Madeline McMahon

I am a Ph.D. candidate studying the intellectual, religious and cultural history of early modern Europe. My dissertation, “Shepherding a Church in Crisis: Religious Life, Governance, and Knowledge in Early Modern Italy,” examines the contested nature and role of bishops in the Catholic Church in Italy after the Council of Trent.
I entered the program in 2015. In 2016-17, I co-organized the Committee for the Study of Books and Media (CSBM) seminar series with Stephanie Pope. I was a co-founding co-editor of JHIBlog, the blog for the Journal of the History of Ideas, through 2016. With Frederic Clark and Erin Schreiner, I co-curated the exhibit, Readers Make Their Mark: Annotated Books at the New York Society Library (2015). Continuing my interest in marginalia, I am a member of the Winthrop Project here at Princeton, where I work on almanacs, religious diaries, and barrels of books on the move.
I received my B.A. from Princeton in 2013. I studied classics at Columbia University (2013-14) and early modern history at Trinity College, Cambridge as a Gates Cambridge Scholar (2014-15). In 2017-18, I was based at the Università di Bologna in order to pursue research on my dissertation as a Fulbright doctoral grantee. In 2018 and 2019, I was a visiting researcher at Harvard University, first as a fellow at the Houghton Library and later as an exchange scholar in the history department.
Publications:
“Matthew Parker and the Practice of Church History” in Nicholas Hardy and Dmitri Levitin, eds., Confessionalisation and Erudition in Early Modern Europe: An Episode in the History of the Humanities. Proceedings of the British Academy 225. Oxford: Published for the British Academy by Oxford University Press (2019): 116–153.
“Polemic in Translation: Jerome’s Fashioning of History in the Chronicle” in Walter Pohl and Veronika Wieser, eds., Historiography and Identity I: Ancient and Early Christian Narratives of Community. Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages 24. Turnhout: Brepols (2019): 219–246.
“Licking the ‘beare whelpe’: William Lambarde and Matthew Parker Revise the Perambulation of Kent.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 81 (2018): 154–171.
R. Calis, F. Clark, C. Flow, A. Grafton, M. McMahon, and J. M. Rampling, “Passing the Book: Cultures of Reading in the Winthrop Family, 1580 – 1730.” Past & Present 241, no. 1 (2018): 69–141. https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gty022