Marcia L. Colish

After teaching there from 1963 to 2001, Marcia L. Colish retired from Oberlin College as Frederick B. Artz Professor of History emerita. Since then she has been a Visiting Fellow, Visiting Professor, and Lecturer in History at Yale University. She has been a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University and at the Weston School of Theology (1982), Etienne Gilson Lecturer at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto (2000), and a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar (2006-07). She holds a Ph.D. from Yale (1965) and an honorary D.H.L. from Grinnell College (1999). The Yale Graduate School awarded her its Wilbur Cross Medal in 1993.

Ms. Colish’s chief scholarly interest is the intellectual history of the Middle Ages, particularly the fortunes of the classical and Christian traditions, as well as their pre-medieval roots and carryover in early modern thought. Aside from Peter Lombard, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1994), recipient of the Haskins medal of the Medieval Academy of America (1998), the project for which she received the Guggenheim Fellowship, her major publications include The Mirror of Language: A Study in the Medieval Theory of Knowledge (Yale UP, 1968; 2nd rev. ed., University of Nebraska Press, 1983); The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1985; rev. paperback ed., 1990); Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 400-1400 (Yale UP, 1997; paperback ed., 1999; new printing, 2003; Italian trans., 2001; Chinese trans., 2009); Remapping Scholasticism (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaval Studies, 2000); and Ambrose’s Patriarchs: Ethics for the Common Man (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005; paperback ed., 2005). Previously published papers have been collected in Studies in Scholasticism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) and The Fathers and Beyond: Church Fathers between Ancient and Medieval Thought (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).

In addition to the appointments noted above, Ms. Colish has held grants from the American Council of Learned Societies (1974, 1987) and the American Philosophical Society (1998); a Writing Residency at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Villa Serbelloni, Bellagio (1995); and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1968-69, 1981-82), the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin (1975-75), the National Humanities Center (1981-82), the School of History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (1986-87), and the Woodrow Wilson Center (1994-95).