Max LW Laistner

Max LW Laistner (born October 10, 1890 in London , † December 10, 1959 in Ithaca, New York ) was a British-American historian who was particularly concerned with ancient and medieval history .

Life

Max Ludwig Wolfram Laistner, the son of the musician Max Laistner (1853-1917), studied at Cambridge University ( BA 1912) and at the British School at Athens (1913-1914). On his return he worked as an Assistant Lecturer in Classics at the University of Birmingham . During the First World War he had to interrupt his career. From 1915 to 1916 he interrupted his military service and taught at Queen's University Belfast . After the end of the war he was employed at the University of Manchester in 1919 and obtained a master's degree in Cambridge in 1920 . From 1921 to 1925 Laistner worked as Assistant Professor of Ancient History at the University of London .

When Laistner was offered a professorship in the United States in 1925, he accepted. From then on he taught as Professor of Ancient History at Cornell University in Ithaca (New York) , but retained his British citizenship. In 1940 he was appointed John Stambaugh Professor of History as the successor to Carl Lotus Becker . In 1945/1946 he was invited to the University of California, Berkeley as Sather Professor . In 1950 he was James W. Richard Lecturer at the University of Virginia . In 1958 he retired.

Laistner mainly dealt with the history of antiquity and the early Middle Ages , but included wide areas of occidental history in his research. His best-known works are the monograph Thought and Letters in Western Europe, AD 500–900 (1931) and a work on the Commentaries on the Bible by Beda Venerabilis .

Fonts (selection)

• Greek Economics . London / Toronto 1923
• Isocrates. De pace and Philip . New York / London 1927
• A Survey of Ancient History to the Death of Constantine . Boston / New York 1929
• Thought and Letters in Western Europe, AD 500-900 . New York 1931. Third edition, New York 1957
• A History of the Greek World from 479 to 323 BC London 1936. Second edition, London 1947
• Bedae Venerabilis Expositio Actuum Apostolorum et Retractatio . Cambridge 1939
• A Hand-List of Bede Manuscripts . Ithaca (New York) 1943
• The Greater Roman Historians . Berkeley / Los Angeles 1947 ( Sather Classical Lectures 21)
• Christianity and the Pagan Culture in the Later Roman Empire . Ithaca (New York) 1951
• The Intellectual Heritage of the Early Middle Ages . Ithaca (New York) 1957

literature

• Ward W. Briggs : Laistner, Max Ludwig Wolfram . In: Derselbe (ed.): Biographical Dictionary of North American Classicists. Greenwood Press, Westport CT et al. 1994, ISBN 0-313-24560-6 , pp. 337f.

Web links

• Entry on Max LW Laistner in the Database of Classical Scholars (English)
• Literature by and about Max LW Laistner in the bibliographic database WorldCat