Jotham Parsons

After earning a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1997, Jotham taught at the University of Delaware and Roosevelt University in Chicago before joining Duquesne University in 2003. His teaching and research span the history of medieval and early modern Western Europe, with particular expertise in French political, religious, and cultural life during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His scholarly interests include political economy, political theology, and literary history.

He is the author and editor of several significant works in early modern French history. His first book, The Church in the Republic: Gallicanism and Political Ideology in Renaissance France (2004), examined the relationship between religion and politics at the dawn of the modern age. Focusing on the contest over the liberties of the Gallican Church, the book explored one of the central political debates of early modern France and addressed fundamental questions concerning the nature and origins of authority within human institutions.

His second monograph, Making Money in Sixteenth-Century France: Currency, Culture, and the State (2014), investigated the creation and circulation of currency in France and the role of the royal Cour des Monnaies in centralizing monetary administration. The study demonstrated how the institution expanded its authority as part of the emerging modern state while shaping contemporary understandings of money as both a source of opportunity and a potential threat within economic and political life. The book also illuminated the world of counterfeiters and others who exploited the abstract nature of currency for personal gain. In recognition of its contributions to Renaissance studies, the work received the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize from the Renaissance Society of America.

More recently, he collaborated with Robert Maryks and the late Patricia Ranum to translate and edit two important volumes of French anti-Jesuit polemic. Étienne Pasquier’s The Jesuits’ Catechism (2022), originally written at the turn of the seventeenth century, presented the foundational text in a politically influential conflict between French nationalists and the Society of Jesus. France and the Destruction of the Jesuits, 1759–65 (2024) brought together three major texts from the climax of that controversy, a period that culminated in the expulsion of the Jesuits from France prior to the Revolution. Through translation, annotation, and editorial commentary, these works demonstrate how disputes over religion, history, and culture shaped French political life across generations.

His current research extends this line of inquiry by examining the relationship between religious conflict and French literary culture between the 1590s and the 1620s, a period in which the Bourbon dynasty consolidated its absolutist monarchy and literature emerged as a cornerstone of French national identity. He also continues to explore the prehistory of political economy and its connections to religious identity and belief.

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