Dr Eva De Visscher
Faculty of History, member of Oriel College
Tutor on the MSt in Medieval Studies Programme
E-mail: eva.devisscher@history.ox.ac.uk
Research interests
Medieval interfaith relations is my main field of research, with a focus on Jewish-Christian encounters during the eleventh to fourteenth centuries. I am particularly interested in the way in which Jewish communities, as a minority, negotiated their identity within the framework of a Christian majority culture, and in the learning of Hebrew among Christians. I further study multilingualism and biblical translation in the Latin West, and medieval perceptions and practices of magic and the occult.
Publications
- Reading the Rabbis: The Landscape of Herbert of Bosham’s Christian Hebraism, manuscript under consideration with Brill Publishers, August 2011
- ‘An Ave Maria in Hebrew: the Transmission of Hebrew Learning from Jewish to Christian Scholars in Medieval England’, in York 1190-2010, ed. Sarah Rees Jones and Sethina Watson (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, in press)
- ‘Hebrew, Latin, French, English: Multilingualism in Jewish-Christian Encounters’, in Multilingualism in Medieval Britain (c.1066-1520), ed. Judith E. Jefferson and Ad Putter (Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming July 2012)
- Entries on ‘Rashi’, ‘Leazim’, and ‘Herbert of Bosham’ in the Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Robert Bjork (Oxford: OUP, 2010)
- ‘Cross-religious learning and teaching: Hebraism in the Twelfth Century’ in Crossing the Borders: Hebrew Manuscripts as a Meeting Place of Cultures, ed. Piet van Boxel (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2009), pp. 123-32
- ‘Putting Theory into Practice? Hugh of Saint Victor’s Influence on Herbert of Bosham’s Psalterium cum commento’ in Bibel und Exegese in der Abtei Saint-Victor zu Paris: Form und Funktion eines Grundtextes im europäischen Rahmen, ed. Rainer Berndt, Corpus Victorinum, vol. 3. Instrumenta (Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2009), pp. 491-502
- ‘Closer to the Hebrew: Herbert of Bosham’s Commentary on the Psalms’, in The Multiple Meaning of Scripture: The Role of Exegesis in Medieval Culture, ed. Ineke van ‘t Spijker (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 249-72
- ‘Marian devotion in the Central and Later Middle Ages’, in The Virgin Mary: The Complete Resource, ed. Sarah J. Boss (London: Continuum/OUP (US), 2007)