Thomas Max Safley

Professor of History

Thomas Max Safley is Professor of Early Modern European History. He received his Ph.D. in 1980 from the University of Wisconsin. A specialist in the economic and social history of early modern Europe, roughly 1450-1750, he has published extensively on the history of marriage and the family, of poverty and charity and of labor and business.

In addition to numerous articles and reviews, Professor Safley is the author of Let No Man Put Asunder: The Control of Marriage in the German Southwest, 1550-1620 (1984), Charity and Economy in the Orphanages of Early Modern Augsburg (1996), Matheus Miller's Memoirs: A Merchant's Life in the Seventeenth Century (2000), Die Aufzeichnungen des Matheus Miller (2003) and Children of the Laboring Poor: Expectation and Experience among the Orphans of Early Modern Augsburg (2005). He is co-editor of The Workplace before the Factory: Artisans and Proletarians, 1500-1800 (1993) and of Perspectives from the Past (1998), now in its fourth edition, and he has edited a volume of essays on The Reformation of Charity: The Secular and the Religious in Early Modern Poor Relief (2003).

Professor Safley is a member of the Research Group on Self-Narrative in Trans-cultural Perspective at the Free University of Berlin and of the Institute for European Cultural History at the University of Augsburg. He also serves on the editorial board of The Sixteenth Century Journal.

Forthcoming books include "Bankruptcy: Economics and Ethics in a Capitalistic Age" (a close study of bankruptcy and its economic and ethical implications in early modern Europe) and "Debito et Obligatio: Debt and Indebtedness in Early Modern Society." His two-volume history of poverty and charity, based on the orphanages and orphans of early modern Augsburg, is currently being translated for publication in Germany and will appear in 2008 and 2009 as Kinder, Caritas und Kapital.

At the University of Pennsylvania, Professor Safley regularly teaches the introductory survey of European history and advanced lecture courses on the Reformation, the Baroque, pre-industrial economic history and the early modern period. He also offers a broad array of undergraduate and graduate seminars.