Author's Biographical Sketch
While Benedict of Bavaria took two years to write, Brennan Pursell has been preparing for this book all his life.
Born in San Francisco, Brennan grew up in the Bay Area suburbs, a self-proclaimed pagan, and went to college at Stanford University, obtaining his BA in history in 1990. After graduation, he devoted two years to work and travel in Africa, India, Europe, the Middle East, and Southern Asia. In 1992 he began graduate studies in European history at Harvard University, and it was ironically through study of the Protestant Reformation that he first learned about Catholicism.
He began attending Mass at St. Paul's Church in Cambridge, MA, and, in the summer of 1994, while staying at the Benedictine monastery of Metten in Bavaria, he was received into the Church. That same summer he met a beautiful German pianist, named Irmgard, who accompanied him - Brennan moonlights as a tenor soloist - at a private music festival in the Austrian Alps. One year later Brennan returned to Germany to conduct dissertation research in Munich, and the two married in 1997. They relocated to Harvard and completed their respective graduate studies in 2000. German is the language spoken of their home, and the family returns to Bavaria every summer.
Since 2001 Brennan has served as a professor of history at DeSales University, a Catholic liberal arts college in eastern Pennsylvania, where he teaches a wide range of courses in European history and leads summer tours of Bavaria for students and community members. In his first years at DeSales, he published his first book, The Winter King, and numerous articles and book reviews in reputable scholarly journals. He also wrote his first historical novel, The Spanish Match (forthcoming), a court drama and murder mystery set in seventeenth-century Europe. For a series of five video interviews with Brennan about his work at DeSales University, see Our Story at DSU.
On April 19, 2005, Joseph Ratzinger appeared on the loggia overlooking St. Peter's Square, the newly elected Pope Benedict XVI, the first Bavarian pontiff in a thousand years. The Pursell family and their visiting Bavarian relatives rejoiced with abandon. In the weeks and months to come, Brennan felt an overwhelming desire to make the life and work of his favorite theologian better known to the American reading public. Much of the media coverage about the Pope showed a general lack of knowledge about the culture that contributed so decisively to his youth and formation.
Brennan based his biographical research on as many primary sources that he could get his hands on, i.e. the interviews, personal testimonies, articles, and reliable books about Benedict (mostly available only in German) written by the people who grew up, studied, and worked with him. These individuals know him better than any Vatican journalist. Brennan also visited nearly all the sites associated with the Pope’s early life, the towns and churches where he lived, learned, and worshiped. The result is an accurate, truly intimate portrait of the man.