“Preface” to Mathias Schmoeckel and John Witte, Jr., eds., Great Christian Jurists in German History

Abstract

This preface introduces a volume in a 50-volume series on “Great Christian Jurists,“ presenting the interaction of law and Christianity through the biographies of 1000 legal figures of the past two millennia. This volume presents 26 major German legal scholars from Albert the Great and Eike von Repgow in the Middle Ages to Konrad Adenauer and Stephan Kuttner in the twentieth century. Each chapter analyzes the influence of Christianity on their lives and legal work and sketches their enduring influence on the laws of church and state. Featuring freshly written chapters, this is the first overview in English of the relationship of Christianity and German law in the second millennium. Included are studies of both famous and long forgotten Catholics and Protestants, and both martyrs and collaborators with Nazism and earlier forms of state autocracy.

Keywords: Law, Religion, Law and Religion, Germany, legal history, Christian jurists, secularization, Catholicism, Lutheranism, Calvinism, Friederich Carl von Savigny, Erik Wolf