Dr. Michael L. Monheit

Michael L. Monheit, was born in Brooklyn, N.Y.C., a stone’s throw from the Brooklyn Dodgers home, Ebbets Field. He was raised there and in Queens, N.Y.C. He was very active in the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as in the Nuclear Freeze movement of the 1980s. He taught in the History Department at South for 23 years, from 1991 to 2014, where he taught courses on religious reform in the Reformation era, and major European intellectual leaders at the undergraduate and graduate levels, Renaissance Europe at the graduate level, Witchcraft and Magic in Medieval and Early Modern Europe and Western Civilization I at the undergraduate level. Before coming to the University, he taught writing courses, focusing on aspects of American history, at Michigan State University. He received his B.A. in History from the University of California, Berkeley (1976), his M.A. (1981) and Ph.D.(1988) in History from Princeton University.

His research interests included the formative years of the Protestant Reformer Jean Calvin, Eucharistic conflicts in the early Reformation, scriptural and legal interpretation in the Renaissance and early Reformation, the emotional dimension in history. At the end of his career, his focus shifted to the attitudes of religious reformers to participation in Catholic rituals. Focusing on participation in the Catholic Mass, he has presented papers on two religious leaders who expressed different attitudes on this issue:

Gérard Roussel, a reformer who remained within the Catholic Church, became a bishop and abbot, and was ultimately murdered in the pulpit.

Jean Calvin, the most important leader in Reformed Protestantism, who not only broke with the Church, but denounced those who attended Mass and or continued to hold ecclesiastical positions in it.

Martin Bucer, who wrote a long treatise advocating such participation as a means to winning followers within the Church.

In this research, he delved into their different understandings of the relationship between religious belief and ritual practice. While the subject is quite technical, his research addresses a major flashpoint in the French Wars of Religion (later sixteenth century) and many other violent religious conflicts: the meaning and proper performance of the Lord’s Supper.