Norman Fiering


Norman Fiering is an American historian, and Director and Librarian, Emeritus, of the John [Carter Brown Library].

Life

He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1956, where he was a student of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, and from Columbia University with a Ph.D. in 1969.
He taught at Stanford University between 1964 and 1969, and was a post-doctoral fellow for three years at the Institute of Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg, Virginia, 1969-1972. In 1972 he was appointed Editor of Publications at the Institute. From 1983 to 2006, he was Director and Librarian of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

Awards

Books

Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard: A Discipline in Transition, University of North Carolina Press. 1981Jonathan Edwards's Moral Thought and Its British Context, University of North Carolina Press. 1981A Guide to Book Publication for Historians, 1979, pamphlet, 40 pp.
  • "Understanding Rosenstock-Huessy: A Haphazard Collection of Ventures", Wipf and Stock, 2022
  • "James Logan's 'The Duties of Man As They May Be Deduced from Nature': An Analysis of the Unpublished Manuscript, American Philosophical Society, 2022

Articles

  • "President Samuel Johnson and the Circle of Knowledge," William and Mary Quarterly, XXVIII, 199-236.
  • "Solomon Stoddard's Library at Harvard in 1664," Harvard Library Bulletin, 255-269.
  • "Will and Intellect in the New England Mind," William and Mary Quarterly, XXIX, 515-558..
  • "A Reply to George Steiner," Visible Language, VI, 218-222.
  • "Irresistible Compassion: An Aspect of Eighteenth-Century Sympathy and Humanitarianism," Journal of the History of Ideas, XXXVII, 195-218.
  • "Editing the Historian's First Book," The Maryland Historian, VII, 61-69.
  • "The Transatlantic Republic of Letters: A Note on the Circulation of Learned Periodicals to Early
Eighteenth-Century America," William and Mary Quarterly, XXXIII, 642-660.
  • "Early American Philosophy vs. Philosophy in Early America," Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, XIII, 216-237.
  • "Benjamin Franklin and the Way to Virtue," American Quarterly, XXX, 199-223.
  • "The First American Enlightenment: Tillotson, Leverett, and Philosophical Anglicanism," New England Quarterly, LIV, 307-334..
  • "Comment on Thomas Tanselle's, 'The Bibliography and Textual Study of American Books," American Antiquarian Society Proceedings, XCV, Part I, 1985, 152-160.
  • "The Rationalist Foundations of Jonathan Edwards's Metaphysics," in Nathan O. Hatch and Harry S. Stout, Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience
  • "Philosophy" in the three-volume Encyclopedia of the North American Colonies, ed. Jacob E. Cooke.

Edited

  • "Time Bettering Days and Other Essays by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy," edited by Norman Fiering,
Wipf and Stock, 2025.