Bernhard Bischoff
Bernhard Bischoff was a German historian, paleographer, and philologist; he was born in Altendorf, and he died in Munich.
Biography
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. He married Hanne Oehler in 1935 and lived the majority of his life in Bavaria.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 would work on this project until 1972, cataloging Latin manuscripts of the 9th century.
From 1947 until his retirement in 1974, Bischoff held the chair for Medieval Latin Philology at the University of Munich. Here he followed his mentor Lehmann, who himself had succeeded the chair's inaugural holder, Ludwig Traube.
In 1953, Bischoff was elected to the central board of directors of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica and contributed to the Antiquitates series. In the later 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 Latin paleography, specifically in his expertise in dating and localizing early medieval manuscripts. His main work on the subject, Latin Paleography: Antiquity and the Western Middle Ages, remains a standard work in the discipline. It has been translated into English by Dáibhí Ó Cróinín and David Ganz, and into French by Jean Vezin and Harmut Atsma. Bischoff received four degrees honoris causa at the Universities of Dublin, Oxford, Cambridge, and Milan.
He was a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, of the Royal Irish Academy, of the Medieval Academy of America, German Archeological Institute, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.
In 1982 he was awarded the gold medal of the Bibliographical Society. He gave a lecture on the occasion describing his early career and his experiences as a collaborator with E. A. Lowe on compiling the Codices Latini Antiquiores.