Gerd Tellenbach (1903–1999) was a German historian and scholar of medieval social and religious history, particularly of the Papacy and German church during the Investiture Controversy and reform movements of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Year 1903 ( MCMIII) was a Common year starting on Thursday (link will display calendar of the Gregorian calendar or a Common year starting Year 1999 ( MCMXCIX) was a Common year starting on Friday (link will display full 1999 Gregorian calendar) Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany ( ˈbʊndəsʁepuˌbliːk ˈdɔʏtʃlant is a Country in Central Europe. See also History An historian is an individual who studies and writes about History, and is regarded as an Authority on it History See also History of the Papacy Catholics recognize the Pope as a successor to Saint Peter, who Jesus named as the "shepherd" and The Investiture Controversy or Investiture Contest was an 11th century dispute between Henry IV Holy Roman Emperor and Pope Gregory VII over Tellenbach also made pathbreaking contributions to the study of the medieval nobility and helped establish a new field of research dedicated to mapping social networks and familial ties among medieval elites (Personenforschung). After studying history at the universities of Freiburg and Heidelberg, he taught in Gießen, Münster, and finally the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg, where he served as Rektor (chancellor) in 1949–1950 and again in 1957–1958. Heidelberg is a city in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. As of 2006 over 140000 people live within the city's area Gießen (ˈgiːsən is a town in the German federal state ( Bundesland) of Hessen, capital of both the district of Gießen and the administrative Münster ( is a city in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is located in the northern part of the state and is considered to be the cultural centre of the From 1962 to 1971, he was director of the German Historical Institute in Rome, a state-sponsored research center dedicated to German-Italian studies and the history of the Papacy in the Middle Ages. Roman Historical Institutes are collegiate bodies established at Rome for the purpose of historical research notably in the Vatican archives.
Scholarly influence
Given his extraordinarily long and productive career, Tellenbach ranks as one of the most influential German historians of the twentieth century. At Freiburg, as well as during his tenure as director of the German Historical Institute in Rome, he trained and served as a mentor to a large number of students of medieval history who went on to receive important academic chairs throughout Germany. His most famous student was Karl Schmid (1923–1993), who further developed Tellenbach's research on medieval noble families and pioneered important new techniques in prosopography and source criticism using monastic necrologies and memorial books. In historical studies, prosopography is an investigation of the common characteristics of an historical group whose individual biographies may be largely untraceable by means Tellenbach's intellectual formation before World War I and his scholarly maturation following the catastrophe of the Second World War also lent his scholarship a unique perspective. World War I (abbreviated WWI; also known as the First World War, the Great War, and the War to End All World War II, or the Second World War, (often abbreviated WWII) was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including Tellenbach's research in church history, as well as political and social history, broke with long-standing nationalistic and highly confessional and politicized accounts and instead stressed long-term structural changes as well as intellectual and cultural forces in society. His conception of the Investiture Controversy as an epochal clash of opposing ideologies about "right order in the world," (hierocratic vs. monarchic) was certainly formed as a young scholar witnessing the vicious political conflicts that engulfed the universities in the 1930s and 1940s. Throughout his career, and particularly in his publicly visible role as university Rektor, he remained a thoughtful and forceful advocate of academic and intellectual freedom as critical components of liberal democracy. His brother, Reinhard Tellenbach, a very successful surgeon in Munich, has created a wonderful exhibition about his brothers' life and work. He lives in Munich with his wife and their three children Christina, Stefan and Anna.
Selected works
- Libertas. Kirche und Weltordnung im Zeitalter des Investiturstreits (Stuttgart, 1936); English trans. : Church, State and Christian Society at the Time of the Investiture Controversy (Oxford, 1938)
- "Vom karolingischen Reichsadel zum deutschen Reichsfürstenstand," in Adel und Bauer im deutschen Staat des Mittelalters, ed. Theodor Mayer (Leipzig, 1943)
- "Zur Erforschung des hochmittelalterlichen Adels (IX-XII Jh. ), in XIIme Congres internationale des sciences historiques. Rapports I (Vienna, 1965)
- Die Westliche Kirche vom 10. bis frühen 12. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1988); English trans. : The church in western Europe from the tenth to the early twelfth century (Cambridge, 1993)
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