Peter Godman

Peter James Godman (born February 15, 1955 in Auckland , † November 4, 2018 in Cambridge ) was a New Zealand Middle Latin philologist and historian.

life and work

After attending the Auckland Grammar School, Godman studied from 1973 at the University of Cambridge , from 1977 he worked on a doctorate, which he completed in 1980 at the University of Oxford . From 1979 to 1989 he lectured as a lecturer in English Language and Literature at Oxford, where he was elected a Fellow of Pembroke College in 1980 . After numerous visiting fellowships, in 1989 he became professor of Middle Latin Philology at the German Department of the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen . There he was at the DFG - Graduate College 258 Ars and Scientia in the Middle Ages and the early modern period involved. In 2002 he was offered a professorship at both LMU Munich and La Sapienza University . He accepted the latter and moved to Rome. He returned to Cambridge in 2016, where he was associate at Corpus Christi College.

Godman was particularly interested in the polemical and political context of Latin literature , be it in the age of Charlemagne , in the 12th century or in the Renaissance . His early publications dealt with the persistence of classical Latin poetry in the 8th and 9th centuries ( Alcuin . The Bishops, Kings, and Saints of York , 1982; Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance , 1985; Poets and Emperors. Frankish Politics and Carolingian Poetry , 1987).

Godman never wanted to limit himself to a narrow specialty, however. After 1990, his interests expanded exponentially, studying the great Latin humanists of the 12th and 16th centuries and presenting monographs on very different fields. He received the Roland H. Bainton Prize for History in 1998 for his book From Poliziano to Machiavelli . Florentine Humanism in the High Renaissance (1998). Godman possessed a great empathy for the difficulties faced by scholars in an age of political extremes, which helped him analyze their rhetorical maneuvers, which were often overlooked by historians without the necessary knowledge of Latin. The Silent Masters was released in 2000 . Latin Literature and Its Censors in the High Middle Ages , Godman's magnum opus on the literary culture of the 12th century. The title was provocative in a way characteristic of Godman, in that the magistri with whom he was concerned were anything but silent. Rather, it was about heated polemics by a crowd of eloquent and ambitious scholars, all vying for the attention of powerful princes. Godman's sympathy was the very worldly interest of Bernardus Silvestris in nature and the satirical wit of Johannes de Hauvilla. On the other hand, he was suspicious of theologically minded authors such as Alanus ab Insulis , who subordinated their literary brilliance to the requirements of orthodoxy.

The opening of the Historical Archives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in 1997 marked a new turning point in Godman's work. He transferred his interest in the polemical contexts of censorship to the time of the Catholic Reform and Counter-Reformation in the 16th century, specifically to the effectiveness of Robert Bellarmine in the Index Congregation and the Roman Inquisition ( The Saint as Censor. Robert Bellarmine between Inquisition and Index , 2000). Instead of simple historical polemics against Roman censorship , Godman tried to use Bellarmine's example to illustrate how difficult or even impossible it was to develop a reasonably intellectually coherent policy of censorship.

Two works in German were also drawn from the Vatican archives: World literature on the index. The Secret Opinions of the Vatican (2001) and The Secret Inquisition. From the forbidden archives of the Vatican (2002), which were also reflected on television. In addition, Godman dealt with the newly accessible files from the pontificate of Pius XI. , especially with the role of his cardinal secretary of state Eugenio Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII. The book ( Hitler and the Vatican , 2004) was translated into various languages ​​and met with a great response.

Godman then returned to his favorite subject, 12th century Latin humanistic poetry. His interest in the moral problem of feigned repentance brought his work Paradoxes of Conscience in the High Middle Ages. Abelard, Heloise, and the Archpoet (2009), in which he portrayed Petrus Abelard as a witty critic of hypocrisy and Heloise as a first-rate moralist. He contrasted her posture with that of Archipoeta , whose literary brilliance had long drawn him. Because of this work Godman received the Leverhulme Visiting Professorship in Cambridge for the academic year 2009-2010. In his last major monograph ( The Archpoet and Medieval Culture , 2014), Godman dedicated a well-rounded portrait to the Archipoeta, highlighting the worldliness of this literary genius, with which he tried to meet the tastes of his spiritual patron Rainald von Dassel . Godman dedicated the book to the Monumenta Germaniae Historica , an institution he had always enjoyed working on.

literature

• Constant J. Mews: In memoriam Peter Godman (1955-2018). In: The Journal of Medieval Latin 29 (2019), pp. XXIII – XXV, doi : 10.1484 / J.JML.4.2019006 .

Web links

• Sapienza University
• Literature by and about Peter Godman in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Peter Godman in the WorldCat bibliographic database

Individual evidence

1. ^ Pembroke College Record. Oxford 1980, p. 4.
2. ↑ Pearl divers
3. ↑ DFG-GEPRIS
4. ^ Annual report University of Tübingen
5. ↑ Report on the ZDF documentary drama The Secret Inquisition