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.