BU Humanists at Work: Deeana Klepper, Associate Professor of Religion and History
Having “always loved history,” Associate Professor of Religion and History Deeana Klepper found her niche after her work in Europe led her to a PhD in Medieval European History. Undergraduate Center staff member Cheryl Lai sat down with Dr. Klepper to discuss her recent book, Pastoral Care and Community in Late Medieval Germany: Albert of Diessen’s Mirror of Priests, along with how history informs contemporary thought.
What led you to medieval history?
From a young age, I was drawn to stories about the past, history museums, the remains of old settlement sites and burial grounds. I felt the resonance of people who lived before, and contemplating their lives sparked my imagination. My engagement with medieval history specifically came about as something of an accident, however — It came when I had the opportunity to go work in Germany for a while.
In my undergraduate Native American Studies classes, I had learned a great deal about the destruction wrought by European colonialism on native people around the globe, but I hadn’t considered issues of power and control of difference in Europe itself, and how all that played out in American society centuries later.
I decided to go to graduate school to study medieval European history, focusing especially on interreligious encounters and entanglement, matters of religion and identity, and the complex negotiation of inclusion and exclusion of minorities — the shift from tolerance to intolerance and back again. These are all things that remain relevant in our own world.
You recently published a book on a pastoral manuscript you discovered in the Bavarian State Library archives. How did you come across this text, and what exactly is it?
My research draws mainly from unedited manuscripts (handwritten books) from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. Working with unpublished material, there is a significant amount of technical work that goes into a project before the analytical work can begin: identifying, viewing, transcribing, translating, and considering the transmission of surviving manuscripts. We are often searching for needles in haystacks — beginning with a general sense of where a particular discussion might appear, and then pursuing it.
I was in the Bavarian State Library in Munich trying to find sources for a project when I found in the manuscript catalog a reference to a text that began with the line (in Latin), “Note that there are three reasons we do not persecute Jews the way we do Muslims.” The text’s appearance as a random comment seemed odd. I began some sleuthing and realized that this manuscript was a fifteenth-century copy of a fourteenth-century manuscript. It turned out that the paragraph I had found was an additional comment attached to a work by Albert of Diessen called The Mirror of Priests — a pastoral manual.
Pastoral manuals are a form of advice literature for Christian priests in charge of a Christian community. Many things that we consider part of civil society were governed by religious law, and so priests were deeply involved in the lives of their parishioners.
You mention Albert of Diessen’s Mirror of Priests gives us a new perspective on these manuals. How so?
Albert was unusually concerned about the problem of Christian anti-Jewish violence, and he hoped his advice to priests would help limit it. That random paragraph I had found turned out to be an addition to a paragraph Albert had written exploring whether it was allowable to kill Jews without judicial process (which had happened a lot about twenty years prior, in massacres of Jews during the time of the Black plague). Albert brings in evidence from the Christian legal tradition to make it clear that this is not permissible. Obviously there was more concern among Christian leaders about anti-Jewish violence than we can see from other sources in the historical record.
What makes Albert’s pastoral manual exceptionally valuable is the fact that we have three existing copies all written in his own hand. Each of the three is also slightly different: he adds lots of material, changes the way he presents things, uses different arguments or examples. We really get a sense of Albert the author, engaging with his readership and revising his advice. It all feels very direct — given that we’re talking about the Middle Ages here!
Many people are unfamiliar with how a historian writes a book with this kind of scholarly depth. What did that process look like for you?
It is such a long, slow process! But very often, what happens is something like this. I’m working on one thing, and then I find something through that process that catches my interest, and I take notes and set it aside as something to explore when I have the chance.
In this case, I came across the manuscript in the summer of 2009, but I was working on other things until a colleague asked me if I might have something to present for a set of talks on “Violence and Vulnerability in Medieval Europe” in 2014. I realized that Albert’s approach to anti-Jewish violence would be a perfect topic to explore in that context — the thing about specialized conferences is that many audience members know enough about the context to make great suggestions. After the conference I began the next stage of research, resulting in a major journal article that came out in 2017.
When the article was done, I realized that the text and the manuscripts were so compelling that they deserved a book-length treatment. I spent an entire summer just transcribing the chapter headings from each of the three manuscript copies. It was time consuming, but it enabled me to understand the range of material and the ways that they overlapped and diverged.
Bit by bit, the various chapters came into focus. I wrote an essay for an edited volume that gave me a chance to outline the genre of religious advice manuals. For a chapter I was writing on Albert’s environment and community, I traveled to the Catholic Church’s Diocesan Archive in Augsburg to dig up maps of the town where Albert was based so that I could write a spatial analysis. I participated in a mapping workshop at Fordham University to transform a list of far-flung properties owned by Albert’s community into a visual landscape, which helped me connect Albert’s vision for his community with physical space. I was lucky to have a BU Center for the Humanities Fellowship in Fall of 2019, and I wrote the final chapter — the introduction — for the fellows’ seminar meeting in December.
Academic publishing takes a long time even once a book is written. I had sent a proposal to Cornell University Press in August of 2019, and they were very interested. I’ll spare you some steps, but it took until November of 2022 before the book finally came out in print.
How has your scholarly archival work contributed to the way you approach teaching historical nuance, and vice versa?
I often use images from manuscripts that I have come across in my work to illustrate things we are discussing in class and make foreign ideas more accessible to students. I feel I am able to add nuance to discussions about religion and violence, antisemitism, Islamophobia etc. because of the research I do. Having a long view is really helpful when it comes to addressing issues of contemporary concern. For example, we can trace the roots of European (and so American) racism to the Christian racialization of Jews and Muslims in the Middle Ages.
There’s a common narrative about the lack of practical or “real world” value to studying the humanities. What might you say to a student who is curious about the humanities but is concerned about its practicality?
The study of the humanities deals directly with “real world” issues and is great preparation for whatever one wants to do next. The skills one gains in deep reading, critical thinking, analysis, writing, speaking and exchanging ideas, cultural awareness etc. are valued in the workplace — study after study demonstrates this. But also the study of humanities is incredibly valuable preparation for living a meaningful life — for learning to see beyond the surface, to understand things from multiple perspectives, to be inspired by demonstrations of human potential.