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12
President's Lecture | James Hankins
Event details
President Todd A. Olson cordially invites you to Mount Mercy University's President's Lecture, featuring James Hankins, presenting "Catholic Women in the Story of the Western Tradition."
The old saying that 'behind every successful man is a good woman,' now regarded as hopelessly sexist, has a great deal of resonance in the history of Christian societies.
In fact, without good Christian women, late ancient and medieval Christendom would have been much less successful, less peaceful and cooperative, and much smaller in geographical extent. This lecture will tell the stories of the extraordinary but little-known women who changed the history of Christendom by changing the hearts of men.
James Hankins, now at the University of Florida, was a professor of history at Harvard University from 1985 to December of 2025. His first book, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Brill) established him as a leading authority on Renaissance Platonism. In 2000 he founded the I Tatti Renaissance Library (Harvard UP), “the only series that makes available to a broad readership the major literary, historical, philosophical, and scientific works of the Italian Renaissance written in Latin.” He was the series’ General Editor until 2025, when it published its 100th volume. His 2019 book Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy was described in the Times Literary Supplement as “perhaps the greatest study ever written of Renaissance political thought.” In August, 2025, he published The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition: vol. 1: Antiquity and Christendom (Encounter Books). It was reviewed in the Wall Street Journal, where it was described as “a monumental work of reclamation and revival.”
