Personal profile
Research interests
I am a historian of European high medieval religious and intellectual culture, its antecedents and wider intellectual geographies, specialising in the religious, moral, and scientific thought of European Latin culture and in cross-cultural relations between Christian, Islamicate and Jewish thought.
My main research interests focus on the intellectual culture of Western Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries. I am particularly interested in the ways in which Christian intellectual culture in the Latin-dominated part of the Christian world absorbed influences from classical philosophy and Jewish and Islamicate learning. In my published work I have emphasised how monastic intellectual culture in the 12th century incorporated classical and pagan elements by subsuming them into a mode of practice, a comprehensive way of life, in which elements that in purely abstract terms were incompatible in practice could inform a unified notion of the good Christian life. I have also studied how Christian thinkers made sense of Aristotelian natural philosophy and metaphysics in the early period following their translation into Latin. Both of these concerns continue to be central to my current and future work.
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Collaborations and top research areas from the last five years
Research output
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Mapping the Universe: Robert Grosseteste's De sphera 'On the Sphere'
Sønnesyn, S. O., Gasper, G., McLeish, T., Smithson, H., Panti, C., Tanner, B., Siviour, C. R., Cleaver, L., Nothaft, C. P., El-Bizri, N., Gilbert, S., Seb, F., Cunningham, J. P., Thomson, D., Lawrence-Mathers, A., Griffin, S., Smith, J. & Taylor, R., 12 May 2023, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 464 p. (The Scientific Works of Robert Grosseteste; vol. 2)Research output: Book/Report › Authored book
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Writing Intellectual History of the High and Late Middle Ages
Sønnesyn, S. O., 30 May 2022, Routledge Resources Online. Klemettilä, H., Niskanen, S. & Willoughby, J. (eds.). RoutledgeResearch output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Entry for encyclopedia/dictionary
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Word, Example, and Practice: Learning and the Learner in Twelfth-Century Thought
Sønnesyn, S. O., 2020, In: Journal of Medieval History. 46, p. 513–35Research output: Contribution to journal › Article (Academic Journal) › peer-review
Activities
- 1 Participation in workshop, seminar, course
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Department of Religion and Theology Research Seminar
Costantini, L. (Participant), Sønnesyn, S. (Organiser) & Davidson, L. A. (Organiser)
7 Nov 2023Activity: Participating in or organising an event types › Participation in workshop, seminar, course