Dr Simon Burton (BA (Hons), MA (Cantab), DipTh, MPhil, PhD, FHEA)
John Laing Senior Lecturer in Reformation History
Address
- Street
-
School of Divinity
Mound Place - City
- Edinburgh
- Post code
- EH1 2LX
Background
I am a historical theologian and Church historian focussing on the period of the Long Reformation (c. 1400-1700), with a particular interest in medieval and Reformed theology and the movement of universal reformation.
I began my academic career at the University of Cambridge with a degree in Natural Sciences, before switching to postgraduate work in the theology and Church history of the Reformation era. My PhD, which I completed at the University of Edinburgh, was on the Trinitarian method of the seventeenth-century English Reformed theologian Richard Baxter.
In 2012-13 I was a Canadian Commonwealth and CREOR postdoctoral fellow at McGill University, Montreal where I studied Augustinian and Thomist influence on the sixteenth-century Florentine Reformer Peter Martyr Vermigli. Following that I took up a postdoctoral position and later an assistant-professorship at the Faculty of “Artes Liberales”, University of Warsaw. Here I engaged in research on Ramism and the universal reformation, developing themes from my PhD research. In 2017 I returned to New College to take up my current post.
I am the author of The Hallowing of Logic: The Trinitarian Method of Richard Baxter’s Methodus Theologiae (Leiden: Brill, 2012), Ramism and the Reformation of Method: The Franciscan Legacy in Early Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024) and Participation & Covenant in Puritan Theology (Landrum, SC: Davenant Press, 2025). I am the co-editor of Protestant Majorities and Minorities in Early Modern Europe: Confessional Boundaries and Contested Identities (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2019), Nicholas of Cusa and the Making of the Early Modern World (Leiden: Brill, 2019) and Reformation and Education: Confessional Dynamics and Intellectual Transformations (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2022). I have published widely in journals such as Reformation and Renaissance Review, Ecclesiology, History of Universities and Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes and have a number of chapters in edited books. I am the co-founder and co-director of the Cusanus Society UK and Ireland and the Director of the Network for the Study of the Long Reformation.
Responsibilities & affiliations
Memberships of professional bodies and centres
American Cusanus Society
Cusanus Society UK and Ireland
Network for the Study of the Long Reformation
Society for Reformation Studies
Scottish Church History Society
Membership of research groups
At the Crossroads of Early Modernity: An Interdisciplinary Study of John Mair (c.1467-1550), Geneva, SNSF Project (Advisory Board)
Undergraduate teaching
History of Christianity as a World Religion 1A
History of Christianity as a World Religion 1B
Reformations: Britain and Ireland, c. 1475-1600
Reformations: Continental Europe, c. 1475-1600
New College Collections: Archival History and Theology
Postgraduate teaching
Programme Director for Theology in History
Creeds, Councils and Controversies: Patristic and Medieval
Creeds, Councils and Controversies: Reformation and Modern
Theology in the Long Reformation, c. 1400-1600
Open to PhD supervision enquiries?
Yes
Research summary
My research all relates to the theme of the Long Reformation and a primary interest of mine is the complex relation of late medieval, Reformation and post-Reformation theology. My original research was in the field of Reformed scholasticism and I still maintain a strong research focus on this area. However, my interests have also diversified to encompass late medieval and Reformation theology more broadly.
I am particularly fascinated by the relation between intellectual, theological and ecclesiological reform and its impact on the wider Church and society. Currently I am working on a monograph on Ramism, Pietism and Idealism in the Atlantic World.