Jotham Parsons

After earning my Ph.D. from The Johns Hopkins University in 1997, I taught at the University of Delaware and at Roosevelt University in Chicago before coming to Duquesne in 2003. My teaching and research cover a broad area in the history of medieval and early modern Western Europe. My more specialized work centers on French political, religious, and cultural life in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I have a particular interest in the history of political economy and political theology, and in the history of literature.

My current research focuses on the history of political economy and social thought in seventeenth-century Europe. I am working on the development of such thought in the court of King Henri IV of France, and in Catholic pious literature of the reign of Louis XIV.

 My first book, The Church in the Republic: Gallicanism and Political Ideology in Renaissance France, offers a new interpretation of the relationship between religion and politics in Europe at the dawn of the modern age. Its main subject, the theoretical and political contest over the liberties of the Gallican Church, was one of the great political issues of early modern France. This debate raised basic questions on the nature and origins of authority within human institutions. It shaped the way French Catholic magistrates, laypeople, and clergy understood the state and their own places within it, and was followed closely in England, Italy, and beyond.

My second book, Making Money in Sixteenth-Century France: Currency, Culture, and the State, investigates the creation and circulation of currency in France. The royal Cour des Monnaies centralized monetary administration, expanding its role in the emerging modern state during the sixteenth century and assuming new powers as an often controversial repository of theoretical and administrative expertise.It also played an important role in developing the contemporary understanding of money, as a source of both danger and opportunity at the center of economic and political life. More practically, the Monnaies led generally successful responses to the endemic inflation of the era and the monetary chaos of a period of civil war. Its work investigating and prosecuting counterfeiters shone light into a picaresque world of those who used the abstract and artificial nature of money for their own ends. This text was awarded the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize by the Renaissance Society of America.

• Ph.D., History, The Johns Hopkins University, 1997
• M.A., History, The Johns Hopkins University, 1993
• A.B., History, Harvard College, 1990