Cordelia Hess
Om Cordelia Hess
Born 1977, docent in history. M.A. from Hamburg University in history, theology and Scandinavian languages (2003), PhD from the same university in Medieval and Modern History (2007). 2009-2012, postdoc at Stockholm university, 2013 docent. Since 2012 researcher at the Royal Academy of Letters, Literature and Antiquities (Kungliga Vitterhetsakademien). In recent years research fellow at Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, Tel Aviv University and Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung, Berlin. Since 2014 senior lecturer at the Department of Historical Studies.
Research Activities
My main interest is the interconnection between religion and politics, including the relation between religious majority and minority groups. I am also interested in processes of translation; between different languages, cultural regions and discourses or systems of knowledge. I often focus on the use of history and historical images in contemporary ideologies and political movements. This involves most recently several studies on the history of historiography, mainly in the area of German scholarship of the interwar period and National Socialism and how these scholars created paradigms for medieval population history and cultural history. The geographical focus of my work is on the Middle Low German area and the region that used to be the Teutonic Order’s state during the Middle Ages, Prussia. My research centers around four topics: hagiography, historical semantics, and most recently, Jewish-Christian relations and antisemitism, and late medieval urban conflicts.
My most recent monograph Social Imagery in Middle Low German addresses social metaphors. The purpose of the study is to question the historical narrative whereby the Holy Roman Empire was a homogeneous political construct, as well as to highlight the fact that the changes in the ecclesiastical and secular power relations that took place during the Reformation had their semantic precursor some 50 ̶100 years earlier – at least in the Northern parts of the Empire and in the Baltic region. Besides social ordering within Christian society, the social imagery investigated also draws attention towards its boundaries, here mostly represented by Jews.
Currently, my main project is an exploration of Jewish life in medieval Prussia and a study of the related German historiography. Although there has been substantial research into most aspects of Jewish life and Jewish settlement during the European Middle Ages, Prussia remains largely overlooked. There are two reasons for this: on the one hand, the source material is very limited, and on the other hand, there is a preconception that the German landlords had an active anti-Jewish policy and forbade Jewish settlements. The work of most of the researchers from the late 1800s until National Socialism and also in post-war Germany and Poland supported this thesis. The most influential and comprehensive survey was published in 1937 by Kurt Forstreuter, an archivist at the Staatsarchiv Königsberg who was actively involved in the looting of Polish and Jewish archives in the occupied territories. Forstreuter concluded that the Teutonic Order had functioned as an effective Germanic bulwark ("Bollwerk") against the surrounding Ostjudentum. Despite his undeniably antisemitic perspective, Forstreuter’s assertions about the medieval Jewish communities have never been questioned. My study is not aimed at detecting previously unknown Jewish communities in medieval Prussia, but is going to show that the Teutonic Order did not pursue an active anti-Jewish policy, and that Prussia was an area with comparatively little anti-Jewish propaganda and few conflicts between Christian and Jewish inhabitants.
For a complete list of publications, see Academia
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Antisemitism in the North: History and State of
Research
Jonathan Adams, Cordelia Heß
- 2020-01-01 -
Das Ostprogramm der preußischen
Archivverwaltung
Cordelia Heß
Völkische Wissenschaften : Ursprünge, Ideologien und Nachwirkungen / edited by: Michael Fahlbusch, Ingo Haar, Anja Lobenstein-Reichmann, and Julien Reitzenstein - 2020-01-01 -
Antisemitism in the
North
Jonathan Adams, Cordelia Heß
- 2020-01-01 -
Nordic Otherness. Research on Antisemitism in the Nordic Countries in an International
Context
Cordelia Heß
Antisemitism in the North / edited by: Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß - 2020-01-01 -
Antisemitismus in
Schweden
Cordelia Heß
Europäisches Rundschau - 2019-01-01 -
Volcanic Archives: Towards a Direct Comparison of Pre-Modern and Modern Forms of
Antisemitism
Jonathan Adams, Cordelia Heß
The Medieval Roots of Antisemitism : Continuities and Discontinuities from the Middle Ages to the Present Day / edited by Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Hess. - 2018-01-01 -
Rationaliserade ritualmord: Religiösa antisemitiska stereotyper och debatten kring Aftonbladet
2009
Jonathan Adams, Cordelia Heß
Studier om rasism : tvärvetenskapliga perspektiv på ras, vithet och diskriminering / redaktörer: Tobias Hübinette & Andréaz Wasniowski. - 2018-01-01 -
A Rational Model for Blood Libel: The Aftonbladet
Affair
Jonathan Adams, Cordelia Heß
The Medieval Roots of Antisemitism Continuities and Discontinuities from the Middle Ages to the Present Day edited by Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Hess. - 2018-01-01 -
The Medieval Roots of Antisemitism: Continuities and Discontinuities from the Middle Ages to the Present
Day
Jonathan Adams, Cordelia Heß
- 2018-01-01 -
Medieval Cults and Modern Inventions: Dorothy of Montau, the Teutonic Order and "Katholiken für
Hitler"
Cordelia Heß
Saints and Sainthood Around the Baltic Sea: Identity, Literacy, and Communication in the Middle Ages. Edited by Carsten S. Jensen et al. - 2018-01-01 -
Jewish Life and Books under Scrutiny : Ethnography, Polemics, and
Converts
Cordelia Heß, Jonathan Adams
Revealing the Secrets of the Jews / edited by Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß - 2017-01-01 -
Revealing the Secrets of the Jews. Johannes Pfefferkorn and Christian Writings about Jewish Life and Literature in Early Modern
Europe
Jonathan Adams, Cordelia Heß
- 2017-01-01 -
Jew-Hatred Sells? Anti-Jewish Print Production in the German
Dialects
Cordelia Heß
Revealing the Secrets of the Jews/ edited by Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß - 2017-01-01 -
Forstreuter,
Kurt
Cordelia Heß
Handbuch der völkischen Wissenschaften. Personen - Institutionen - Forschungsprogramme - Stiftungen. Bd. 1. Haar, Ingo; Fahlbusch, Michael (red.) - 2017-01-01 -
Ostprogramm und
Archivraub
Cordelia Heß
Handbuch der völkischen Wissenschaften. Bd. 2 / Michael Fahlbusch, Ingo Haar, Alexander Pinwinkler (Herausgeber) - 2017-01-01 -
The Absent Jews. Kurt Forstreuter and the Historiography of Medieval
Prussia
Cordelia Heß
- 2017-01-01 -
Kommentar zu Jan Weyand, "Zum Wandel des Antisemitismus in der Debatte um die
Judenemanzipation"
Cordelia Heß
EPD Dokumentation / Antisemitismus als politische Theologie. Typologien und Welterklärungsmuster Tagung der Evangelischen Akademie zu Berlin, 24. - 26. Januar 2017 - 2017-01-01 -
Urban Community and Social Unrest. Semantics of Conflict in Fourteenth-Century
Lübeck
Cordelia Heß
Imagined communities on the Baltic Rim from the Eleventh to Fifteenth Centuries / edited by Wojtek Jezierski and Lars Hermanson - 2016-01-01 -
Cordelia Heß: Rezension von: Alastair Minnis: From Eden to Eternity. Creations of Paradise in the Later Middle Ages, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press
2016
Cordelia Heß
Sehepunkte - 2016-01-01 -
Rezension von: Of Kings and Chronicles. National Saints and the Emergence of Nation States in the Early Middle
Ages
Cordelia Heß
H-Soz-Kult - 2016-01-01 -
The Writing on the Barn: Content and Materiality in Contested Documents of Northern German Towns (Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Centuries)
Cordelia Heß
Seminar. A Journal of Germanic Studies - 2016-01-01 -
Fear and Loathing in the North. Jews and Muslims in Medieval Scandinavia and the Baltic
Region
Cordelia Heß, Jonathan Adams
- 2015-01-01 -
Encounters and Fantasies: Muslims, Jews and Christians in the
North
Cordelia Heß, Jonathan Adams
Fear and Loathing in the North Jews and Muslims in Medieval Scandinavia and the Baltic Region / edited by Cordelia Hess, Jonathan Adams. - 2015-01-01 -
Review of Jonathan Adams and Jussi Hanska (eds.), The Jewish-Christian Encounter in Medieval Preaching. New York: Routledge,
2015.
Cordelia Heß
Medieval Sermon Studies - 2015-01-01 -
Rezension von: Donald J. Harreld (ed.): A Companion to the Hanseatic League, Leiden / Boston: Brill
2015
Cordelia Heß
Sehepunkte - 2015-01-01 -
Jews and the Black Death in Fourteenth- Century Prussia: A Search for
Traces
Cordelia Heß
Fear and Loathing in the North / Ed. by Heß, Cordelia / Adams, Jonathan - 2015-01-01 -
"Some short business trips". Kurt Forstreuter and the Looting of Archives in Poland and Lithuania,
1939-1942
Cordelia Heß
Yad Vashem Studies - 2014-01-01 -
Nigra crux mala crux: a comparative perspective on urban conflict in Gdansk in 1411 and
1416
Cordelia Heß
Urban History - 2014-01-01 -
Rezension von: Michael Hohlstein: Soziale Ausgrenzung im Medium der Predigt. Der franziskanische Antijudaismus im spätmittelalterlichen
Italien
Cordelia Heß
Sehepunkte - 2014-01-01 -
Rezension von: Virginia Blanton / Veronica O'Mara / Patrizia Stoop (eds.): Nuns' Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Hull
Dialogue
Cordelia Heß
Sehepunkte - 2014-01-01 -
Otfried Czaika & Heinrich Holtze (red.), Migration und Kulturtransfer im Ostseeraum während der Frühen
Neuzeit
Cordelia Heß
Historisk tidskrift - 2014-01-01