Rate My Professor Alice Chapman

Alice Chapman is a Professor of Medieval History in the History Department at Grand Valley State University, where she has taught since joining the faculty in 2008. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge (2006), an M.A.R. from Yale University (1996), and a B.A. from Utah State University (1991). Chapman teaches a variety of European history courses in the Department of History and the Meijer Honors College. Her research interests encompass medieval history, intellectual history, and church-state relations, with a focus on the role of the papacy in disputes between ecclesiastical and royal power, as well as the influence of Bernard of Clairvaux’s texts on conflicts between the papacy and temporal power, particularly in relation to the development of the two swords theory in the later Middle Ages.

Chapman authored the monograph Sacred Authority and Temporal Power in the Writings of Bernard of Clairvaux, part of the Medieval Church Series published by Brepols Publishers (2013). Her publications also include the article “Ideal and Reality: Images of a Bishop in Bernard of Clairvaux's Advice to Eugenius III (1145-53)” in Envisioning the Bishop: Images and the Episcopacy in the Middle Ages, edited by Evan Gatti and Sigrid Danielson (Brepols, 2014, pp. 331-346); “Disentangling Potestas in the Works of St Bernard of Clairvaux” in Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 60, no. 3 (2004): 587–600; and “Authority and Power in the Writings of St Bernard of Clairvaux” in Cîteaux Commentarii Cistercienses 54, no. 3–4 (2003): 209–223. More recent contributions are “Christ the Physician: The Medieval Roots of Christus Medicus in Luther,” chapter 7 in Beyond Oberman: The Medieval Luther, edited by Christine Helmer (Mohr Siebeck, 2020, pp. 105-126), and “Introduction to the Various Sermons of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux” in Bernard of Clairvaux, the Various Sermons, translated by Grace Remington, OCSO (Cistercian Fathers Series 84, Liturgical Press, 2020, pp. 1-53). She reviewed The Two Powers: The Papacy, the Empire, and the Struggle for Sovereignty in the Thirteenth Century by Brett Edward Whalen for The Medieval Review (November 2020). In 2022-2023, Chapman was awarded a Residency Research Fellowship by the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Michigan, which included a $10,000 stipend, office space, library privileges, and support for her book project Christ the Physician: Healing Spiritual Sickness in the 12th-14th Centuries, to be submitted to Brepols Press’s Disputatio series.