Willemien Otten

Willemien Otten is a medievalist, professor of the history of Christianity and theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School at the University of Chicago. She holds the Dorothy Grant Maclear chair.

Biography

Willemien Otten completed her PhD at the University of Amsterdam in 1989 under Prof. M. B. Pranger, Prof. L. M. de Rijk. She was first professor at Boston College, then, she taught ten years at the University of Utrecht. Since 2007, she is professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Since 2019, she also holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Copenhagen.

Thought

She specialized on John Scotus Eriugena on whom she wrote her dissertation published as The Anthropology of Eriugena. Through her books, articles or edited books, she provided solid scholarship on this Carolingian thinker. She worked on the concept of "nature," putting in discussion its early medieval conception with the contemporary understanding of "nature" - such as the one developed by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Following Eriugena, she relates her conception of "nature" with the Holy Scripture, for instance on account of their manifoldness.

Books

• The Anthropology of Johannes Scottus Eriugena. Leiden, Brill, 1991.
• From Paradise to Paradigm: A Study of Twelfth-Century Humanism. Boston: Brill, 2004.
• Thinking Nature and the Nature of Thinking. Stanford University Press, 2020.
• Poetry and Exegesis in Premodern Latin Christianity: The Encounter between Classical and Christian Strategies of Interpretation.