Brian Patrick McGuire

brian@bpmg.dk

GOODBYE TO THE DARK MIDDLE AGES!

 

Born Hawaii 1946. Grew up in Oakland, California. B.A. UC Berkeley 1968.

D.Phil. Oxford University England 1971. Married Ann Kirstin Pedersen 1970. Emigrated to Denmark 1971.

Lectures at Berkeley, Stanford, Northwestern, University of Chicago; Trappist-Cistercian abbeys in the US, Britain, Ireland, Hong Kong.

Visiting professor at Western Michigan University 1989 and 1994.

Adjunkt, later lektor (associate professor) at Copenhagen University 1975-1997.

Professor of medieval history at Roskilde University, 1996-2009.

 

Publications (besides those in Danish) include:

 

The Cistercians in Denmark: Attitudes, Roles and Functions in Medieval Society

(Kalamazoo, Michigan: Cistercian Publications 1982)

 

Friendship and Community: The Monastic Experience 350-1250. First published by Cistercian 1988, republished by Cornell University Press, 2010.

 

The Difficult Saint: Bernard of Clairvaux and his Tradition (Cistercian, 1991)

 

Brother and Lover: Aelred of Rievaulx (New York: Crossroad, 1994)

 

Jean Gerson: Early Works (New York: Paulist, 1998). Classics of Western Spirituality

 

Friendship and Faith: Cistercian Men, Women, and their Stories, 1100-1250 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002)

(collection of articles)         

 

Jean Gerson and the Last Medieval Reformation (Philadelphia: Penn State Press, 2005)                  

 

Bernard of Clairvaux: An Inner Life (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2020)

 

Elected Corresponding Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, 2011.

 

Academic activities now focus on a new history of Danish medieval saints (in Danish). Attendance at the Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo Michigan and visits and lectures at Trappist Cistercian monasteries—2016 Hong Kong, 2018 New Clairvaux in California, 2017 and 2019 New Melleray in Iowa, 2021 planned for Gethsemani Abbey, Kentucky.