Kenneth Baxter Wolf

Trained at Stanford University as a Medieval European historian, Kenneth Baxter Wolf is a member of the Classics Department, where he oversees the Late Antique-Medieval Studies (LAMS) Program that he founded in 2012.

Wolf is a historian of mentalité who mines medieval Latin texts in an effort to reconstruct the mind-sets and world-views of their authors and imagined audiences. Because this approach relies on such a close reading of texts, it is no surprise that Wolf has evolved over the course of his career into a translator, applying his skills to Latin texts ranging from eighth-century chronicles to 13th-century canonization records. He regularly offers a Medieval Latin translation tutorial for students who have at least one year of Classical Latin under their belts.

Wolf began his scholarly work as a historian of early medieval Spain, with particular interests in the cultural construction of sanctity and early Christian views of Islam. Over the years the geographical scope of these two interests has expanded to encompass the Mediterranean basin as a whole. His signature course is Medieval Mediterranean, a lecture-based class that simultaneously treats the history of the Latin, Greek and Arabic components of the post-Roman world. He regularly offers two other surveys (Saints and Society and Medieval Europe and the World Outside) as well as a number of seminars (Heresy and Church, Earliest Christian Views of Islam, and Medieval Spain).

An active researcher, writer and translator, Wolf recently finished the second of a two-volume set of Latin texts produced in the 850s by Córdoban Christians writing under Muslim Rule. He is particularly intrigued by what these sources reveal about how Christians living under Muslim rule came to terms with their political subordination without losing their religious identity in the process. In his spare time, Wolf is slowly reconstructing the experiences of his 19th-century German and English immigrant ancestors.