Wolfram Drews

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Wolfram Drews (born March 26, 1966 in Rostock ) is a German historian . Drews has been teaching as professor of medieval history at the University of Münster since 2011 . In the professional world, he has primarily emerged with his work on world and global history, on transcultural history and on strategies of domination and integration in the Christian and Islamic Middle Ages, as well as on interdependence processes in the Christian-Jewish-Islamic environment. In his research he also deals with the border areas of Europe, Byzantium and Spain.

Live and act

academic career

Wolfram Drews studied history, Jewish studies , theology, English and Romance studies in Berlin, Jerusalem and Córdoba. From 1998 to 2001 he was a research assistant at the Institute for Jewish Studies at the University of Göttingen . In 2000 he received his doctorate in medieval history with Kaspar Elm and Peter Schäfer at the Free University of Berlin with a thesis on the functionalization of anti-Judaism in Visigothic Spain. His dissertation was awarded the Friedrich Meinecke Prize in 2001. From 2001 to 2011 he was a research assistant at the Franz Joseph Dölger Institute at the University of Bonn .

In the 2007/08 winter semester he completed his habilitation at the University of Cologne with a comparative thesis on the cultural history of politics in the Islamic and Christian-Latin Middle Ages. Drews held visiting professorships at the Humboldt University in Berlin (winter semester 2008/09 and summer semester 2009), the Ruhr University Bochum (summer semester 2010) and at the University of Cologne (winter semester 2010/11). On March 1, 2011, he succeeded Gerd Althoff as Professor of Early and High Medieval History at the University of Münster . In January 2012 he gave his inaugural lecture there .

In the summer semester of 2012, Drews was a Fellow at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library at Harvard University . Drews was co-editor in 2011 and has been one of the editors of the journal Early Medieval Studies since 2012 . Drews was Executive Director of the History Department from 2012 to 2014. He has been managing director of the Institute for Early Medieval Research since 2012. From 2013 to 2017 Drews was Vice President of the Medievalists Association , and has been its President since 2017. He is a member of the Association of Historians in Germany , Medievalists Association, German University Association , Association of Judaists in Germany , Görres Society for the Care of Science and since 2018 a member of Academia Europaea .

Research priorities

His main research interests are the cultural history of the political in the Middle Ages, historical comparative studies, world and global history, transcultural history, strategies of domination and integration in the Christian and Islamic Middle Ages, kingship in the early and high Middle Ages as well as acculturation processes in the Christian-Jewish environment. Islamic interaction.

In his dissertation, published in 2001, he devoted himself in detail to the anti-Jewish treatise by Isidore of Seville . According to Drews, previous research has overestimated Isidor's philological knowledge. After his studies, Isidore was neither proficient in Hebrew nor in Greek. With his treatise De fide catholica contra Iudaeos he did not address the Jews, but his cultural and intellectual horizon was limited to the traditions of the Gothic Catholic community. When writing the treatise, Isidore's intention was to strengthen Catholic Christians in their faith and to prepare them for possible Jewish arguments and objections. The function of the treatise is to promote the merging of Visigoths and Hispanic Romans into a unified "state people", the gens Gothorum . According to an essay published by Drews in 2002, Roman and Gothic traditions merge in Isidor's depiction of the Historia Gothorum to form a historical image that “should serve as the basis for the self-image of Hispanic Gothic society in the seventh century”.

In his habilitation thesis he deals with the almost simultaneous dynasty change from Merovingians to Carolingians in the Frankish empire and from Umayyads to Abbasids in the Islamic caliphate . He pursues the claim "to look at a traditional field of historical research from a new perspective". Until then, approaches to transcultural historical comparative studies had rarely been tried out in German Medieval Studies. He would like to see his work as "a contribution to a political cultural history". In a systematic comparison, he asks about the structural prerequisites for both dynasty changes and the strategies that stabilize rule. The work focuses on the time of Charlemagne (768–814) and al-Ma'mūn (813–833). The new dynasties that came to power were under strong pressure to legitimize. Drews therefore focuses on the arguments and strategies that were "used to formulate and propagate (invented) traditions and claims to rule". In four main chapters it deals with discourses (pp. 38–173), practices (pp. 174–235), and cultural and religious parameters of the legitimation of power (pp. 236–329). To conclude (pp. 330–436), Drews attempts “to analyze the cultural foundations and prerequisites that were decisive for the political room for maneuver of the Carolingian and Abbasid actors”. As a result, he found that the two dynasty changes “differed considerably in their cultural framework”. The Carolingians relied on various rituals and institutions, while the Abbasids were only able to cite such institutional grounds for legitimation under incomparably more difficult conditions. The Abbasids only legitimized themselves through their religion. In Islam there was no equivalent to the church. Islam did not have any sacraments from which consensus rituals for the establishment of rulers could have developed. The Carolingians established the connection with (Christianized) antiquity, while the Abbasids could obtain “legitimizing capital only from Islamic and pre-Islamic Arabic traditions”.

In a 2011 contribution on transcultural perspectives in medieval historiography, he raises the questions "whether there were no such global historical representations in the Christian (or Jewish) Middle Ages" and "why the European Middle Ages are usually ignored in current genealogies of global history" . He refers to the peculiarity of the medieval world chronicles, which can be seen as universal in a temporal and salvation-historical sense and only to a limited extent in a spatial sense. Drews understands the Castilian author Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada and his “Historia Arabum” from the 1240s as a medieval example of a “global historical approach”.

In 2016, Drews and Christian Scholl published the results of a 2013 conference on the topic of transcultural entanglement processes in the pre-modern era. The studies concentrate on premodern interweaving processes of the most varied of kinds between cultures, regions and social groups. Drews chaired an international conference on "The Interaction of Rulers and Elites in Imperial Orders". The conference took place as part of the Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics” in June 2015 in Münster. The volume published by Drews in 2018 makes an important contribution to the study of empires.

Fonts

Monographs

  • The Carolingians and Abbasids of Baghdad. Legitimation strategies of early medieval ruling dynasties in a transcultural comparison (= Europe in the Middle Ages. Vol. 12). Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-05-004560-3 (Partly also: Cologne, University, habilitation paper, 2007).
  • Jews and Judaism with Isidore of Seville (= Berlin historical studies. Vol. 34). Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-428-10571-0 (also: Berlin, Free University, dissertation, 2000).

Editorships

  • with Ulrich Pfister, Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf: Religion and decision-making. Historical and cultural studies perspectives (= religion and politics. Vol. 17). Ergon-Verlag, Baden-Baden 2018, ISBN 3-95650-390-2 .
  • The interaction of rulers and elites in imperial orders of the Middle Ages (= The Middle Ages. Perspectives of Medieval Research. Supplements. Vol. 8). De Gruyter, Berlin 2018, ISBN 3-11-057255-9 .
  • with Antje Flüchter , Christoph Dartmann , Jörg Gengnagel, Almut Höfert , Sebastian Kolditz, Jenny Rahel Oesterle, Ruth Schilling, Gerald Schwedler: Monarchical forms of rule of the premodern in a transcultural perspective (= Europe in the Middle Ages. Treatises and contributions to historical comparative literature. Vol. 26) . De Gruyter, Berlin 2015, ISBN 3-11-041164-4 .
  • with Heike Schlie: Testimony and testimony. Perspectives from the pre-modern era (= Trajekte. A series of the Center for Literary and Cultural Research Berlin ). Fink, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-7705-4905-4 .
  • with Jenny Rahel Oesterle : Transcultural Comparative Literature. Contributions to a global history of the premodern (= Comparative. Journal for Global History and Comparative Social Research. Volume 18 (2008), Issue 3/4). Leipziger Universitäts-Verlag, Leipzig 2008, ISBN 3-86583-335-8 .

literature

  • Drews, Wolfram. In: Kürschner's German Scholars Calendar. Bio-bibliographical directory of contemporary German-speaking scientists. Volume 1: A - G. 30th edition. De Gruyter, Berlin et al. 2018, ISBN 978-3-11-051766-8 , p. 674.

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Wolfram Drews: Imperial rule on the periphery? Striving for hegemony and political competition between Christian and Islamic rulers in the early and high medieval "West". In: Frühmedievalliche Studien 46 (2012), pp. 1–39.
  2. ↑ Christel Meier: 50 Years of Early Medieval Studies. In: Frühmittelalterliche Studien , Vol. 50 (2016), pp. 1–13, here: pp. 12 f.
  3. ↑ See the reviews by Bat-Sheva Albert in: Revue d'Histoire Ecclésiastique 103 (2008), pp. 963–965; Veronika Lukas in: German Archive for Research into the Middle Ages 60 (2004), p. 851f. ( Digitized version ); Jacques Elfassi in: Revue des Études Augustiniennes 49 (2003), pp. 219f .; Joseph Shatzmiller in: Aschkenas 13 (2003), pp. 560-562; Raúl González Salinero in: Sefarad 62 (2002), pp. 439-441; HJ Selderhuis in: Nederlands Dagblad June 15, 2002, p. 7.
  4. ↑ Wolfram Drews: Jews and Judaism with Isidore of Seville. Berlin 2001, pp. 527-542.
  5. ^ Wolfram Drews: Goths and Romans as an object of historiography in Isidore of Seville. In: Saeculum 53 (2002), pp. 1–20, here: p. 17.
  6. ↑ See the reviews Jens Scheiner, Undine Ott in: Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Studium 67 (2016), p. 747; Stephan Conermann: The Middle Ages. Perspectives of Medieval Research 18 (2013), pp. 192–194; Alexander Beihammer in: Mitteilungen des Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung 121 (2013), pp. 468–471 ( online ); Jenny Rahel Oesterle in: Historische Zeitschrift 292 (2011), pp. 755–757; Rudolf Schieffer in: German Archive for Research into the Middle Ages 66 (2010), p. 282f .; Kordula Wolf in: Sources and research from Italian archives and libraries 90 (2010), pp. 569–571 ( online ); Konrad Hirschler in: Journal of Global History 5 (2010), p. 177f .; Rodolphe Dreillard in: Revue de l'Institut Français d'Histoire en Allemagne 1 (2009), pp. 364-366; Linda Dohmen in: H-Soz-u-Kult November 11, 2009, ( online ); Roman Deutinger in: Sehepunkte 9 (2009), No. 6 [15. June 2009], ( online ); Medienspiegel - German-Maghreb Society , June 2009, 12f .; Carsten Woll in: Das Historisch-Politische Buch 57 (2009), 584f .; Maaike van Berkel in: Early Medieval Europe 20 (2012), pp. 96-97.
  7. ↑ Wolfram Drews: The Carolingians and Abbasids of Baghdad. Legitimation strategies of early medieval ruling dynasties in a transcultural comparison. Berlin 2009, p. 33.
  8. ↑ See the review by Jenny Rahel Oesterle in: Historische Zeitschrift 292 (2011), pp. 755–757.
  9. ↑ Wolfram Drews: The Carolingians and Abbasids of Baghdad. Legitimation strategies of early medieval ruling dynasties in a transcultural comparison. Berlin 2009, p. 18.
  10. ↑ Wolfram Drews: The Carolingians and Abbasids of Baghdad. Legitimation strategies of early medieval ruling dynasties in a transcultural comparison. Berlin 2009, p. 17.
  11. ↑ Wolfram Drews: The Carolingians and Abbasids of Baghdad. Legitimation strategies of early medieval ruling dynasties in a transcultural comparison. Berlin 2009, p. 330.
  12. ↑ Wolfram Drews: The Carolingians and Abbasids of Baghdad. Legitimation strategies of early medieval ruling dynasties in a transcultural comparison. Berlin 2009, p. 366.
  13. ↑ Wolfram Drews: The Carolingians and Abbasids of Baghdad. Legitimation strategies of early medieval ruling dynasties in a transcultural comparison. Berlin 2009, p. 168.
  14. ↑ Wolfram Drews: The Carolingians and Abbasids of Baghdad. Legitimation strategies of early medieval ruling dynasties in a transcultural comparison. Berlin 2009, p. 380.
  15. ↑ Wolfram Drews: The Carolingians and Abbasids of Baghdad. Legitimation strategies of early medieval ruling dynasties in a transcultural comparison. Berlin 2009, p. 98.
  16. ↑ Wolfram Drews: The Carolingians and Abbasids of Baghdad. Legitimation strategies of early medieval ruling dynasties in a transcultural comparison. Berlin 2009, p. 366.
  17. ↑ Wolfram Drews: Transcultural Perspectives in Medieval Historiography. In: Historische Zeitschrift 292 (2011), pp. 31–59, here: p. 37.
  18. ↑ Wolfram Drews: Transcultural Perspectives in Medieval Historiography. In: Historische Zeitschrift 292 (2011), pp. 31–59, here: p. 57.
  19. ↑ Wolfram Drews, Christian Scholl (ed.): Transcultural entanglement processes in the premodern. Berlin / Boston 2016.
  20. ↑ See the review by Matthias Becher in: H-Soz-Kult , February 5, 2020, ( online ).
personal data
SURNAME Drews, Wolfram
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian
DATE OF BIRTH March 26, 1966
PLACE OF BIRTH Rostock