Biography

Zack is Priest Vicar at Christ Church, Oxford. At the University, he is a tutorial affiliate of the Faculty of History and associate member of the Faculty of Theology & Religious Studies.

In 2023, he won the Ecclesiastical History Society's book prize for a first monograph, on research stemming from his Gates Cambridge funded PhD. He was recently appointed to the Academic Board of the Archbishop of Canterbury's Lambeth Research Degrees.

Zack works primarily on collections of sermons and biblical commentaries from Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, in particular their place within the intellectual, spiritual, and economic cultures of the eighth through tenth centuries. His historical research has focused strongly on the central place of religious practice in the cultures of the Latin West, and the reception history of biblical texts.

His first monograph, The Homiliary of Paul the Deacon, considered a unique collection of sermons commissioned by Charlemagne, along with 88 of its earliest extant manuscripts, used in cathedrals and monasteries across the Carolingian Empire. The homiliary was a striking example of royal piety and the patronage of scholarship in the eighth and ninth centuries, with a considerable impact on later religious practice and theological writing.

His present research project concerns power and poverty in the Middle Ages, considering how the Gospel of Luke and the thought of its most important medieval interpreter, Bede, affected practices of charity, work, and ownership. He is at work on a book tentatively titled, Bede’s economy: The commentary ‘On Luke’ and its readers in early medieval West.

Links

https://www.seh.ox.ac.uk/people/zachary-guiliano
http://hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/houghton/collections/early_manuscripts/preaching/index.cfm