Jerry Bentley

Jerry H. Bentley was professor of history at the University of Hawai‘i and editor of the Journal of World History. His research on the religious, moral, and political writings of Renaissance humanists led to the publication of Humanists and Holy Writ: New Testament Scholarship in the Renaissance (Princeton, 1983) and Politics and Culture in Renaissance Naples (Princeton, 1987). More recently, his research was concentrated on global history and particularly on processes of cross-cultural interaction. His book Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times (New York, 1993) examines processes of cultural exchange and religious conversion before the modern era, and his pamphlet Shapes of World History in Twentieth-Century Scholarship (Washington, D.C., 1996) discusses the historiography of world history. His most recent publication is The Oxford Handbook of World History (Oxford, 2011), and he served as a member of the editorial team preparing the forthcoming Cambridge History of the World. Jerry Bentley passed away in July 2012.