Henri-Irénée Marrou

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Henri-Irénée Marrou (born November 12, 1904 in Marseille , † April 11, 1977 in Bourg-la-Reine ) was a French historian with a special focus on the history of the Roman Catholic Church .

Life

Born to Catholic parents, Marrou was admitted to the École normal superieure de la rue d´Ulm because of his excellent studies, where he was qualified to teach history in 1929. From there, Marrou moved to the École française de Rome to conduct intensive research there on St. Augustine . He also worked on the Esprit magazine with Emmanuel Mounier , who also researched Augustine and, together with Marrou, is the founder of the “ Études Augustiniennes ” magazine .

Marrou went on study trips to Naples and Cairo before teaching in Nancy and later in Montpellier . He wrote his dissertation on St. Augustine and the end of ancient culture. He received his doctorate for this in 1937.

During the Second World War , Marrou was involved in the resistance ( Résistance ). From 1945 to 1976 he was professor for the history of Christianity at the Sorbonne in Paris. During this time Marrou wrote his main works.

Marrou was one of the first contributors to the “ Sources Chrétiennes ” collection, in which the texts of the Church Fathers are published in the original language and with a French translation. He also published the series Patristica Sorbonensia (1957ff.), Which , however, only made nine volumes.

Henri Irénée Marrou was also politically active: he took a public position during the Algerian War and condemned the practice of torture , which resulted in a house search. The second Vatican Council met with its full approval, as it fought alongside the fundamentalists also the Marxists . The events of May 1968 filled him with suspicion. Since 1965 he was a corresponding member of the British Academy and since 1968 of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences .

His first book "Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique" (1938) was translated into German and Italian. In this work, Marrou examined Augustine's relationship to ancient education and science. In the center of his study he moved Augustine's work De doctrina christiana , which he called a "charte fondamentale de la culture chrétienne". He put forward the thesis that De doctrina christiana heralded the end of ancient culture. His book "Histoire de l'education dans l'antiquité" (1948) has been translated into English, Portuguese, Spanish, Polish, German and Italian. It is "the classic standard work on intellectual education in the time of the late republic".

The historian André Mandouze (1916–2006) wrote in his obituary for Marrou in the newspaper Le Monde : "The name of Marrou will always be associated with the discovery (or rediscovery) of a broad field: that of Christian late antiquity."

His daughter Françoise Marrou-Flamant (born February 21, 1931) was a professor at the University of Aix-Marseille and made a name for herself as a translator from Russian into French.

Major students of Marrou were the stoicism researchers Michel Spanneut and Charles Pietri .

Works (selection)

  • History of Education in Classical Antiquity. Freiburg 1957.
  • Augustine in personal testimonies and image documents. Translated from the French by Christine Muthesius. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1958.
  • Les troubadours . Éditions du Seuil, Paris 1961.
  • Augustine and the end of ancient education. Paderborn u. a. 1981, 2nd edition 1995.

literature

  • Pierre Riché : Henri Irénée Marrou. Histories engaged . Ed. du Cerf, 2003. (French biography).
  • Charles Pietri : Marrou, Henri-Irénée, in: TRE 22 (1992) 182-183.
  • Jean Delumeau : La vie et l'oeuvre d'Henri-Irénée Marrou, in: CRAI 2004, 223-227.
  • Gert Melville : Categories of the metahistorical - research goal of a new historical-scientific self-understanding ?, in: Philosophisches Jahrbuch 82 (1975) 188-206.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Deceased Fellows. British Academy, accessed July 5, 2020 .
  2. ^ Klaus Bringmann, Augustus. Darmstadt 2007. p. 254.
  3. ↑ Quotation from Michael Bentley: Companion to historiography. London 1997, p. 70.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Marrou, Henri-Irénée
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Marrou, Henri Irénée
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French historian
DATE OF BIRTH November 12, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Marseille
DATE OF DEATH April 11, 1977
Place of death Bourg-la-Reine