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Kirsten Macfarlane Awarded Selma V. Forkosch Prize
May 6, 2026
Kirsten Macfarlane, Associate Professor of Early Modern Religious and Intellectual History, has been awarded the Selma V. Forkosch Prize for the best article published in the Journal of the History of Ideas over the past year.
The annual prize recognizes exceptional contributions to intellectual history, honoring work that advances understanding of the ideas, texts, and traditions that shape human inquiry. Macfarlane’s article, “Written in the Stars? Alphabets and Angels in Early Modern Europe” (vol. 86, no. 3, pp. 473–506), was selected for its originality, methodological precision, and its contribution to the study of early modern religious and intellectual life.
“Written in the Stars? Alphabets and Angels in Early Modern Europe” examines the early modern reception of Brillenbuchstaben, enigmatic characters found in medieval Jewish kabbalistic manuscripts. The study traces how learned Christian readers came to interpret these symbols as celestial alphabets derived from the stars and authored by angels.
By the mid-seventeenth century, these ideas had gained sufficient traction to provoke concern among theologians, who saw them as challenging established Christian doctrines about angelic beings.
Situating these developments within broader intellectual currents, the article highlights how the transmission and reinterpretation of esoteric knowledge reshaped theological and epistemological frameworks in early modern Europe.