Humanities and Social Sciences Colloquium - Immo Warntjes

At the age of 50, Arno Borst, winner of the Balzan Prize and arguably the most influential German medievalist of the 20^th century, laid out a plan of research for the following three decades. His initial idea was to write a biography of Hermann of Reichenau, one of the most original thinkers of the 11^th century. For this he needed to edit Hermann’s writings. This undertaking stalled in 1990, when Borst turned to an investigation of the centuries-long traditions that informed Hermann’s thought. He finished this part of the project in 2006, but died a year later. The 1990 manuscript of Borst’s edition of Hermann’s writings was found among Borst’s papers. I am currently finalizing this project. This talk will introduce the project by principally focusing on the following five aspects:1) how to organize a life’s work; 2) how to deal with the Nachlaß of a scholar, and how to continue someone else’s work; 3) how to write medieval biography; 4) in which language to publish; 5) the problems of editing medieval texts.