A Colloquium on They Flew by Carlos Eire

Richard Kieckhefer is the John Evans Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies. His research interests focus mainly on late medieval religious culture, with special interest in local religion, sainthood and mysticism, witchcraft and magic, and related themes. His most recent book, The Mystical Presence of Christ (Cornell, 2022), explores the relationship between ordinary and exceptional religious experience in the late medieval West. He has also published European Witch Trials (Routledge & Kegan Paul; 1976), Repression of Heresy in Medieval Germany (Pennsylvania, 1979), Unquiet Souls (Chicago, 1984), Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1989), Forbidden Rites (Sutton and Penn State, 1997), and Theology in Stone (Oxford, 2004). A theme underlying much of his research is the way in which communities create and sustain a sense of shared culture in the face of difference, dissention, and dispute.

Carlos Eire, who was awarded the 2024 Harwood F. Byrnes/Richard B. Sewall Teaching Prize by Yale College, received his PhD from Yale in 1979.   He specializes in the social, intellectual, religious, and cultural history of late medieval and early modern Europe, with a focus on both the Protestant and Catholic Reformations; the history of popular piety; the history of the supernatural, and the history of death.  Before joining the Yale faculty in 1996, he taught at St. John’s University in Minnesota and the University of Virginia, and was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.  He is the author of  War Against the Idols (1986); From Madrid to Purgatory (1995); A Very Brief History of Eternity (2010); Reformations: The Early Modern World (2016);  The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila: A Biography (2019); and They Flew: A History of the Impossible (2023).  He is also co-author of Jews, Christians, Muslims: An Introduction to Monotheistic Religions (1997); and ventured into the twentieth century and the Cuban Revolution in the memoir Waiting for Snow in Havana (2003), which won the National Book Award in Nonfiction in the United States and has been translated into more than a dozen languages.  His second memoir, Learning to Die in Miami (2010), explores the exile experience.  A past president of the Society for Reformation Research, he is currently researching various topics in the history of the supernatural. His book Reformations won the R.R.Hawkins Prize for Best Book of the Year from the American Publishers Association, as well as the award for Best Book in the Humanities in 2017. It was also awarded the Jaroslav Pelikan Prize by Yale University Press.  All of his books are banned in Cuba, where he has been proclaimed an enemy of the state – a distinction he regards as the highest of all honors.

Professor Newman (Ph.D. Yale) is known for her work on medieval religious culture, comparative literature, and women’s spirituality. Her most recent books are The Permeable Self: Five Medieval Relationships (2021) and a translation of Richard Methley’s collected works (2021). She is also the editor/translator of Thomas of Cantimpré: The Collected Saints’ Lives (2008) and Mechthild of Hackeborn’s Book of Special Grace (2017). Other works include Making Love in the Twelfth Century (2016), Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against the Sacred (2013), Frauenlob’s Song of Songs: A Medieval German Poet and His Masterpiece (2006), God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (2003), and From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (1995), as well as three books on Hildegard of Bingen.

Professor Newman has been a Fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities at Northwestern. She holds the John Evans Chair of Latin Language and Literature and previously held a Charles Deering McCormick Chair of Teaching Excellence (2003-06). Professor Newman is a past president of the Medieval Academy of America and director of the graduate cluster in Medieval Studies.