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Wolf Liebeschuetz | |
|---|---|
| Born | 22 June 1927 Hamburg, Germany |
| Died | 12 July 2022 |
| Nationality | British |
| Spouse | Margaret Taylor (m. 1955) |
| Children | 4 |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | |
| Doctoral advisor | Arnaldo Momigliano |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | History |
| Sub-discipline | Late Antiquity |
| Institutions | |
John Hugo Wolfgang Gideon Liebeschuetz FBA (22 June 1927 - 11 July 2022 [1] ) was a German-born British historian who specialized in late antiquity.
John Hugo Wolfgang Gideon Liebeschuetz was born in Hamburg on 22 June 1927,the son of historian Hans Liebeschuetz and physician Rahel Plaut. [2] [3] His father was a prominent medievalist who taught at the University of Hamburg. The family had been wealthy,having inherited a large fortune from Wolf's great-grandfather Brach,who amassed wealth trading in Texas and Mexico though much was lost in the German inflation. [4] The Liebeschuetz family was Jewish,and were subjected to increasing persecution following the seizure of power by the Nazis. [5] As a young boy,Liebeschuetz was expelled from junior school because he was Jewish,and was subsequently taught at a very small all-Jewish school. [6] Although his family was able to escape,his teacher was eventually murdered in the Holocaust. [6] His father was twice arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp after the Kristallnacht of November 1938. The four children had received English lessons since 1934 and were sent to England on 12 December. The parents and two grandmothers followed soon after. [5] The emigration of Hans Liebeschuetz was sponsored by the Warburg Institute,with whom the family had long been closely associated. [7]
After arriving in England,the Liebeschuetz family eventually settled in Epsom. Hans Liebeschuetz taught Latin at a number of schools and after the war he became a lecturer at the University of Liverpool. After his retirement he played an important role in founding the Leo Baeck Institute in London. [5]
Liebeschuetz gained his Higher School Certificate at Whitgift School,Croydon in 1944. He initially intended to study medicine. He performed National Service in the Canal Zone in Egypt,as a sergeant in the Royal Army Educational Corps. Liebeschuetz studied Ancient and Medieval History at University College London,where his teachers included A. H. M. Jones and John Morris. After graduating in 1951,Liebeschuetz took a one-year postgraduate certificate in education at Westminster College London. He later studied for his Ph.D. at University College London. His supervisor was Arnaldo Momigliano,and Liebeschuetz was able to consult T. B. L. Webster and Robert Browning. [5]
After gaining his doctorate,Liebeschuetz worked from 1958 to 1963 as a teacher mainly at Heanor Grammar School,Derbyshire. In 1963,he was appointed Assistant Lecturer at the Classics Department at the University of Leicester,which was then under the leadership of Professor Abraham Wasserstein. [7] In 1972,he published the monograph Antioch:City and Imperial Administration in the Later Roman Empire. [8]
In 1979,he was appointed Professor and Head of the Department of Classical and Archaeological Studies at the University of Nottingham. [5] This position had previously been held by E. A. Thompson. [9] 1979 was also the year of the publishing of his monograph Continuity and Change in Roman Religion,which examined how Roman religion worked and how it was abandoned. [9] In the early 1990s Liebeschuetz became increasingly interested in the role of "barbarians" in the fall of the Western Roman Empire. His Barbarians and Bishops (1990) is concerned with this topic. [10]
Liebeschuetz retired in 1992,and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy the same year. In 1993 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts,and a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton,New Jersey. [5]
The Liebeschuetz's research centred on late antiquity,particularly the nature of Roman cities and Roman religion during this time. [5] He argued that Roman religion remained strong well into late antiquity. [8]
In the later part of his career,Liebeschuetz examined the role of "barbarians" in the fall of the Western Roman Empire. [10] Discussing the ethnogenesis model developed by Herwig Wolfram of the Vienna School of History,Liebeschuetz argued that the Visigoths emerged as a people under the leadership of Alaric I and his successors. [11] He further argued that parts of the Getica of Jordanes,such as the account of a Gothic migration from Scandinavia towards the Black Sea,are derived from genuinely Gothic oral traditions. [12] Liebeschuetz maintained that the early Germanic peoples shared closely related language,culture and identity,and considered that the concept of Germanic peoples remains indispensable for scholarship. [13] In the 1990s Liebeschuetz was a participant in the Transformation of the Roman World project,which was sponsored by the European Science Foundation. [11] He felt that many members of this project denied the impact or even existence of Germanic peoples,and also sought to blacklist the traditional idea that the Roman Empire had declined. [14] Liebeschuetz argued that these scholars were practising an ideologically dogmatic and flawed form of scholarship,and manipulating history to promote multiculturalism and European federalism. [15]
Liebeschuetz married Margaret Taylor in 1955,with whom he had three daughters and one son and five grandchildren. [5]
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Arcadius was Roman emperor from 383 to his death in 408. He was the eldest son of the Augustus Theodosius I and his first wife Aelia Flaccilla, and the brother of Honorius. Arcadius ruled the eastern half of the empire from 395, when their father died, while Honorius ruled the west. A weak ruler, his reign was dominated by a series of powerful ministers and by his wife, Aelia Eudoxia.
The Burgundians were an early Germanic tribe or group of tribes. They appeared in the middle Rhine region, near the Roman Empire, and were later moved into the empire, in eastern Gaul. They were possibly mentioned much earlier in the time of the Roman Empire as living in part of the region of Germania that is now part of Poland.
The Germanic peoples were historical groups of people that once occupied Northwestern and Central Europe and Scandinavia during antiquity and into the early Middle Ages. Since the 19th century, they have traditionally been defined by the use of ancient and early medieval Germanic languages and are thus equated at least approximately with Germanic-speaking peoples, although different academic disciplines have their own definitions of what makes someone or something "Germanic". The Romans named the area belonging to North-Central Europe in which Germanic peoples lived Germania, stretching east to west between the Vistula and Rhine rivers and north to south from southern Scandinavia to the upper Danube. In discussions of the Roman period, the Germanic peoples are sometimes referred to as Germani or ancient Germans, although many scholars consider the second term problematic since it suggests identity with present-day Germans. The very concept of "Germanic peoples" has become the subject of controversy among contemporary scholars. Some scholars call for its total abandonment as a modern construct since lumping "Germanic peoples" together implies a common group identity for which there is little evidence. Other scholars have defended the term's continued use and argue that a common Germanic language allows one to speak of "Germanic peoples", regardless of whether these ancient and medieval peoples saw themselves as having a common identity. While several historians and archaeologists continue to use the term "Germanic peoples" to refer to historical people groups from the 1st to 4th centuries CE, the term is no longer used by most historians and archaeologists for the period around the Fall of the Roman Empire and the Early Middle Ages.
The Migration Period, also known as the Barbarian Invasions, was a period in European history marked by large-scale migrations that saw the fall of the Western Roman Empire and subsequent settlement of its former territories by various tribes, and the establishment of the post-Roman kingdoms.
Constans II was the son of Western Roman emperor Constantine III, and served as his co-emperor from 409 to 411. Constans was a monk prior to his father being acclaimed emperor by the army in Britain in early 407, an act of rebellion against the ruling emperor Honorius. He was summoned to Gaul, appointed to the position of caesar (heir) and swiftly married so that a dynasty could be founded. In Hispania, Honorius's relatives rose in 408 and expelled Constantine's administration. An army under the generals Constans and Gerontius was sent to deal with this and Constantine's authority was re-established. Honorius acknowledged Constantine as co-emperor in early 409 and Constantine immediately raised Constans to the position of augustus (emperor), theoretically equal in rank to Honorius as well as to Constantine. Later in 409 Gerontius rebelled, proclaimed his client Maximus emperor and incited barbarian groups in Gaul to rise up. Constans was sent to quash the revolt, but was defeated and withdrew to Arles. In 410, Constans was sent to Hispania again. Gerontius had strengthened his army with barbarians and defeated Constans; the latter withdrew north and was defeated again and killed at Vienne early in 411. Gerontius then besieged Constantine in Arles and killed him.
The causes and mechanisms of the fall of the Western Roman Empire are a historical theme that was introduced by historian Edward Gibbon in his 1776 book The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Though Gibbon was not the first to speculate on why the empire collapsed, he was the first to give a well-researched and well-referenced account of the event, and started an ongoing historiographical discussion about what caused the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The traditional date for the end of the Western Roman Empire is 476 when the last Western Roman Emperor was deposed. Many theories of causality have been explored. In 1984, Alexander Demandt enumerated 210 different theories on why Rome fell, and new theories have since emerged. Gibbon himself explored ideas of internal decline and of attacks from outside the empire.
The Thracian Goths, also known as Moesogoths or Moesian Goths, refers to the branches of Goths who settled in Thrace and Moesia, Roman provinces in the Balkans. These Goths were mentioned in the 4th, 5th and 6th centuries.
Peter John Heather is a British historian of late antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Heather is Chair of the Medieval History Department and Professor of Medieval History at King's College London. He specialises in the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Goths, on which he for decades has been considered the world's leading authority.
Walter Pohl is an Austrian historian who is Professor of Auxiliary Sciences of History and Medieval History at the University of Vienna. He is a leading member of the Vienna School of History.
Walter Andre Goffart is a German-born American historian who specializes in Late Antiquity and the European Middle Ages. He taught for many years in the history department and Centre for Medieval Studies of the University of Toronto (1960–1999), and is currently a senior research scholar at Yale University. He is the author of monographs on a ninth-century forgery, late Roman taxation, four "barbarian" historians, and historical atlases.
Michael Kulikowski is an American historian. He is a professor of history and classics and the head of the history department at Pennsylvania State University. Kulikowski specializes in the history of the western Mediterranean world of late antiquity. He is sometimes associated with the Toronto School of History and was a student of Walter Goffart.
Edward Arthur Thompson was an Irish-born British Marxist historian of classics and medieval studies. He was professor and director of the classics department at the University of Nottingham from 1948 to 1979, and a fellow of the British Academy. Thompson was a pioneer in the study of late antiquity, and was for decades the most prominent British scholar in this field. He was particularly interested in the relations between Ancient Rome and "barbarian" peoples such as the Huns and Visigoths, and has been credited with revitalizing English-language scholarship on the history of early Germanic peoples. Thompson's works on these subjects have been highly influential.
Rolf Hachmann was a German archaeologist who specialized in pre- and protohistory.
Guy Halsall is an English historian and academic, specialising in Early Medieval Europe. He is currently based at the University of York, and has published a number of books, essays, and articles on the subject of early medieval history and archaeology. Halsall's current research focuses on western Europe in the important period of change around AD 600 and on the application of continental philosophy to history. He taught at the University of Newcastle and Birkbeck, University of London, before moving to the University of York.
Dr Rahel Plaut (1894-1993) was a medical doctor and researcher in physiology who became the first female academic to be appointed at Hamburg University School of Medicine. Between 1919 and 1924 she co-authored 25 scientific papers on subjects including metabolism, muscle physiology and infectious disease. She married the historian Hans Liebeschuetz in Hamburg in 1924. They emigrated to England in 1938 to escape Nazi persecution.
Hans Liebeschuetz was a medieval historian. He is best known for his study of John of Salisbury.
Ablabius is thought to be either a historian, a geographer or ethnographer, who had written about the Goths, and whose work is cited by the influential 6th century historian of the Goths, Jordanes. Since Jordanes himself states that he based his own work on recollections of reading a work on Gothic history, now lost, composed by Cassiodorus, Ablabius has traditionally been thought of as a source also for the latter work, though this view has met with considerable scepticism.
Early Germanic culture was the culture of the early Germanic peoples. Largely derived from a synthesis of Proto-Indo-European and indigenous Northern European elements, the Germanic culture started to exist in the Jastorf culture that developed out of the Nordic Bronze Age. It came under significant external influence during the Migration Period, particularly from ancient Rome.
The Vienna School of History is an influential school of historical thinking based at the University of Vienna. It is closely associated with Reinhard Wenskus, Herwig Wolfram and Walter Pohl. Partly drawing upon ideas from sociology and critical theory, scholars of the Vienna School have utilized the concept of ethnogenesis to reassess the notion of ethnicity as it applies to historical groups of peoples such as the Germanic tribes. Focusing on Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, the Vienna School has a large publishing output, and has had a major influence on the modern analysis of barbarian identity.
Dieter Timpe was a German historian best known for his theories on Arminius and the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest.
