John Jeffries Martin

John Jeffries Martin grew up on St. Simons Island, Georgia and attended St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire.[1] He earned a PhD from Harvard University in 1982.[1]

Martin is professor and former chair of History at Duke University .[1] He also served as chair of History at Trinity University where he taught from 1982 to 2007.

Martin's publications have explored the histories of sixteenth-century Venice, the invention of sincerity, Renaissance individualism, and early modern apocalypticism. He is, in addition, the editor or co-editor of four volumes. In Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City, Martin writes about the European Protestants who moved to Venice and were falsely accused of heresy by Venetians in the sixteenth century.[2] Reviewing it for The American Historical Review, Professor William Monter of Northwestern University described it as a "useful, readable and original book."[2] His most recent book "A Beautiful Ending: The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Making of the Modern World," by contrast, places its emphasis on the role of faith -- not only within Christianity but also within Judaism and in Islam -- in animating individual and collective actions in the early modern world. Indeed, faith did much to shape agency, and played a role in fostering new political, religious, and scientific visions of a more hopeful future. At the same time, many horrors -- from civil wars to colonialism -- also stemmed from the "apocalyptic imagination."[3]

• A Beautiful Ending: The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Making of the Modern World (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022).
• Myths of Renaissance Individualism (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004).
• Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
• editor with Dennis Romano, Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-state, 1297-1797 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
• editor, The Renaissance: Italy and Abroad (London: Routledge, 2003).
• editor with Ronald K. Delph and Michelle Fontaine, Heresy, Culture, and Religion in Early Modern Italy: Contexts and Contestations. (Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2006).
• editor, The Renaissance World (New York: Routledge, 2007).