plagueatmagdalen.magd.ox.ac.uk/

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@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