Joel Francis Harrington (born August 25, 1959) is an American historian of pre-modern Germany. He is currently Centennial Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. [1] He has published books for both scholarly and general audiences, and his work has been translated into thirteen foreign languages.
Harrington was born in Toledo, Ohio, and attended Catholic elementary and secondary schools there. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 1981 with a B.A. in English and History. After studying at universities in France and Germany, Harrington was awarded a Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 1989. [2]
Since 1989, Harrington has taught at Vanderbilt University, where he is now Centennial Professor of History. His research has focused on pre-1700 Germany, particularly on social, legal, and religious topics. He has been especially interested in finding a balanced perspective on short-term micro-historical individual experiences and long-term macro-historical social structures. [1]
Harrington's most recent monograph, Dangerous Mystic, [3] provides a focused study of the life and teachings of the famous medieval friar Meister Eckhart. His third monograph, The Faithful Executioner, [4] adopted a similar approach for the life and times of a sixteenth-century German executioner. Following the release of The Faithful Executioner, Harrington edited and translated The Executioner's Journal: Meister Frantz Schmidt of the Imperial City. [5] Harrington has also published The Unwanted Child [6] (2009) and Reordering Marriage and Society in Reformation Germany [7] (1995). He worked as an editor for A Cloud of Witnesses: Readings in the History of Western Christianity [8] (2001) and co-edited Names and Naming in Early Modern Germany [9] with Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer in 2019.
Harrington was a visiting fellow at Institut für Geschichte der Medizin (Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg), Herzog August Bibliothek (Wolfenbüttel), Clare College (Cambridge University) and at the American Academy in Berlin. [10]
Harrington lives in Nashville, Tennessee with his wife, Beth Monin Harrington, and their two children.
Year 1260 (MCCLX) was a leap year starting on Thursday of the Julian calendar.
Frantz Omar Fanon was a French Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist, political philosopher, and Marxist from the French colony of Martinique. His works have become influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and Marxism. As well as being an intellectual, Fanon was a political radical, Pan-Africanist, and Marxist humanist concerned with the psychopathology of colonization and the human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonization.
Pseudophilosophy is a term applied to a philosophical idea or system which does not meet an expected set of philosophical standards. There is no universally accepted set of standards, but there are similarities and some common ground.
Mechthildof Magdeburg, a Beguine, was a Christian medieval mystic, whose book Das fließende Licht der Gottheit is a compendium of visions, prayers, dialogues and mystical accounts. She was the first mystic to write in Low German.
Timothy James "Matthew " Fox is an American priest and theologian. Formerly a member of the Dominican Order within the Catholic Church, he became a member of the Episcopal Church following his expulsion from the order in 1993.
Johannes Tauler OP was a German mystic, a Catholic priest and a theologian. A disciple of Meister Eckhart, he belonged to the Dominican order. Tauler was known as one of the most important Rhineland mystics. He promoted a certain neo-platonist dimension in the Dominican spirituality of his time.
Henry Suso, OP was a German Dominican friar and the most popular vernacular writer of the fourteenth century. Suso is thought to have been born on 21 March 1295. An important author in both Latin and Middle High German, he is also notable for defending Meister Eckhart's legacy after Eckhart was posthumously condemned for heresy in 1329. He died in Ulm on 25 January 1366, and was beatified by the Catholic Church in 1831.
Ernst Tugendhat was a Czechoslovak-born German philosopher. He was a scion of the wealthy and influential Jewish Tugendhat family. They lived in Venezuela during the Nazi regime, and he studied first in Stanford University, then in Freiburg. He taught internationally in Europa and South America, with a focus on language analysis.
Franz Schmidt (1555–1634), also known as Meister Franz or Frantz Schmidt, was an executioner in Hof from 1573 to April 1578, and from 1 May 1578 till the end of 1617 he was the executioner of Nuremberg. He left a diary in which he detailed the 361 executions he performed during his 45-year career.
Ross Hassig is an American historical anthropologist specializing in Mesoamerican studies, particularly the Aztec culture. His focus is often on the description of practical infrastructure in Mesoamerican societies. He is the author of several influential books, among them: Time, History, and Belief in Aztec and Colonial Mexico; Aztec Warfare: Imperial Expansion and Political Control; and Trade, Tribute, and Transportation: The Sixteenth-Century Political Economy of the Valley of Mexico.
Eckhart von Hochheim, commonly known as Meister Eckhart, Master Eckhart or Eckehart, claimed original name Johannes Eckhart, was a German Catholic priest, theologian, philosopher and mystic. He was born near Gotha in the Landgraviate of Thuringia in the Holy Roman Empire.
Markus Vinzent is a historian of religion. He was a professor in the Department of Theology & Religious Studies at King's College London, and fellow of the Max Weber Center for Advanced Social and Cultural Studies, Erfurt, Germany.
Nigel Fenton Palmer FBA was a British Germanist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Oxford.
Ulrich Raulff is a German cultural scientist and journalist.
L'Indifférent is a 1717 oil on panel painting by Antoine Watteau, which entered the Louvre in the collection of Louis La Caze in 1869.
Norbert Gstrein is an Austrian writer. He was born in Mils in Tyrol, the son of the hotelier and ski school director Norbert Gstrein (1931–1988) and Maria Gstrein, née Thurner. He grews up with his five siblings in Vent and attended the secondary school from 1971 to 1979 in Imst. From 1979 to 1984, Gstrein studied mathematics in Innsbruck, Stanford and Erlangen. He not completed his PhD in 1988 at the University of Innsbruck, under the supervision of Roman Liedl and Gerhard Frey.
The Heimkehrerdenkmal is a monument in Friedland, Germany, dedicated to German prisoners of war during the Second World War. Both Heimkehrerdenkmal and Heimkehrermahnmal translate to Monument to Homecomers in English. It is significant as one of the only monuments in Germany dedicated to Germans who served as soldiers in the war. The monument was commissioned by the Verband der Heimkehrer, Kriegsgefangenen und Vermisstenangehörigen Deutschlands, which was founded in 1950 to represent the interests of German veterans. While only a few of the monuments remain, the VdH commissioned around 1800 monuments dedicated to German POWs. When the monument was inaugurated in 1967, representatives of the German federal government declined to attend because of the monument's controversial focus on German victimhood. The monument has been subject to vandalism, including graffiti referring to German concentration camps.
Felicitas Becker is a Belgian historian, currently a Professor of African History at the University of Ghent. She worked from 2010 till 2016 at the University of Cambridge, where she was also Fellow of Peterhouse. She works on AIDS, slavery and the spread of Islam in East Africa, especially Tanzania.
Soul flight is a technique of ecstasy used by shamans with the aim of entering into a state of trance. During such ecstatic trance it is believed that the shaman's soul has left the body and the corporeal world which allows him or her to enter a spiritual world and interact with its denizens. Believing themselves to be travelling into other realms, shamans either descend into an underworld or ascend unto an upper world - usually by means of an axis mundi - and indeed they can, in a sense, be said to be flying through such divine or infernal realms.
Christine Büchner is a German Roman Catholic theologian and author.
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