Steven Edgar Ozment (February 21, 1939 – December 12, 2019) was an American historian of early modern and modern Germany, the European family, and the Protestant Reformation. From 1990 to 2015, he was the McLean Professor of Ancient and Modern History at Harvard University, and Professor Emeritus until his death on December 12, 2019.
A son of Lowell Ozment and Shirley (Edgar) Ozment, he was born in McComb, Mississippi, and raised in Camden, Arkansas. He attended the University of Arkansas on a football scholarship, and transferred to Hendrix College after two years, and graduated with a BA in 1960.[1] He obtained a Bachelor of Divinity degree at Drew Theological School in 1964, and a PhD at Harvard University in 1967.[2] His dissertation, written under the supervision of Dutch intellectual historian Heiko Oberman, concerned the thought of Johannes Tauler, Jean Gerson and Martin Luther.[3]
Ozment taught at the University of Tübingen, Germany, and at Yale University and Stanford University as well as Harvard. In 1977, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of Renaissance history.
Ozment authored ten books. His Age of Reform, 1250–1550 (1980), based on his lecture notes for two survey courses at Yale,[4] won the Schaff History Prize (1981) and was nominated for the 1981 National Book Award. Five of his books were selections of the History Book Club and several have been translated into European and Asian languages.
A Mighty Fortress: A New History of the German People came out in 2005. Ozment's study of the world of German artist Lucas Cranach the Elder was published by Yale University Press in June, 2013, under the title, The Serpent and the Lamb: Cranach, Luther, and the Making of the Reformation.
Ozment was married first to Elinor Pryor of Little Rock, with whom he had 3 of his children. He later married Andrea Foster of Norwich, NY and had 2 more children. They lived together in Newbury, MA, where Steven spent the majority of his academic life. He spent the last years of his life married to Susanna Schweizer.
- ^ "The Twenty-ninth Charles Edmundson Historical Lectures [program]" (PDF). Baylor University. March 1, 2007. Retrieved 10 February 2020.
- ^ "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2013-05-22. Retrieved 2019-11-08.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link) - ^ “Homo spiritualis: A Comparative Study of the Anthropology of Johannes Tauler, Jean Gerson and Martin Luther (1513–1516) in the Context of Their Theological Thought.” PhD dissertation—Harvard University, 1967. Proquest no. 302224060.
- ^ Duffy, Eamon (February 25, 2021). "Why Was There a Reformation?". New York Review of Books. ISSN 0028-7504. Retrieved February 10, 2021.