Jamie Kreiner

Biography

I’m a historian of the early Middle Ages, and my research focuses on the mechanics of culture. How did people interpret the world? How did they decide what should be done? And how did they change their minds? I’m especially interested in the quieter forces that shape ethical systems — forces that are not always purposeful, individual, or human — and it’s a thread that runs through my research on narrative, cognition, ecological systems, religion, and science.

A bit about my books: The Wandering Mind tracks early Christian monks’ frustrations with distraction and their inventive and sometimes contentious efforts to make themselves concentrate. How to Focus: A Monastic Guide for an Age of Distraction offers a new translation of the most psychologically adventurous sections of John Cassian’s great Collationes. Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West examines pigs as both objects and subjects, to measure the impact that this species had on early medieval culture and to highlight the surprising ways that early medieval societies handled their lived environments. And The Social Life of Hagiography in the Merovingian Kingdom highlights how the cultures of Christianity and government defined each other in the early medieval society of Gaul through an astutely crafted literary form. Or if an amuse-bouche is more your thing, you can check out some medieval advice for dealing with distraction in a digital age, find consolation in learning that early Christian monks had a hard time sticking to their resolutions, too, or get a sense of medieval humor here and here.

My work has been awarded prizes from multiple academic societies; supported by several grants and fellowships; translated into ​​Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Korean, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish; and covered in popular press outlets running the word-length gamut from People to The New Yorker.