Early life
John Hugo Wolfgang Gideon Liebeschuetz was born in Hamburg on 22 June 1927,the son of historian Hans Liebeschuetz and physician Rahel Plaut. 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. The Liebeschuetz family was Jewish,and were subjected to increasing persecution following the seizure of power by the Nazis. 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. Although his family was able to escape,his teacher was eventually murdered in the Holocaust. 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. The emigration of Hans Liebeschuetz was sponsored by the Warburg Institute,with whom the family had long been closely associated.
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.
Research
The Liebeschuetz's research centred on late antiquity,particularly the nature of Roman cities and Roman religion during this time. He argued that Roman religion remained strong well into late antiquity.
In the later part of his career,Liebeschuetz examined the role of "barbarians" in the fall of the Western Roman Empire. 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. 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. 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. 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. Liebeschuetz argued that these scholars were practising an ideologically dogmatic and flawed form of scholarship,and manipulating history to promote multiculturalism and European federalism.
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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.
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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.
Hugo Carl Plaut was a German physician, who worked primarily as a bacteriologist and mycologist in human and animal medicine. He is best known for his discovery of the cause of Plaut–Vincent angina an infection of the tonsils caused by spirochaeta and treponema bacteria. He was also a pioneer in the field of vaccination and he created a vaccine for sheep pox.
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.
