Yitzhak Hen
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Yitzhak Hen is Professor of late antique and early medieval History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Director of the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies. His research focuses on the social, cultural and intellectual history of the post-Roman Barbarians kingdoms of the early medieval West; early medieval liturgy and religious culture; as well as early medieval Latin palaeography and codicology. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (UK), a Corresponding Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America (MAA), and a Life Member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge.
In February 2025, he joins the IAS for a one-month writing residency.
Research Interests
Intellectual history of the post-Roman West
Purifying texts in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages
Throughout Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, a vast corpus of potentially dangerous texts was dismissed as unorthodox and unauthorised by Christian scholars and policy makers. These texts exposed their readers to unorthodox systems of thought and belief, and hence should have been eradicated. And yet, although these texts and the world-view they represented were repeatedly questioned, denounced and condemned, they were still read, copied and commented upon by a select group of Christian scholars, who clearly realised the implications of what they were doing. Given the fact that the attitude towards these texts remained negative and reproachful, their preservation and use seem even more intriguing. This study, which is an off-shoot of a larger project – "Forbidden Knowledge: The reception of Unorthodox Texts and Practices in the Early Medieval West" – explores some of the mechanism that allowed the preservation, copying, and reading of such texts in the late-antique and the early medieval West. The significance of this study is two-fold. First, it will offer an original and innovative analysis of a hitherto neglected phenomenon, and a platform for introducing new approaches to the transformation of knowledge in the early medieval West. Second, it will provide some thoughts on the limits of censorship in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages.
Key Publications
The Royal Patronage of Liturgy in Frankish Gaul to the Death of Charles the Bald (877), Henry Bradshaw Society, subsidia 3 (Boydell & Brewer: London, 2001)
Roman Barbarians: The Royal Court and Culture in the Early Medieval West (Palgrave-Macmillan: London and New York, 2007)
"The Merovingian polity: a network of courts and courtiers", in The Oxford Companion to Merovingian History, ed. B. Effros and I. Moreira (Oxford, 2020), pp. 217-237"
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