Werner Paravicini

File:Werner Paravicini Aufnahme von Werner Maleczek.jpg

Paravicini, photographed by Werner Maleczek at a Reichenau meeting of the Constance Working Group for Medieval History in October 1999

Werner Paravicini (born October 25, 1942 in Berlin) is a German historian.

Paravicini taught as a professor of Medieval and Modern History and Auxiliary Sciences at the University of Kiel from 1984 to 1993. He was director of the German Historical Institute Paris (DHIP) from 1993 to 2007. Paravicini is one of the most important researchers of Burgundian history and medieval nobility. As a scholar, he made a special effort to promote Franco-German and European historical scholarship. His work has placed the court as a social site for the exercise of representation and rule at the center of medievalist research. His main scholarly work is the account of the Prussian Crusade of the European nobility.

Biography

Paravicini is the son of a graduate engineer. He studied history and Romance languages and literature at the universities of Berlin (with Wilhelm Berges), Göttingen (with Hermann Heimpel), Freiburg (with Karl Schmid and Joachim Wollasch), Leuven (with Léopold Genicot) and Mannheim (with Karl Ferdinand Werner) from 1961 to 1969. In 1969 he married. The marriage produced three sons, the designer Heinrich Paravicini, the musician Friedrich Paravicini and the mathematician Walther Paravicini. He received his doctorate from Karl Ferdinand Werner in 1970 in Mannheim with a dissertation on Guy of Brimeu and the noble ruling class of the Burgundian state. From 1969 to 1984 he was a research associate at the German Historical Institute in Paris. Paravicini pursued his studies from Paris in close exchange with modern French, English, and Dutch research on the nobility, including Philippe Contamine, Maurice Keen, Malcolme Vale, Wim Blockmans, and Johanna-Maria van Winter.

He habilitated with Fritz Trautz in Mannheim in 1982 on Prussian Crusade. A Study of the Lifestyles of the European Nobility in the 14th Century. After standing in for Erich Meuthen at the University of Cologne, he succeeded Hartmut Boockmann as Chair of Medieval and Modern History and Ancillary Historical Sciences at the Christian Albrechts University in Kiel from 1984 to 1993. He has been an honorary professor there since 2004. From 1993 to 2007, he was director of the German Historical Institute Paris (DHIP) in the Hôtel Duret-de-Chevry, which since 2002 is part of the public foundation "German Humanities Institutes Abroad" (DGIA), then Max Weber Foundation.

Research

Paravicini's research focuses on the nobility, court and residences in Europe, the Dukes of Burgundy and the Kings of France, the Hanseatic League and the Teutonic Order in the 14th and 15th centuries.

From 1990 to 2014, he was chairman of the Residence Commission of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities and in this capacity edited the Residence Research series. At the same time, he was the founder and director of the Kiel branch of the Residency Commission and played a major role in its establishment. The aim of the Residences Commission is "to lay the foundations for the scholarly study of the long-neglected phenomena of courts and residences as new political, social and cultural centers in the empire of the late Middle Ages." In this context, residences and courts in the late medieval empire (1200–1600) are researched in a European comparison. The work of the commission focused primarily on the project of a three-part handbook of "Courts and Residences in the Late Medieval Empire." Under Paravicini's editorship, the first two volumes of the dynastic-topographical handbook Höfe und Residenzen im spätmittelalterlichen Reich (Courts and Residences in the Late Medieval Empire) were published, covering the royal and princely courts from the High Middle Ages to the Thirty Years' War in a previously unknown detail and completeness in about 600 articles. More than two hundred authors treat forty dynasties from the Saxon Albertines to Württemberg, 31 kings and emperors from Philip of Swabia to Ferdinand III, the seven electorates, 64 ecclesiastical imperial principalities, 41 (feudal) imperial prelates, the Teutonic Order, the Order of St. John, and 34 secular imperial principalities, as well as 368 residences (Residenzorte) from Ahaus and Altenburg to Cambrai, Ziesar, and Zweibrücken. He ensured that biennial symposia of the commission were held together with the DHIP from 1994 to 2006. This had the consequence that French colleagues could get to know German residence towns and German colleagues. Paravicini is a member of the commission continued in 2012 with new terms of reference ("Residence Cities in the Old Kingdom, 1300–1800").

As director of the German Historical Institute Paris, he was responsible for Franco-German as well as international historians' conferences, the awarding of research grants, the publication of series on Western European history and the journal Francia. As director, he also focused on late medieval Burgundy with the international project Prosopographia Burgundica. This was intended to place the documentary basis of Burgundy's occupation on a new source foundation. Prosopographia Burgundica was the first publication to be published electronically in 2003 and was expanded into a virtual Burgundy portal in the fall of 2007. In October 2007, a large international colloquium on the topic of The Burgundian Court and Europe brought the research together. As early as 1999, the Science Council judged that the Institute had developed into a European center in the field of Burgundy research. In addition, Paravicini, together with Michael Werner, produced the long-planned book series Franco-German History.

Paravicini is an expert on the history of the Western European Late Middle Ages, especially on nobility, court, residences and chivalry in Europe from 1200 to 1600, with special emphasis on travel, the Hanseatic League and Burgundy. For his dissertation he collected archival records from no less than 56 archives, mainly from Belgium, France but also the Netherlands. By this research achievement no person below the princely state is worked up at this time in such detail as the lord of Humbercourt to Charles the Bold he presented in 1976 an account for a broader public. The account was also translated into Hungarian and Czech. In 1994, Paravicini presented an overview of the chivalric-courtly culture of the Middle Ages for the Encyclopedia of German History. His goal of knowledge is "the intellectual and practical way of life of a certain upper class, not the explanation of an epoch in German literary history." In dialogue with the cultural and mentality-historical approaches of French research, Paravicini's work from the nineties of the 20th century decisively stimulated the treatment of coats of arms and armorial scrolls as historical sources in diverse contexts. He presented an edition of the Aachen coat of arms scroll.

Paravicini conducted extensive research on the subject of Crusades. In his habilitation, which was accepted in Mannheim in 1982, he dealt with the Prussian Crusades of the European nobility (1320–1420). The work was already planned for three volumes when it appeared in 1989. For the first time, he undertook the task of collecting, classifying and evaluating the widely scattered sources. A comprehensive older account had not been available until then. Paravicini attributes this to the fact that "the international character of this aristocratic phenomenon par excellence did not please the bourgeois national historiography, but also the lower class research". The Prussian crusaders came from all strata of the nobility. Paravicini comes to the conclusion that "the nobility as a whole traveled to Prussia from the highest to the lowest level." The second part on the typology, course and financing of the crusades appeared in 1995. In his analysis of the costs of the Prussian crusades, he comes to the conclusion that these were "always and always an economic loss-making business for all self-payers." For this purpose, Paravicini evaluated with the crusade accounts a source type that had been little used until then in economic and financial history. The nobles came to fight the pagans or to celebrate. Prussian crusades thus served noble self-expression. For the year 1410, he noted a caesura in Prussian crusades. From then on, the Prussian nobility's crusades went to Portugal, Burgundy, and France. The third part, with the main title "Noble Life in the 14th Century," did not appear until 2020 and asks why European nobles moved to Prussia.

In 1999 and 2000, two international colloquia took place in Paris and at Villa Vigoni, which dealt with the forms, developments and functions of the crusades of the European nobility from the late Middle Ages to the end of the 18th century. Paravicini edited the total of 35 contributions together with Rainer Babel in 2005. In 2017, on the occasion of his 75th birthday, several essays published by him in connection with aristocratic crusades were published in an anthology.

Honors

For his research, Paravicini was awarded several honors and memberships. Among others, he has been a corresponding member of the Central Directorate of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica since 1995, a foreign member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (since 2002) and of the Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium (since 1995), a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen (since 1993), a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a full member of the Historical Commission of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (since 2002). He is a recipient of the Federal Cross of Merit and the Knight's Cross of the French Ordre national du Mérite.

Works

Monographs

• Guy de Brimeu. Der burgundische Staat und seine adlige Führungsschicht unter Karl dem Kühnen (1975)
• Die Preußenreisen des europäischen Adels (1989–1995; 2 volumes)
  • Adlig leben im 14. Jahrhundert. Weshalb sie fuhren: Die Preußenreisen des europäischen Adels (2020)
• Die ritterlich-höfische Kultur des Mittelalters (1994)
• Die Wahrheit der Historiker (2010)
• Colleoni und Karl der Kühne (2014)
• "Montée, Crise, Réorientation. Pour une Histoire de la Famille de Croy au XVe Siècle," Revue Belge de Philologie et d'Histoire, Vol. 98 (2020), pp. 149–355.

Essay collections

• Menschen am Hof der Herzöge von Burgund. Gesammelte Aufsätze (2002; edited by Klaus Krüger, Holger Kruse and Andreas Ranft)
• Edelleute und Kaufleute im Norden Europas (2007; edited by Jan Hirschbiegel, Andreas Ranft and Jörg Wettlaufer)
• Noblesse. Studien zum adeligen Leben im spätmittelalterlichen Europa (2012; edited by Ulf Christian Ewert, Andreas Ranft and Stephan Selzer)
• Ehrenvolle Abwesenheit. Studien zum adligen Reisen im späteren Mittelalter (2017; edited by Jan Hirschbiegel and Harm von Seggern)

As editor

• Hansekaufleute in Brügge (1992–2011; 6 volumes)
• Europäische Reiseberichte des späten Mittelalters. Eine analytische Bibliographie (1994–2000; 3 volumes)
• Comptes de l’Argentier de Charles le Téméraire, duc de Bourgogne (2001–2014; 5 volumes)
• Höfe und Residenzen im spätmittelalterlichen Reich (2003–2012; 4 volumes)

External links

• Works by Werner Paravicini at German National Library
• Works by Werner Paravicini at Regesta Imperii