Simon Burton holds a PhD in Historical Theology from the University of Edinburgh. His doctoral dissertation, an expanded version of which was published by Brill in 2012, concerned the Trinitarian method of Richard Baxter, the seventeenth-century English Reformed scholastic. It focussed especially on Baxter’s distinctive ‘hallowing of logic’, and his drawing on late medieval and Renaissance thought in order to reconfigure his theological method into a scriptural and Trinitarian pattern.
In 2012-13 Burton was a Canadian Commonwealth and CREOR Postdoctoral Fellow (sponsored by DFAIT) at the Faculty of Religious Studies, McGill University. His research there was on Peter Martyr Vermigli, the Florentine Reformer, and concerned especially his debt to the Thomist and late medieval Augustinian traditions. Burton has published on this topic in Reformation and Renaissance Review and has an article forthcoming in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History. He also has a number of other book chapters and articles on the wider field of Reformed scholasticism, covering diverse fields such as ethics, politics and ecclesiology.
Burton is now a Postdoctoral Fellow and Assistant-Professor at the Faculty of Artes Liberales, University of Warsaw. Here, as part of a wider project on the ‘Traditions of Mediterranean Humanism’, he is pursuing a project on Ramism and ‘Universal Reformation’. With colleagues in Warsaw, he recently co-organised a conference on ‘Reformed Majorities and Minorities: Confessional Boundaries and Contested Identities’, and is currently involved in publishing the proceedings of this and organising another conference on early modern intellectual history and theology.