Paola von Wyss-Giacosa works as a lecturer, researcher and guest curator at the Ethnographic Museum of the University of Zurich since 1997. From 2007 to 2010 she held a postdoctoral position at the University Research Priority Program Asia and Europe of the same institution. In 2014 she was a Fellow at the Max-Weber-Kolleg, University of Erfurt, and in 2015 she was Acting Junior Professor for the Chair of Entangled History at the same institution. She is a member of the Research Center Gotha, of the research group Media and Religion, of the research group International Exchange on Media and Religion. Her research topics include media and religion, book illustration and travel literature of the early modern period
Cristiana Facchini is Associate Professor at the University of Bologna where she teaches history of Christianity and religious studies; she is also a Fellow at the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt. She studied in Bologna, with specialized studies also in Oxford and Jerusalem. She earned her PhD in Jewish Studies at the University of Turin. She has been awarded many fellowships and grants, pursuing her research in Paris, Budapest, New York and Berlin. She has written extensively on history and theories of religions, with regard to Christianity and Judaism in particular.
The exceptional and yet very human life of Jesus has been represented in a vast breadth of forms, from the visual to the textual, in a kind of intertextual relationship that is highly complex, in that it outreaches an impressive amount of different cultures both in terms of chronological depth and geographical reach. In order to properly appreciate the richness of early modern scholarship on these topics, a more inclusive approach might be of use, one that is capable of grasping and conveying how scholars belonging to different communities of faiths performed their historical quest on such charged theological themes. Jewish, Catholic, and different Protestant scholars left interesting traces of their understanding of the historical context where Jesus lived. Their work often reached vast clandestine circulation to become part of a shared library of religious reformers and enlighteners, not to mention fervid critics of Christianity. The collection of articles presented here combines various methodological lines of inquiry. At the same time, it brings together, albeit very selectively, the early modern and the modern period, including the second half of the twentieth century; we believe that this selection of case studies offers a composite view on different, and often contrasting practices of historiographical writing, which may belong to different religious, anti-religious, and neutral traditions that span across a few centuries
