François Bœspflug

François Bœspflug (May 30, 1945) is a French historian of Christianity and Christian art, in particular of the Middle Ages. He specialises in the iconography of the Bible moralisée.

Biography

Education François Bœspflug undertook a scientific curriculum that led him to the l'École nationale supérieure des mines de Saint-Étienne, where he was a student from 1964 to 1965. From 1969 to 1975, he obtained a degree in scholastic philosophy and a master's degree in theology from the Catholic University of Paris. In 1982, he obtained two postgraduate doctorates after having defended his doctoral thesis on "Dieu dans l’art" ("God in Art"), subsequently going on to publish numerous works on Christian iconography.

Teaching Bœspflug has been a lecturer at the Catholic University of Paris (1984-1987), lecturer at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (1987-1990), professor of the history or religions at the Faculté de théologie catholique de Strasbourg (1990-2013), and professor and/or director of research at the Centre Sèvres, Institut de recherche et d'histoire des textes, University of Geneva, and Free University of Brussels (1994-2008). He was holder of the seat of Pope Benedict XVI in Regensburg in 2013 and was a literary director at the religious publishing house Éditions du Cerf from 1982 to 1999. He left the Dominican order and the priesthood when he married in 2015 and he divorced in 2024. He lives in a EHPAD in Lyon.

Views Bœspflug denounces the celibacy of men of the Church, and regularly intervenes in the media on questions relating to the Catholic Church, but also more generally on the representations of the divine in all religions.

Works

Participations 2004 : Lettres à Dieu, collectif, Calmann-Lévy. 2004 : Religions, les mots pour en parler. Notions fondamentales en Histoire des religions, F. Boespflug, Th. Legrand et A.-L. Zwilling, Paris / Genève, Bayard / Labor et Fides.

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