William Brown Patterson
Professor of History
B.A. University ofthe South; B.A. and M.A., Oxford University; M.Div. Episcopal Divinity School (Cambridge, Massachusetts); A.M., Ph.D. Harvard University
Phone: (931) 598-1583
Office Location: Breslin Tower A
Email: bpatters@sewanee.edu
Areas of specialization
Early Modern Britain and Europe; religious and intellectual history, political theory
Courses taught
Renaissance, Reformation, Tudor England, Stuart Britain,Seventeenth-Century Europe, Age of the Enlightenment, Humanities: FromRenaissance to Revolution, Junior Tutorial in Historiography
Biography
William Brown Patterson, Professor of History, is a specialist in British and European history in the early modern period. He has special interests in religious and intellectual history and in political theory. A native of Greensboro, North Carolina, he graduated from the University of the South in 1952 and pursued graduate work at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, the Episcopal Divinity School, and Harvard University, where he received the Ph.D. in 1966. Ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church after graduation from theological school, he has served parishes in Ma
ssachusetts, New Jersey, and North Carolina. He has held research fellowships at Cambridge University, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, the Newberry Library in Chicago, and the University of Virginia. He returned to Sewanee in 1980 after teaching for seventeen years at Davidson College in North Carolina and served as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences from 1980 to 1991. At the University of the South he teaches in the History Department and in the Interdisciplinary Humanities program as well as in the School of Theology, where he and Guy F. Lytle teach a course in the history of Anglicanism open to both seminarians and undergraduates.
Professor Patterson's publications include some twenty articles in learned journals on subjects ranging from Renaissance education to King Henry IV of France. His book, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), was awarded the Albert C. Outler Prize in ecumenical church history for 1998 by the American Society of Church History. It deals with the efforts of King James VI of Scotland and I of England to establish a lasting peace in Europe and achieve a religious reconciliation among Christian churches in the wake of the Protestant Reformation and the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation.
Professor Patterson met his wife Evie at Harvard where she was a graduate student in Classical Languages. At Sewanee, she has served as Director of the Slide Library in the Department of Art and Art History. They have four children.
