Historian Philippe Buc on Religion and Violence

Philippe Buc has been at Stanford since 1990. He earned his Ph.D. from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Sciences Sociales, Paris. His research has been concerned with religion and power in pre-modern western Europe, principally from Late Antiquity to the High Middle Ages, so the 2nd to 14th centuries of the Common Era. The geographic areas that he is most familiar with include what are now France, Germany, and the Low Countries, but given the translocal nature of political and religious elites in the Middle Ages, his space is by necessity the whole of Western Europe. His books are titled L'ambiguïté du Livre. Prince, pouvoir et peuple dans les commentaires de la Bible [the ambiguity of the Book. Prince, power, and the people in biblical commentaries] (1994), and Dangers of Ritual (2001).