Maren Lorenz

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Maren Lorenz at a conference in March 2015 in Düsseldorf.

Maren Lorenz (born December 5, 1965 in Dortmund ) is a German historian with a focus on the early modern period . Lorenz has been teaching as Professor of Early Modern History and Gender History at the Ruhr University Bochum since December 2014 .

Live and act

academic career

Maren Lorenz studied history, political science and psychology at the universities of Heidelberg , Vienna and Hamburg from the winter semester 1987/88 to the winter semester 1992/93 . In April 1993, the master's degree in Hamburg followed with a work on the history of the body and culture on infanticide as reflected in forensic medicine in the 18th century. From 1994 to 1996 Lorenz was a scholarship holder of the Saarland State Graduate Fund. From December 1996 to December 1998 she was a scholarship holder in the work area “Theory and History of Violence” at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research . In February 1998 she received her doctorate with Richard van Dülmen at the University of Saarland . From September 1998 to May 2007 Lorenz was a research assistant at the Hamburg Foundation for the Promotion of Science and Culture .

In January 2006, she completed her habilitation at the University of Hamburg with a thesis on military and martial violence half a century after the end of the Thirty Years' War . From June 2007 to May 2008 she was Visiting Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) at the German Historical Institute Washington DC (GHI). In the winter semester of 2009/10 she held the Käthe Leichter visiting professorship at the University of Vienna . In the winter semester 2011/12 she took over a professorship at the University of Basel . From May 2012 to 2014 she was Visiting Associate Professor for German Cultural Studies and History at the University of Toronto . From May 2012 to 2014 she was also head of the Canadian Information Center (IC) of the DAAD in Toronto. In 2014, Lorenz accepted a call to the Ruhr University Bochum for a W3 professorship for Early Modern History and Gender History on December 1, 2014. At the same time, she turned down a call to the Free University of Berlin for a W2 professorship for early modern history.

Research priorities

Lorenz's main research areas are modern cultural history, the history of science and ideas, the history of crime and violence research, body history , gender studies and the relationship between history and the new media.

In her cultural-historical dissertation, Lorenz wants to gain "insight into the appropriation and use of body images, thought structures and perceptual categories of early modern people". The basis for this is formed by around 1,800 cases from German-language expert collections published between 1730 and 1804.

Lorenz sees her habilitation as a “contribution to the cultural history of violence” and broadens the perspective on questions of mentality and cultural history. At the same time, she distances herself from conventional perspectives on military and political history. The focus of the study is on the violent conflicts between the military and the civilian population in the Swedish-ruled imperial territories of Bremen-Verden and Swedish-Pomerania . For the first time, Lorenz evaluated the fully preserved files of the Swedish military jurisdiction in German and Swedish archives. A total of 14 archives were consulted. The basic assumption of their investigation is that “continued (collective) violent action has a fundamental effect on the motivation and actions of those affected (subjects, objects and witnesses)”. Lorenz methodically examines acts of violence based on the habitus concept of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu . In addition to the requirements of military supplies and the struggle for everyday material life resources, Lorenz sees defamation as decisive for the escalation of violence, caused by insufficient wages. According to Lorenz, it was mainly the veteran soldiers who tended to use violence, while the newly recruited soldiers often behaved respectfully towards the civilian population. Violence against civilians was rarely prosecuted by the military justice and only in rare cases were penalties imposed. For numerous offenses, instead of the death penalty, a pardon for multiple street walks was ordered. With these measures one did not want to use a "cold-blooded fighter type", but rather to maintain the operational capability of the soldier. Military justice and military orders only had an “alibi and appeal function”. In contrast, internal military power struggles were not only precisely investigated, but draconian penalties were also imposed. The reviewer of the Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung ruled that she had submitted “pioneering work that points the way in many respects”. Lorenz's work was the first to present results on historical crime research in the field of military justice in the 17th century. After the review of Hans Medick in the historical journal , Lorenz presented with her study "an important contribution to the investigation of the forms, practices and perceptions of military violence in a special semi-colonial situation and an important period of the early modern period". However, not all perspectives of the study are “completely convincing”. According to Frank Göse's review in the Zeitschrift für Geschichtswwissenschaft , Lorenz's picture of almost unchanged conditions after the Peace of Westphalia was concluded is problematic. In Göse's view, pietism , enlightenment and legalization processes have also entered the military .

In their 2000 published account of the body of the past. Introduction to body history , Lorenz systematically worked through the numerous international and German-language body history studies for the first time and thus presented the first German-language introduction to body history. Lorenz understands the history of the body as the "historicization [...] of the plural bodies in the history of mankind". For Lorenz, only those works play a role, "which try to find answers to the constitution of society by means of questions about traditional body concepts and practices." Katja Patzel-Mattern praised the presentation as a pioneering work. In 2009 Lorenz presented a story about vandalism in Germany from the 17th century to the present day. In 2018 she published a paper on human breeding . In it she deals with proto-eugenic ideas and strategies in the period from 1500 to 1870 and deals extensively with the Old Kingdom , France, Great Britain and North America. Referring to premodern thought experiments on human breeding, Lorenz advocates the thesis that scientific, literary and popular discourses, which “in their time were not yet able to win a majority”, nevertheless “left their social traces in the long term and across borders” and thus the limits of what can be said to an increasing extent Feasible shifted.

Lorenz has written numerous studies on the online encyclopedia Wikipedia . Lorenz is critical of the development of Wikipedia in the field of history. In 2011 she denied that the article information from Wikipedia was fundamentally citable. Among other things, she criticized the quality of the articles and the unclear authorship. There is no quality management by specialist editors and no clearly defined control system. The biographical articles would largely be based on articles in the public domain from older encyclopedias.

Fonts

  • Criminal bodies - troubled minds. The standardization of the individual in forensic medicine and psychiatry of the Enlightenment. Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 1999, ISBN 3-930908-44-1 (= also: Saarbrücken, University, dissertation, 1998).
  • Incarnate past. Introduction to the history of the body (= historical introductions. Volume 4). Edition diskord, Tübingen 2000, ISBN 3-89295-696-0 .
  • The wheel of violence. Military and civilian population in Northern Germany after the Thirty Years War (1650–1700). Böhlau, Cologne a. a. 2007, ISBN 978-3-412-11606-4 (Also: Hamburg, University, habilitation paper).
  • Vandalism as an everyday phenomenon. Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-86854-204-2 .
  • Human breeding. Early Ideas and Strategies 1500–1870. Wallstein, Göttingen 2018, ISBN 978-3-8353-3349-9 .

Web links

Commons : Maren Lorenz  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Remarks

  1. ↑ Kürschner's German Scholar Calendar Online
  2. ↑ Maren Lorenz: Criminal bodies - disturbed minds. The standardization of the individual in forensic medicine and psychiatry of the Enlightenment. Hamburg 1999, p. 14. See the review by Hans-Ludwig Kröber in: Zeitschrift für Sexualforschung, Volume 13 (2000), pp. 165–168.
  3. ↑ Maren Lorenz: The wheel of violence. Military and civilian population in Northern Germany after the Thirty Years War (1650–1700). Cologne u. a. 2007, p. 11.
  4. ^ Review by Hans Medick in: Historische Zeitschrift 289 (2009), pp. 466–468, here: p. 467.
  5. ↑ Maren Lorenz: The wheel of violence. Military and civilian population in Northern Germany after the Thirty Years War (1650–1700). Cologne u. a. 2007, p. 1.
  6. ↑ Maren Lorenz: The wheel of violence. Military and civilian population in Northern Germany after the Thirty Years War (1650–1700). Cologne u. a. 2007, p. 25ff.
  7. ↑ See the review by Martin Meier in: Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift 68 (2009), pp. 163–165, here: p. 164.
  8. ↑ Maren Lorenz: The wheel of violence. Military and civilian population in Northern Germany after the Thirty Years War (1650–1700). Cologne u. a. 2007, p. 331.
  9. ↑ Maren Lorenz: The wheel of violence. Military and civilian population in Northern Germany after the Thirty Years War (1650–1700). Cologne u. a. 2007, p. 330.
  10. ^ Review of Sascha Möbius in: Journal for Historical Research 36 (2009), pp. 360–362.
  11. ↑ Jutta Nowosadtko in: Historische Anthropologie 16 (2008), pp. 312–314, here: p. 313.
  12. ^ Review by Hans Medick in: Historische Zeitschrift 289 (2009), pp. 466–468, here: p. 468.
  13. ^ Review by Frank Göse in: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswwissenschaft 56 (2008), pp. 667–669.
  14. ↑ Maren Lorenz: Incarnate past. Introduction to body history. Tübingen 2000, p. 10.
  15. ↑ Maren Lorenz: Incarnate past. Introduction to body history. Tübingen 2000, p. 13.
  16. ↑ See the review by Katja Patzel-Mattern: in: H-Soz-u-Kult , September 17, 2001, ( online ). Further review by Robert Jütte in: Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 88 (2001), pp. 503–504.
  17. ↑ See the reviews by Jörg Vögele in: Historische Zeitschrift 309 (2019), pp. 440–441; Vitus Huber in: Sehepunkte 19 (2019), No. 4 [15. April 2019], ( online ); Ian F McNeely in: German History 37 (2019), pp. 408-410; Pierre Pfütsch in: Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 46 (2019), pp. 521–522 ( online ); Regine Maritz in: H-Soz-Kult , February 19, 2020, ( online ); Aline Vogt in: L'Homme. European Journal of Feminist History 31 (2020), pp. 153–156.
  18. ^ Maren Lorenz: Human breeding. Early Ideas and Strategies 1500–1870. Göttingen 2018, p. 10.
  19. ↑ Maren Lorenz: Representation of history in Wikipedia or: The longing for constancy in the inconsistent. In: Barbara Korte, Sylvia Paletschek (eds.): History goes Pop. To represent history in popular media and genres. Bielefeld 2009, pp. 289-312; Maren Lorenz: Wikipedia as a store of knowledge for mankind - ingenious, dangerous or banal? In: Erik Meyer (Ed.) : Culture of Remembrance 2.0: Commemorative communication in digital media. Frankfurt am Main 2009, pp. 207-236; Maren Lorenz: Wikipedia - a model for the future? The danger of the boundaries between information and infotainment disappearing. In: Marco Jorio, Cindy Eggs (ed.): “In the beginning is the word.” Lexicons in Switzerland. (Accompanying publication to the exhibition: “The Room of Knowledge - Lexicons and Encyclopedias in Switzerland,” November 7, 2008 to March 29, 2009). Baden / CH 2008, pp. 91-109; Maren Lorenz: Wikipedia. On the relationship between the structure and effectiveness of a secret leading medium. In: WerkstattGeschichte. 43 (2006), pp. 84–95 ( online )
  20. ↑ Maren Lorenz: The trend towards the Wikipedia document. Why Wikipedia is scientifically not quotable. In: Research & Teaching , Volume 18 (2011), 2, pp. 120–122 ( online )
personal data
SURNAME Lorenz, Maren
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian
DATE OF BIRTH December 5, 1965
PLACE OF BIRTH Dortmund