Charles Yost
History

Charles C. Yost

Assistant Professor of Medieval History
“Domine, Deus meus es, et Dominus meus es, et numquam te vidi. Tu me fecisti et refecisti, et omnia mea bona tu mihi contulisti, et nondum novi te. Denique ad te videndum factus sum, et nondum feci, propter quod factus sum.”

[O Lord, Thou art my God, Thou art my Lord, and I have never seen Thee. Thou didst make me, and make me anew, and all of my goods Thou didst give me—and I have not yet known Thee. Finally, I was made to see Thee—and I have not yet done that for which I was made.]
— St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109), Proslogion

Faculty Information

Additional Faculty Information for Charles C. Yost

Education 

Ph.D., Medieval Studies, University of Notre Dame

M.M.S., Medieval Studies, University of Notre Dame

M.A., Medieval Studies, Columbia University

B.A., Classical Languages, University of St. Thomas

Current courses taught

The American Heritage

The High and Late Middle Ages, 1100-1500: The Reign and Fall of Christendom

The Western Heritage

The Early Middle Ages, 284-1099: The Forge of Christendom

Academic Specializations

Medieval and Byzantine intellectual and religious history; the historic relations between the Churches of Rome and Constantinople; medieval councils; Byzantine unionists and anti-unionists; sacramental ministry and pastoral care

Lectures

“‘Thou shalt trample under foot the lion and the dragon’: Petrine Mysticism as Unionist Spirituality in the Thought of John Plousiadenos, Greek Priest and Apologist for the Union of Florence (1439),” Chicago Seminar on Medieval Culture and Intellect, 2019.
“The Great Schism: A Church Divided,” Des Moines Catholic Culture Lecture Series, 2018.
“A Unionist Pastor? Speculations on the Pastoral Ministry of John Plousiadenos (d. 1500) on the Basis of Unedited Manuscripts,” Πρόγραμμα Εργαστηρίου Βυζαντινών και Μεσαιωνικών Σπουδών, University of Cyprus, 2018.

Publications

“Doubting the Conventional Narrative About the Schism of 1054,” The Imaginative Conservative, 2020

“Anti-Palamism, Unionism, and the ‘Crisis of Faith’ of the Fourteenth Century,” in Knighthood, Crusades, and Diplomacy in the Eastern Mediterranean in the Time of King Peter I of Cyprus, ed. Angel Nicolaou-Konnari and Alexander D. Beihammer, Mediterranean Nexus 1100-1700 (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, NV). Forthcoming.

“Neither Greek nor Latin, but ‘catholic’: Aspects of the Theology of Union of John Plousiadenos,” Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies 1.1 (2018): 43-59.

Professional Memberships

The Byzantine Studies Association of North America
Conference on Faith and History
The Medieval Academy of America
The Renaissance Society of America

Research Projects

A monograph on the phenomenon of Byzantine unionism especially as seen through the theology and pastoral care of the Greek priest and unionist John Plousiadenos (d. 1500).

Co-editor (with Yury P. Avvakmov, University of Notre Dame) of proposed series of volumes: Eastern Catholic Studies and Texts (ECST) (Catholic University of America Press)

Studies on the character of medieval Christianity (teaching, ways of life, institutions, and “outsiders”: tentative title: “Taking Heaven by Violence: The Spirit of Medieval Christianity”)

Biography

Dr. Charles C. Yost is an Iowa native, but prior to Hillsdale College he taught 9th and 10th grade history (Ancient and Medieval) and philosophy at Founders Classical Academy in Schertz, Texas. His research has taken him to the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana in Rome, the island of Crete, and the island of Cyprus (the latter thanks to a Fulbright Scholarship). Dr. Yost remains convinced that it was during the Middle Ages that Western Civilization was first fully realized.