Bernhard Bischoff

Bernhard Bischoff (20 December 1906 – 17 September 1991) was a German historian, paleographer, and philologist; he was born in Altendorf (administrative division of Altenburg, Thuringia), and he died in Munich.

He was the son of Emil Bischoff and Charlotte von Gersdorff, who died giving birth to him.

He received a Pietistic education during his youth.

Before he earned his doctorate in 1933, under the direction of Paul Lehmann, he was recruited by the American paleographer E. A. Lowe as an assistant for the Codices Latini Antiquiores.

He married Hanne Oehler in 1935 and lived the majority of his life in Bavaria outside of academia.

He began to teach at the University of Munich in 1947, receiving the Chair of Medieval Latin Philology under his instructor, Lehmann, succeeding Ludwig Traube.

In 1953, Bischoff was elected to the general editorship of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH).

He was a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (1956), of the Royal Irish Academy (1957), of the Medieval Academy of America (1960), German Archeological Institute (1962), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1968), and the American Philosophical Society (1989).

Bischoff received four degrees honoris causa at the Universities of Dublin (1962), Oxford (1963), Cambridge, and Milan.

He would work on this achievement until 1972, cataloging Latin manuscripts of the 9th century.

In 1974 he became emeritus.

In the last years of his life, he worked on cataloging nearly 7,000 9th-century medieval Latin manuscripts, published by the Bavarian Academy of Sciences.

Bischoff was most influential in the field of paleography, specifically in his expertise in dating and localizing medieval manuscripts.

His work on the subject, Latin Paleography: Antiquity and the Western Middle Ages, is a fundamental work for the discipline.

It has been translated into English by Daíbí Ó Cróinín and David Ganz, and into French by Jean Vezin and Harmut Atsma.