Rudolf Schieffer (1947-2018) *71

was a German historian specializing in medieval history. From 1994 to 2012 he was president of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Rudolf Schieffer was the son of the historian Theodor Schieffer. He graduated from high school (Abitur) in 1966, and studied history and Latin between 1966 and 1971 at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn and the Philipps-Universität Marburg. He received his doctorate in 1975 in Bonn, his dissertation, Die Entstehung von Domkapiteln in Deutschland, supervised by Eugen Ewig. From 1975 to 1980 he worked at the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH). His habilitation, for Die Entstehung des päpstlichen Investiturverbots für den deutschen König, took place in 1979 at the University of Regensburg. In 1980 he was appointed professor of medieval and modern history at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, and in 1994 went to the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München to take charge of the MGH.

Schieffer's specialism was the political, legal, and religious history from the late antique to the high middle ages, and particularly the era of the Carolingians. He was awarded the Eike-von-Repgow-Preis in 2008. Schieffer was a member of Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Künste, the Royal Historical Society, the Konstanzer Arbeitskreis für mittelalterliche Geschichte, the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, and the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Since 2012 he was a member of the board of directors of the Roman Institute of the Görres Society.

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