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About Me

I am a historian of religious culture in Italy during the tumultuous 16th and 17th century.

Most of my research coalesces around two fundamental questions:

1. How did early modern people balance their private beliefs with public actions?
2. How did close contact affect the way different religious groups interacted and imagined each other?

I am a cultural and religious historian of early modern Italy. Most of my research coalesces around two fundamental questions:

1. How did early modern people balance their private beliefs with public actions?
2. How did close contact affect the way different religious groups interacted and imagined each other?

 These questions have inspired all of my research, in various ways. My first book (The Pulpit and the Press in Reformation Italy, Harvard UP 2013), applied these questions to Catholic preachers in Italy as they reacted to the many competing pressures of the Protestant Reformation. My second book (funded by a British Academy mid-career grant and an AHRC early-career fellowship), Catholic Spectacle and Rome’s Jews: Early Modern Conversion and Resistance, reconstructs the spectacle of forced conversion sermons to Jews in Rome, held publicly ever week from the 16th through the 18th centuries. The book argues that the spectacle of these sermons became the city’s most powerful platform for promoting both conversion and Catholicism in a changing world, and, more broadly, that these rhetorical and ceremonial uses of Jews reveal Catholic concerns about globalization, Islam, and Protestants.  I have also co-edited one volume of essays in honor of Prof. Carlos Eire, and a second, more recently, on the varieties of religious minorities in early modern Rome, a book which reveals a surprising level of religious diversity and interaction at the heart of the Eternal City.

I am increasingly interested in the role of space, mobility, and especially   the act of walking on foot in changing the way we think, especially in regard to interfaith encounters and religious minorities in the early modern world.

I am co-editor (with Prof. Harald Braun, Liverpool) of the Routledge interdisciplinary book series Renaissance and Early Modern Worlds of Knowledge.

I am increasingly interested in the topic of walking as a way to understand the early modern worlds and mentalities.

Recent Publications

• Monographs:
  • Catholic Spectacle and Rome’s Jews: Early Modern Conversion and Resistance, Princeton University Press, May, 2022.
    • Prizes:
      • American Historical Association Dorothy Rosenberg Prize
      • American Society of Church History Albert C. Outler Prize
      • Finalist, Association for Jewish Studies Jordan Schnitzer Book Award
      • Honourable Mention, British and Irish Association of Jewish Studies Book Prize
    • Media: New Books Network, Sforim Chatter, Catholic Herald, Page99Test.
  • The Pulpit and the Press in Reformation Italy, I Tatti Monographs in Italian Renaissance History, Harvard University Press, 2013).

• Edited Collections:
  • Cambridge Companion to Counter-Reformation Saints and Sanctity, with Jan Machielsen and Katrina Olds, under contract with Cambridge University Press.
  • A Companion to Religious Minorities in Early Modern Rome. Matthew Coneys Wainwright and Emily Michelson (Brill Companions to the Christian Tradition). Brill, 2020.
  • A Linking of Heaven and Earth: Studies in Religious and Cultural History in honor of Carlos M.N. Eire, Emily Michelson, Scott K. Taylor and Mary Noll Venables (St Andrews Studies in Reformation History). Ashgate, 2012.

• Articles and Book Chapters:
  • “Roamin’ Holiday: Protestants on Foot in the Eternal City,” under peer review for “Religion and Culture in Early Modern Italy: New Questions and Approaches,” special issue of Religions, publication in 2022.

“Rhetoric and Religion: The Catholic World,” under peer review for The Cambridge History of Rhetoric, Volume 3, 1450-1640 edited by Jennifer Richards and Virginia Cox.

• “Refute, Resist, Redirect: Roman Jews Attend Conversionary Sermons” in Religious Minorities in Early Modern Rome, Matthew Coneys Wainwright and Emily Michelson, Brill, 2020, 349-373.
• “Introduction” in Religious Minorities in Early Modern Rome, Matthew Coneys Wainwright and Emily Michelson, Brill, 2020, 1-12 (with Matthew Coneys)
• “Conversionary preaching and the Jews of Early Modern Rome” Past & Present 235 issue 1, May 2017, 68-104.
• “How to write a conversionary sermon: Rhetorical influences and religious identity,” in Religious orders and religious identity formation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ca. 1420-1620, Bert Roest and Johanneke Uphoff (Brill, 2016), 235-251.
• “Dramatics in (and out of) the Pulpit in post-Tridentine Italy,” The Italianist, 34 no. 3 (2014), 449-462.
• “Evangelista Marcellino: One Preacher, Two Congregations” Archivio Italiano per la storia della pietà 25 (2013): 185-202.
• “An Italian explains the English Reformation (with God’s help),” A Linking of Heaven and Earth: Studies in Religious and Cultural History in honor of Carlos M.N. Eire Michelson, Taylor, and Venables (Ashgate, 2012): 33-48.
• “Preaching Across Rome in the Sixteenth Century: Three Key Sites for Catholic Identity,” Early Modern Rome 1341-1667 Portia Prebys (AACUPI, 2012): 466-476.
• “The Catholic Inquisition,” The World History Encyclopedia, Vol. 6: The First Global Age. Eds. Dane Morrison and Jeffrey Diamond. ABC-CLIO (2010).
• “Luigi Lippomano, His Vicars, and the Reform of Verona from the Pulpit,” Church History 78, no. 3 (2009): 584-605.
• “Preaching Scripture under Pressure in Tridentine Italy: A Case Study of Gabriele Fiamma,” The Formation of Clerical and Confessional Identities in the Sixteenth Century. Wim Janse et al. Dutch Review of Church History, vol. 85; Brill (2006).
• Translator (from Italian), “From the Council of Trent to Tridentinism,” by Giuseppe Alberigo, From Trent to Vatican II: Historical and Theological Investigations. Eds. Raymond F. Bulman and Frederick J. Parrella. Oxford (2006).
• “Bernardino of Siena Visualizes the Name of God,” Speculum Sermonis: Interdisciplinary Reflections on the Medieval Sermon. Georgiana Donavin et al. (Disputatio series; Brepols) (2004).

• Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, as of 2019.
• AHRC Standard Research Grant (Co-I with Prof. Mary Laven, Cambridge University), Objects and Spaces of Encounter in Renaissance Italy, co-leading a team of 7, 2023-2026.
• AHRC Early Career Leadership Fellowship 2017-2019.
• Research Fellow (honorary), British School at Rome, 2017-2018
• British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship 2016-2017
• The Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland Research Grant, 2014-2015.
• Robert Lehman Fellow, Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Florence, Italy, 2013-2014.

Media Coverage

I write columns for Times Higher Ed (available at https://www.timeshighereducation.com/author/emily-michelson), notably about the UK immigration process.

Social Media

@Emily_Michelson

Country Focus

Italy

Expertise by Geography

Western Europe

Expertise by Chronology

Pre-17th century

Expertise by Topic

Religion