H. C. Erik Midelfort
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Professor Emeritus of History and Religious Studies, University of Virginia

Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellow - Class of Spring 2011

Historian H. C. Erik Midelfort is a specialist in the social and intellectual history of early modern Europe and sixteenth-century Germany in particular. His extensive research into witchcraft trials and the history of madness in early modern Germany has resulted in numerous publications, most importantly A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Stanford, 1999), which won both the 1999 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award of the Phi Beta Kappa Society and the Roland H. Bainton Prize for the best book of 1999. Midelfort’s book Exorcism and Enlightenment (Yale, 2005) centers on Johann Joseph Gassner (1727–1779), an Austrian exorcist whose mass campaign of “healings” came under sharp criticism both from enlightened Protestants and Catholics. Midelfort has been a visiting scholar at numerous institutions, including Oxford University, Yale University, University of Bern, and Harvard University.

Project Description

The Suppression of Dissent in Germany, 1650-1750

Midelfort pursued a book tentatively titled “Fear of Freethinking: The Suppression of Dissent in Germany, 1650–1750.” He will explore how the German states in the century after 1650 managed, despite the lack of an effective central government, to suppress radical and dissenting political, moral, and religious views. The work is based on the assumption that the authorities succeeded through a combination of threats and warnings from employers and church authorities, from city councilors and censorship boards, and that they very effectively mobilized fears of “atheism.” The result was a chilling and surprisingly academic culture in which Catholics and Protestants could survive in their own separate religious niches – but where other modes of thought were rigorously suppressed.

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