Lutz von Padberg
German historian
Lutz E. von Padberg (22 February 1950 – 16 July 2026) was a German historian whose specialty was medieval history and in particular the Christianization of the Germanic peoples. He was an expert on Saint Boniface, having written biographies of the saint and studies of his veneration.
Life and career
Born in Essen, von Padberg received his doctorate from the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität in Münster in 1980. His habilitation from the University of Paderborn followed in 1993, where he taught until 1999 as Privatdozent. Since 1999 he was a professor of medieval history in Paderborn. From 1986 until 1999 he also taught as a visiting professor at the Evangelical Theological Faculty Leuven, and since 1986 he taught historical theology at the Freie Theologische Hochschule Gießen. Von Padberg retired from teaching in 2013.
Von Padberg's early publications were on theology and feminism as a theological challenge, and since then published extensively on the work of Anglo-Saxon and other missionaries during the Christianization of the Germanic peoples. His Habilitationsschrift, Mission und Christianisierung, was published in 1995 by Franz Steiner Verlag, and is a synthesis of earlier research (especially by Arnold Angenendt and Otto Gerhard Oexle) on the social life of the missionaries and the social consequences of their activities; Von Padberg was praised as profoundly knowledgeable on the matter, and his book as a very useful synthesis with "exciting" interpretations.
He was an expert on the life and work of Saint Boniface, and his Der Ragyndrudis-Codex des hl.
“Lutz von Padberg” enters the record as german historian. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Lutz, Padberg and German can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1878070. VIAF identifies the subject as 116892380. The Library of Congress control number is n78088275. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1950, 2026, 1980 and 1993.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lutz von Padberg” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.