Department of History | The University of Chicago

The University of Chicago
Department of History
1126 E. 59th Street, Mailbox 73
Chicago, IL 60637
(773) 702-7935 -- Office
(773) 702-7550 -- Fax
Email: icon@uchicago.edu
Website: http://home.uchicago.edu/~icon
CV: http://home.uchicago.edu/~icon/cfcv.pdf
On Leave: 2009- 2010

Field Specialties
Early Modern Europe; Political, Social, and Legal Thought in Medieval and Early Modern Europe; History and Theory of Historical Writing; Reformation; Conciliar Movement.

Biography

Constantin Fasolt's interest is focused on the historical background behind the structures of authority that governed the European and American worlds from the eighteenth until the twentieth century. His research deals with the origin and significance of modern historical and political thought. His teaching covers European intellectual history from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, especially in Germany and France, with occasional glances further back in time. He has written books on late medieval theories of constitutional government as carried forward by the conciliar movement (Council and Hierarchy) and the significance of the early modern turn to history (The Limits of History). He is also general editor of New Perspectives on the Past, a series of interdisciplinary monographs on fundamental aspects of history published by Blackwell, Oxford.

Publications

The Limits of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Council and Hierarchy: The Political Thought of William Durant the Younger. Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Hermann Conring's New Discourse on the Roman-German Emperor. Ed. and trans. Constantin Fasolt. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 282. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005.

"Hegel's Ghost: Europe, the Reformation, and the Middle Ages." Viator 39 (2008): 345-86.

"History and Religion in the Modern Age." History and Theory, Theme Issue 45 (2006): 10-26.

"Sovereignty and Heresy." In: Infinite Boundaries: Order, Disorder, and Reorder in Early Modern German Culture, eds. M. Reinhart and T. Robisheaux. Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies, 1998.

"Visions of Order in the Canonists and Civilians." In: Handbook of European History, 1400-1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation, eds. T. A. Brady, H. Oberman and J. Tracy. Brill, 1995, 2:31-59.

"Political Unity and Religious Diversity: Hermann Conring's Confessional Writings and the Preface to Aristotle's Politics of 1637." In Confessionalization in Europe, 1555-1700: Essays in Honor and Memory of Bodo Nischan, ed. John M. Headley, Hans J. Hillerbrand, and Anthony J. Papalas, 319-45. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004.

"Author and Authenticity in Conring's New Discourse on the Roman-German Emperor: A Seventeenth-Century Case Study." Renaissance Quarterly 54 (2001): 188-220.

"A Question of Right: Hermann Conring's 'New Discourse on the Roman-German Emperor'." Sixteenth Century Journal, 1997, pp. 739-58.

"William Durant the Younger and Conciliar Theory." Journal of the History of Ideas, 1997, pp. 385-402.

"Conring on History." In: Supplementum Festivum: Studies in Honor of Paul Oskar Kristeller, eds. J. Hankins, J. Monfasani, F. Purnell. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1987, pp. 563-87.

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Constantin Fasolt

Karl J. Weintraub Professor of History and the College
Ph.D. Columbia University 1981