John Jeffries Martin

John Jeffries Martin is fascinated by the social, religious, and cultural history of Europe and the Mediterranean in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries.

John has always been interested in the history of religious beliefs and practices. In his books he has explored the heresies of artisans in sixteenth-century Venice, the invention of sincerity, and myths of Renaissance individualism. His most recent book "A Beautiful Ending: The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Making of the Modern World," by contrast, places its emphasis on the role of faith -- not only within Christianity but also within Judaism and in Islam -- in animating individual and collective actions in the early modern world. Indeed, faith did much to shape agency, and played a role in fostering new political, religious, and scientific visions of a more hopeful future. At the same time, many horrors -- from civil wars to colonialism -- also stemmed from the "apocalyptic imagination."

John is professor and former chair of history at Duke University and lives in Hillsborough, NC. He grew up on St. Simons Island and studied history at Harvard. Before joining the faculty at Duke, he taught at Trinity University in San Antonio. He is currently writing about the history of torture in early modern Italy and studying the changes in the nature of intellectual activity in Europe from the mid-fifteenth to the late eighteenth century.