Dr Michelle Pfeffer

Background

I received my BA in History from The University of Queensland (UQ), Australia and my MSc in History of Science, Medicine, and Technology from Harris Manchester College, Oxford, for which I was awarded the Charles Webster Prize. My PhD in History, supported by the Australian Research Council, was awarded by UQ in 2020. Before joining Magdalen as a Prize Fellow in Early Modern History, I taught history and was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at UQ. I have also been a Lisa Jardine History of Science scholar at the Royal Society of London. Some of my academic activities have been undertaken under the name Michelle Aroney.

Research

I am a historian of science and religion in the early modern period. Much of my work explores how scientific and religious ideas, traditions, and institutions worked in tandem to shape historical shifts often said to belong to the so-called ‘disenchantment of the world’.

My first book in this vein, Scholarship, Society, and the Soul in Early Enlightenment England: The Making of Heterodoxy, will be published in 2026 with Oxford University Press in their Oxford-Warburg Studies series. It explores how the immortality of the soul—a topic of mutual natural philosophical and theological interest—was rejected by lay people steeped in popularised scientific, biblical, and historical scholarship, who argued that the very concept of the soul was an artefact of ancient pagan religion rather than true philosophy or theology.

I also work on the history of divination. I recently published (with David Zeitlyn) Divination, Oracles, and Omens (Bodleian Library Publishing, 2024), which accompanied our Bodleian Library exhibition ‘Oracles, Omens & Answers’, which ran from 5 December 2024 to 27 April 2025 and was reviewed in outlets like the TLS, The Guardian, New Scientist, and Apollo Magazine. With David Zeitlyn and Parsa Daneshmand, I lead the TORCH Network Divination, Oracles, and Omens, which runs regular academic and public-facing events. I also have long-standing interests in the history of forecasting. I have written about the role played by astrologers in early epidemiological forecasting for Past and Present and in 2023 curated an exhibition (with Richard Allen) at Magdalen called Plague! at Magdalen: Epidemics and Public Life. 

Much of my current research centres on the marginalisation of astrology. I’ve written on this in the Historical Journal and The British Journal for the History of Science, and am now working on a book on the marginalisation of astrology in early modern England. In 2021 I organised with Jan Machielsen and Robin Briggs a conference commemorating the 50th anniversary of Sir Keith Thomas’s classic Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) (recordings of the event can be found here). Jan and I later co-authored an article on this topic for Past and Present. These interests led me to collaborate with Joe Martin (Durham) and Alex Aylard (Oxford) to set up the network and collaborative research project ‘How Sciences End‘.

For many years I have been working on the records of disputations at Oxford and Cambridge, an archive I used extensively in my first book and now in my research on the marginalisation of astrology. A talk I gave on this at Pisa can be found here. My next monograph will focus on the graduation ceremonies at Oxbridge, where members of the public had the opportunity listen to disputations, lectures, and sermons as well as comedical, theatrical, and musical performances. I am particularly interested in what this tells us about the university as a public-facing institution, rather than an isolated ivory tower. 

​I write regularly for public audiences (for example in History Today and The Conversation), and am represented by Kate Evans at Peters Fraser + Dunlop. I am one of the authors of A History of Astrology, Divination & Prophecy, forthcoming with DK of Penguin Random House. I enjoy contributing to radio and podcast programmes; some of my recent interviews can be found here, here, and here. A few years ago, I contributed to a virtual tour of the Old Library at Magdalen that can be found here; I also recently enjoyed being a part of an Oxplore webinar for schools on Do we make our own luck?

Publications

• with David Zeitlyn, Divination, Oracles, and Omens (Bodleian Library Publishing, 2024).
• ‘Astrology, Plague, and Prognostication in Early Modern England: A Forgotten Chapter in the History of Public Health’, Past & Present 263 (2024): 81-124.
• ‘Reassessing the Marginalization of Astrology in the Early Modern World’, The Historical Journal 66 (5) (2023): 1152-1176.
• with Jan Machielsen, ‘A Work Out of Time: Religion and the Decline of Magic at 50’, Past & Present 261 (2023): 259-96.
• ‘The Contribution of the Early Modern Humanities to “Disenchantment”’, Journal of Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 16 (3) (2021): 398-405.
• ‘The Society of Astrologers (c. 1647–1684): Sermons, Feasts, and the Resuscitation of Astrology in Seventeenth-Century London’, The British Journal for the History of Science 54(2) (2021): 133-153. 
• ‘The Pentateuch and Immortality in England and the Dutch Republic: The Confessionalisation of a Claim’, in The Worlds of Knowledge and the Classical Tradition in the Early Modern Age: Comparative Approaches, eds., Ian Maclean and Dmitri Levitin (Brill, 2021). 
• ‘Paganism, Natural Reason, and Immortality: Charles Blount and John Toland’s Histories of the Soul’, Intellectual History Review 31(4) (2021): 563-583.