Walter Ullmann

Walter Ullmann (29 November 1910 – 18 January 1983 ) was an Austrian-Jewish scholar who left Austria in the 1930s and settled in the United Kingdom, where he became a naturalised citizen.

He was a recognised authority on medieval political thought, and in particular legal theory, an area in which he published prolifically.

Ullmann was the son of a doctor.

He attended the classical languages school in Horn and studied law at Vienna and Innsbruck.

Having a non-Aryan grandfather made it dangerous for him to remain in Austria, so he left for England in 1939 and took up a position at Ratcliffe College, a Roman Catholic boarding school in Leicestershire.

In 1940 he enlisted.

He served for three years, first in the Royal Pioneer Corps and then in the Royal Engineers, before being discharged due to ill health.

After the war he had positions at the University of Leeds, and then from 1949 at the University of Cambridge, becoming a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

He was President of the Ecclesiastical History Society (1969–70).

Notable people who studied under Ullmann include Quentin Skinner, Janet Nelson, and Rosamond McKitterick.

Ullmann principally concerned himself with the history of thought in the mediaeval period and the history of the papacy in the Middle Ages.

His most successful book was The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages, which deals with the relationship between secular and ecclesiastical power in medieval times.

Innsbruck University awarded him an honorary doctorate in political science.

Ullmann has been credited with "historicizing the concept of the political" in a manner that is relevant for several subfields of the humanities and social sciences.

In an entry for Oxford Bibliographies Online, Thomas F. X. Noble and Atria Larson called his study A Short History of the Papacy in the Middle Ages "perhaps the best single-volume history" on the Papacy in the Middle Ages.

He became Professor of Medieval History at Cambridge in 1972, retiring in 1978.