Jeffrey Burton Russell

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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.

[edit] 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.

Other books include Inventing the Flat Earth (1991). It argues that 19th century anti-Christians invented and spread the falsehood that educated people in the Middle Ages believed that the earth was flat. He has also written A History of Heaven: The Singing Silence (1997), a study of the history of heaven in Christian thinking up to Dante.