Research and Publications

Education

BA (1997-2000) Hebrew University
MA (2001-2003) Princeton University
PhD (2003-2006) Princeton University
Post-doc (2006-2008) University of Oxford 

Updates

For an up-to-date profile, including cv, publications, research projects, events, lectures, and blog, please follow the link to my academia.edu Website below.

G. Geltner on Academia.edu

Center for Medieval Studies Amsterdam

The Center for Medieval Studies Amsterdam (CMSA) was founded in 2010 as a platform for collaboration among medievalist across different fields at the University of Amsterdam. To read more follow the link below. 

Link to CMSA website

Major Publications

The Making of Medieval Antifraternalism: Polemic, Violence, Deviance, and Remembrance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)

Documenting the scale and scope of opposition to the medieval mendicant orders, this book contends that the phenomenon reaches far beyond an ecclesiastical in-house debate and supports only tenuous links with Reformation or modern forms of anticlericalism. Drawing on numerous sources, it shows that people from all walks of life lambasted and occasionally assaulted friars, orchestrating in the process detailed and suggestive scenes of urban violence. At the same time, it demonstrates the friars' active role in forging a medieval antifraternal tradition, not only by deviating from their founders' paths, but also by chronicling their suffering inter fideles and thus incorporating it into the orders' identity.

The Making of Medieval Antifraternalism on the OUP Website

Defenders and Critics of Franciscan Life, co-edited with Michael F. Cusato (Leiden: Brill, 2009)

The essays in this volume revisit John V. Fleming's 1977 An Introduction to the Franciscan Literature of the Middle Ages, from a number of different perspectives, including social, religious and literary history, as well as art, exegesis, political thought and the history of education. A prominent, but not exclusive, theme of the contributions is the distinction between "defenders" and "critics" of medieval Franciscanism, categories which recent scholarship has challenged.

The Medieval Prison: A Social History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008)

The modern prison is commonly thought to be the fruit of an Enlightenment penology that stressed man's ability to reform his soul. The Medieval Prison challenges this view by tracing the institution's emergence to a much earlier period beginning in the late thirteenth century, and in doing so provides a unique view of medieval prison life.

The Medieval Prison on the PUP Website

De Periculis Novissimorum Temporum (Leuven: Peeters, 2008)

In 1256, amidst growing tensions between Parisian secular and mendicant academics, William of Saint-Amour published his major assault on the friars, Depericulis novissimorum temporum, or On the Dangers of the Last Times. As its title proclaims, the treatise employed the exegetical language of apocalypticism to expose the mendicants' success as the ultimate universal threat, and to warn theirsupportersthatthey were siding with the Antichrist. William's party was soon silenced, yet for centuries De periculis continued to furnish the basic vocabulary of anti-fraternal polemics. Medieval poets, Reformation theologians, modern playwrights - all have drawn upon this anathematized treatise to different ends.

De periculis on the Peeters Website