Sabine von Heusinger
W. John Bennett Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies and the Centre for Medieval Studies
Sabine von Heusinger is a Professor of Late Medieval History at the University of Cologne in Germany. Earlier, she has been a fellow at Morphomata International Center for Advanced Studies at University of Cologne and a Senior-Research Fellow at the Institute for Advances Studies for Junior Researchers at University of Konstanz. While she is in Toronto, her research will focus on water as a precondition for human life – without water survival is not possible. The topic “water” will allow her to explore numerous aspects of social, cultural and intellectual history in Late Medieval times.
Beyond this, her main research interests focus on the constitution, the advancement and reform of social groups in the Late Middle Ages using as examples the Dominican Order as well as guilds in the German Empire. She has published a book on the Dominican Johannes Mulberg and the quarrel over Beguines at Basel including an editon of his “Tractatus contra Beginas et Beghardos” (Johannes Mulberg OP († 1414), Akademie Verlag 2000) and a monograph on Guilds in the Late Middle Ages (Die Zunft im Mittelalter, Franz Steiner Verlag 2009). On the occasion of the 800th anniversary of the Dominican Order, she published jointly with Elias H. Fuellenbach OP, et al. a collected volume on the latest research on the male and female branches of the Dominican order in the Regnum Teutonicum (Die deutschen Dominikaner und Dominikanerinnen im Mittelalter. De Gruyter 2016). She is also interested in new methodological approaches – especially in the “material turn” – and she is preparing a volume on the material culture of towns, co-edited with the art historian Susanne Wittekind (Boehlau publishing).
- 2017–2018 - Distinguished Visiting Scholar