Dr. Michael Lovell

Ph.D., University of Tennessee-Knoxville

Areas of Expertise

• Early Medieval Europe
• Late Antiquity 

Email: mlovell@fau.edu
Office Phone: 561-297-2893

Michael Lovell is a historian of late antique and early medieval Europe. His interests include Jewish-Christian relations, pagan-Christian relations, pagan survivals, questions of identity, Christianization in the Roman and post-Roman worlds, post-Roman statecraft, Merovingian Francia, the Carolingian Empire, biblical exegesis, apocalyptic thought, as well as the concrete social impacts of late antique and medieval preaching, heresy, theology, and philosophy.

His book project, currently titled Predestination and Religious Tolerance in Late Antique Gaul: Faith and Reason in a Multiconfessional Society, 330-600, examines how Christians claimed a monopoly on rationality and how this self-understanding had affected their tolerance for religious outsiders, namely pagans, heretics, and Jews. It reexamines how an intra-Christian debate, commonly known as the Semipelagian or Massilian Controversy, had a fundamental impact on early medieval conceptions of religious tolerance for these confessional outsiders in one of the most significant post-Roman states in Western Europe, Merovingian Gaul. Two factions predominated during this period: the synergists, who believed that human nature and rationality were merely wounded by the Fall of Adam and Eve, and the Augustinians or predestinarians, who considered human nature and the capacity for reason to be totally depraved after the Fall. The synergist faction was more willing to view religious minorities as fellow humans capable of reason and neighborly trust, while the predestinarian faction viewed these minorities as irrational and untrustworthy. Dr. Lovell examines how both factions inculcated their views among the wider laity and influenced social tolerance or the lack thereof between religious groups during this period.

 

Courses

Undergraduate Courses

• History of Civilization I
• Medieval England
• Medieval Europe
• Roman Civilization

 

Graduate Courses

• Readings in European History

Curriculum Vitae (Available upon request)