THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
BIOGRAPHY
A scholar of early modern Europe and North America, Prof. Macfarlane works at the intersection of religious, cultural, and intellectual history. She has a particular interest in the history of biblical scholarship, encompassing its production by Latin-speaking scholarly elites, its interactions with vernacular religious culture, and its relationship with theological controversy and confessional identity.
This interest unites much of her research, including her first book on the Elizabethan Hebraist Hugh Broughton (Biblical Scholarship in an Age of Controversy, published with Oxford University Press in 2021); her co-edited volume with Joanna Weinberg and Piet van Boxel on the early modern reception of the Mishnah (published in 2022 in the Oxford-Warburg Series); and her second monograph on the relationship between erudition and piety in an exceptional community of early immigrants to Massachusetts (Lay Learning and the Bible in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World, Oxford University Press, 2024).
Lay Learning and the Bible was awarded the 2025 Roland H. Bainton Religion and Theology Book Prize from The Sixteenth Century Society: you can hear Macfarlane discuss the book here and here.
She is currently working on her third monograph on the study of Hebrew in North America from the colonial period through to the dawn of the nineteenth century. Entitled ‘American Hebraism 1640-1800’, this book is under contract with Harvard University Press.
Before arriving at Chicago, Macfarlane served as an Associate Professor at the University of Oxford, where she also received her BA, MSt, and DPhil. Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from Trinity College, Cambridge; the Houghton Library; the Massachusetts Historical Society; the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies; the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council; the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study; KU Leuven; Lund University; and the Library Company of Philadelphia. She serves on the Editorial Advisory Board for Lias: Journal of Early Modern Intellectual Culture and its Sources and is an elected fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
She has a joint appointment in the Divinity School and is a member of the Faculty Board of the Nicholson Center for British Studies.
Recent Research / Recent Publications
- Lay Learning and the Bible in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World. Oxford University Press, 2024. Winner of the 2025 Roland H. Bainton Theology and Religion Prize from The Sixteenth-Century Society
- Biblical Scholarship in an Age of Controversy: The Polemical World of Hugh Broughton (1549-1612). Oxford University Press, 2021.
- Co-editor with Piet van Boxel and Joanna Weinberg. The Mishnaic Moment: Jewish Law among Jews and Christians in Early Modern Europe. Oxford University Press: Oxford-Warburg Studies, 2022.
- ‘Gospel Harmonies and the Genres of Biblical Scholarship in Early Modern Europe.' Renaissance Quarterly 76.3 (2023): 1027-67.
- 'John Lightfoot (1602-1675), the Westminster Assembly, and the Horae Hebraicae et Talmudicae', Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 53.1 (2023): 87-116.
- ‘Christianity as Jewish Allegory? Guiliemus Surenhusius, Rabbinic Hermeneutics and the Reformed Study of the New Testament in the Early Eighteenth Century,’ in The Mishnaic Moment: Jewish Law among Jews and Christians in Early Modern Europe, pp. 378-400. Oxford University Press: Oxford-Warburg Studies, 2022.
- 'Why did Henry Dunster Reject Infant Baptism? Circumcision and the Covenant of Grace in the Seventeenth-Century Transatlantic Reformed Community,' The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 72.2 (2021): 323-51.