![Dr Sigbjorn Sonnesyn](https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/ws/files/353174247/Profile_photo.jpg)
Dr Sigbjorn Sonnesyn
BA, MA, PhD
Expertise
I study European medieval religious and intellectual culture, specialising in the religious, moral, and scientific thought of European Latin culture and in cross-cultural relations between Christian, Islamicate and Jewish thought.
Current positions
Lecturer in Medieval Christianity
Department of Religion and Theology
Contact
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Research interests
I am a historian of European high medieval religious and intellectual culture, its antecedents and wider intellectual geographies, specialising in the religious, moral, and scientific thought of European Latin culture and in cross-cultural relations between Christian, Islamicate and Jewish thought.
My main research interests focus on the intellectual culture of Western Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries. I am particularly interested in the ways in which Christian intellectual culture in the Latin-dominated part of the Christian world absorbed influences from classical philosophy and Jewish and Islamicate learning. In my published work I have emphasised how monastic intellectual culture in the 12th century incorporated classical and pagan elements by subsuming them into a mode of practice, a comprehensive way of life, in which elements that in purely abstract terms were incompatible in practice could inform a unified notion of the good Christian life. I have also studied how Christian thinkers made sense of Aristotelian natural philosophy and metaphysics in the early period following their translation into Latin. Both of these concerns continue to be central to my current and future work.
Projects and supervisions
Thesis supervisions
Publications
Recent publications
12/05/2023Mapping the Universe
Mapping the Universe
Writing Intellectual History of the High and Late Middle Ages
Routledge Resources Online
Word, Example, and Practice
Journal of Medieval History
Knowing and Speaking
Knowing and Speaking
Ralph von Battle, Dialoge zur philosophischen Theologie
Ralph von Battle, Dialoge zur philosophischen Theologie