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Timothy M. Baker

Doctoral Candidate, Harvard Divinity School at Harvard University

Harvard University

Areas of expertise

  • - History of Christianity
  • - Medieval History and Historiography
  • - Interpretation of Scripture/Exegesis
  • - Manuscript Studies

Major works

Timothy M. Baker, “‘Be You as Living Stones Built Up, A Spiritual House, A Holy Priesthood’: Cistercian Exegesis, Reforms, and the Construction of Holy Architectures,” (Harvard University, 2015) [Doctoral Dissertation, available locally]; Timothy Baker and Beverly Mayne Kienzle, "Hélinand of Froidmont," Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception 10 (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2015); Timothy Baker and Beverly Mayne Kienzle, "Monastic Preaching in Medieval Latin Christendom," in Cambridge History of Medieval Monasticism in the Latin West, 2 vols, (publication forthcoming: Cambridge University Press, late 2015); Beverly Mayne Kienzle, Timothy M. Baker, and Jenny C. Bledsoe, “Part IV: Arts of Preaching,” in Bibliographical Supplement to Rhetoric in the Middle Ages. Ed. James J. Murphy, (publication forthcoming: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, late 2015); “The Inheritance of Patristic Writings,” in A History of Medieval Christian Preaching as Seen in the Manuscripts of Houghton Library (online exhibition).

About me

Timothy M. Baker studies medieval religious history and manuscript traditions, with a paritcular emphasis on high medieval monastic theology and exegesis. Alongside Professors Beverly Kienzle and Thomas Kelly, he and William Stoneman of Houghton Library (Harvard) taught a class and curated an exhibit on medieval scrolls at Harvard from which the “Scrolls” unit of the The Book: Histories Across Time and Space derives. His doctoral work explores twelfth- and thirteenth-century Cisterican texts, investigating Cistercian interpretations of the monastery as a sacred space and a sacred bridge between the world of creation and the realm of the divine. Within this sacred architecture, monks pursued ascent into God. In addition to examining medieval theological texts, Timothy is in the process of editing Cistercian sermon manuscripts in order to add to the broader corpus of accessible medieval texts.