About the Author

Jeffrey Burton Russell is Professor of History, Emeritus, at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Besides UCSB, he has taught History and Religious Studies at Berkeley, Riverside, Harvard, New Mexico, and Notre Dame. He has published seventeen books and many articles, most of them in his special field, history of theology. He is most noted for his five-volume history of the concept of the Devil, published by Cornell University Press between 1977 and 1988. He would prefer to be most noted for two more recent books, Inventing the Flat Earth (1991) , which shows how nineteenth-century anti-Christians invented and spread the falsehood that educated people in the Middle Ages believed that the earth was flat, and A History of Heaven: The Singing Silence, Princeton University Press (1997) , a study of the history and meaning of heaven in Christian thought from the beginnings to the time of Dante.