Yitzhak Hen

Yitzhak Hen (Hebrew: יצחק חן; born 1963) is Anna and Sam Lopin Professor of History, formerly at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (Israel).

His current research, for which he won a grant from the Israel Science Foundation, is: Western Arianism: Politics and Religious Culture in the Early Medieval West.

Similarly, the reports on the Romanisation of the Frankish liturgy under Pippin III and Charlemagne, which, in the past, were accepted at face value, appear to be part of what Hen calls ‘the Carolingian rhetoric of reforms’.

Through liturgy they disseminated political messages and ideology in an attempt to shape the ‘public opinion’, and this is precisely why they invested vast amounts of landed property and privileges in patronising liturgical activity.

[3] His latest book [4] investigates the place of the royal court and the mechanisms of patronage which operated through it in several kingdoms of the early Middle Ages.

Hen's general approach is based on the conviction that the roots of later medieval developments, and especially of the so-called Carolingian Renaissance, are to be sought in the centuries immediately succeeding the period of Roman rule.