Hagen Keller

Ruedi Hagen Keller (born 2 May 1937, in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany) is a German historian specializing in the history of the early and high Middle Ages.

He gave his inaugural lecture in June 1983 on population growth and social organization in the European High Middle Ages using the example of Upper Italian agrarian society in the 12th and 13th centuries.

[7] In Münster, Keller was one of the founders and for many years the spokesman of the special research area "Carriers, Fields, Forms of Pragmatic Writing" and of the graduate program "Written Culture and Society in the Middle Ages.

His academic students include Franz-Josef Arlinghaus, Marita Blattmann, Christoph Dartmann, Jenny Rahel Oesterle, Hedwig Röckelein, Thomas Scharff, and Petra Schulte.

Reform, revolution, rationality, and technical inventions, including their economic and military uses, had formed the guiding principles and the framework of life with which people wanted to distinguish themselves from the Middle Ages.

Keller has been a visiting professor at the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici in Naples (1979), at the University of Florence (1997), and at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris (2001).

[22] In light of these findings, the image of a personal associational state based on loyalty and allegiance to a leader, as portrayed by Otto Brunner and Theodor Mayer under the influence of National Socialism, was considered outdated.

[28] In their double biography of the first two Ottonians, Henry I, and Otto I, published in 1985, Hagen Keller and Gerd Althoff made intensive use of the findings on medieval prayer commemoration.

For Althoff and Keller, the first two Ottonian rulers were no longer symbols of Germany's early power and greatness, but rather representatives of an archaic society far removed from modern thinking.

[39] Until then, research had been based solely on the information provided by Widukind of Corvey, whose Saxon History seemed to indicate that King Henry I had appointed his eldest son Otto as his successor in 936, shortly before his death.

In an essay on Widukind's account of Otto the Great's accession to the throne in Aachen, written in 1995 in the context of the discussion on the critique of memory and tradition,[40] Keller emphasized the importance of the results that Karl Schmid had obtained based on the memory tradition: they "enable and force a different kind of access: namely, to examine the intention of representation and its 'deforming' effect on the 'report' at a central point by confronting it with deviating information.

In contrast to the approach to the unreliability of Ottonian historiography developed by the historians Fedor Schneider, Martin Lintzel, and Carlrichard Brühl and continued by Johannes Fried, Keller[45] concentrated on the effects of a deliberately shaped and deformed representation that aims to show something specific about events.

[46] Keller fundamentally doubted whether it was legitimate to apply ethnological methods to a literate medieval historian like Widukind to study completely unwritten cultures.

Widukind was convinced that the military successes of King Henry and his son Otto repeated the victories God had granted the Maccabees against the superiority of their godless enemies.

[57] In examining the portrayal of rulers in Ottonian historiography of the 960s (Widukind, Liudprand of Cremona, and Hrotsvit), Keller rejects "interpreting the authors' statements simply as testimony to a free-floating history of ideas about kingship.

[59] In his studies of the change in the image of the ruler on Carolingian and Ottonian royal and imperial seals, he no longer understood them as mere propaganda of power[60] but took greater account of the liturgical context of the tradition.

[64] The study of rituals and forms of symbolic communication led to the realization that Ottonian historians' representational intentions were primarily focused on the ruler's ties and obligations to God and his loyal followers.

[68] In a study of the king's role in the appointment of bishops in the Ottonian and Salian kingdoms, Keller showed that promotions were usually the consensual result of negotiations between the ruler and the cathedral chapter.

In it, he examined the place of jurisdiction within the larger cities of Tuscany and northern Italy from the 9th to the 11th centuries and concluded the balance of power between king, bishop, count, and urban patrician.

[76] In his habilitation thesis published in 1979, Aristocratic Rule and Urban Society in Northern Italy, he no longer focuses solely on the high aristocracy of counts and margraves, but also on the middle nobility, the capitani and valvassors known as episcopal (sub-)vassals.

[79] Keller, however, wanted to use a regional example to show "how far and in what ways the social history of northern Italy was involved in the general developments of the société féodale during the 10th-12th centuries".

[83] The international debate on the conditions of communication in oral societies in the 1960s and 1970s provided the impetus for an interdisciplinary research project on the development of European written culture in the Middle Ages.

The sharp increase in the use of written law was therefore accompanied by a large number of new legal provisions, a systematic organization of the statute books and periodic revisions.

[104] On the basis of his research on the administrative records of the Italian communes, which grew enormously from the end of the 12th century, Keller examined the social side effects and anthropological consequences of this process of writing.

His thesis is "that the forms of cognitive orientation associated with writing are of direct importance for the process of individualization that can be traced in European society since the High Middle Ages".

[106] Keller used tax collection and grain and supply policies to show that the living conditions of each individual citizen in the community were integrated into controllable procedures through administrative writing.

[123] In an essay published in 1983 on the behaviour of the Swabian dukes of the 11th and 12th centuries as pretenders to the throne, Keller initiated a paradigm shift in German-language medieval studies with the idea of "princely responsibility for the empire".

[126] With this view, Keller opposed the older scholarly opinion that the princes were the "gravediggers of the realm" whose behaviour in the Middle Ages had contributed to the decline of royal central authority.

[141] The work that emerged from the project "The writing process and its carriers in northern Italy" between 1986 and 1999 has so far only been selectively received in Italian medieval research - probably mainly for linguistic reasons.

[148] This allowed a "school" to develop in Münster in the sense of a circle of students with a common field of research: Roland Rölker examined the role of different families in the Contado (the area claimed as a dominion and economic area) and in the municipality of Modena,[149] Nikolai Wandruszka analyzed the social development of Bologna in the High Middle Ages,[150] Thomas Behrmann traced the writing process from the 11th to the 13th century on the basis of the two document collections in Novara, the cathedral chapter of S. Maria and the chapter of the Basilica of S. Gaudenzio, which was separated from it.