Dr. Adam J. Davis received his Ph.D. in history from Princeton University in 2001. He arrived at Denison in
2003 after teaching as a lecturer at Yale.
Dr. Davis teaches survey courses on Late Antiquity, the high and later Middle
Ages, and early modern Europe. His upper-level courses include Renaissance
Italy, Jews and Christians in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance/Reformation of
the Twelfth Century, University and Society: From the Middle Ages to the
Present, and Doing History: Debating the Middle Ages.
Davis's research explores the interplay between medieval ideas and institutions,
social values and practices. His first book, The Holy Bureaucrat:
Eudes Rigaud and Religious Reform in Thirteenth-Century Normandy (Cornell University Press,
2006), used the career of the Franciscan archbishop of Rouen as a window into the relationship between medieval institutional
power and evangelical devotion. Davis's publications have appeared in
the Journal of Ecclesiastical History, the Revue Mabillon, the
Dictionary of the Middle Ages, and an edited volume on Medieval Education
(Fordham University Press, 2005). His current research project,
supported by a grant from the Lilly Foundation, is a book-length study
of medieval poor hospitals and the formation of a charitable society in
northern France.
