Jeffrey Burton Russell

Jeffrey Burton Russell (born 1934) is an American historian and religious studies scholar who received his undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1955 and his PhD from Emory University in 1960. He is now Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has also taught History and Religious Studies at Berkeley, Riverside, Harvard, University of New Mexico, and University of Notre Dame.

Works

He has published widely, mostly in medieval European history and the history of theology. He is most noted for his five-volume history of the concept of the Devil: The Devil (1977), Satan (1981), Lucifer (1984), Mephistopheles (1986) and The Prince of Darkness (1988).

In Inventing the Flat Earth (1991) he argues that 19th century anti-Christians invented and spread the falsehood that educated people in the Middle Ages believed that the earth was flat (see Myth of the Flat Earth). As one writer summarizes, "Russell also examined a large selection of textbooks and found those written before 1870 usually included the correct account, but most textbooks written after 1880 uncritically repeated the erroneous claims in Irving, Draper and White. Russell concludes that Irving, Draper and White were the main writers responsible for introducing the erroneous flat-earth myth that is still with us today."

Russell has also written two books on the history of the notion of Heaven: A History of Heaven: The Singing Silence (1997), which deals with the period from around 200 B.C. up to Dante, and Paradise Mislaid (2006), which takes the story up to the present day.

Source

• Jeffrey Burton Russell, academic career