Peter Moraw

Peter Moraw (31 August 1935 – 8 April 2013) was a German historian.

Moraw taught as Professor of Medieval History, German Regional History, and Economic and Social History at the University of Giessen for three decades until his retirement in 2003. His work in the second half of the 20th century considerably influenced German Late Middle Ages research. He is most renowned for his contributions to integrating theory-oriented social sciences and prosopography into medieval research, the turn towards court research oriented towards structural history, and a university history understood as social history. His late medieval volume, From an Open Constitution to a Designed Consolidation of the Propylaea, History of Germany, became a standard work in medieval studies.

Life
Peter Moraw was born on 31 August 1935 in the industrial city of Moravská Ostrava in Czechoslovakia. Following the conclusion of the Second World War, he was compelled to flee his native Czechoslovakia and seek refuge with his parents in Heidelberg. He graduated from high school there in 1955. Like his father, he pursued a degree in history, German, and Latin at the Heidelberg University from 1955 to 1960, to become a teacher. He completed the state examination for teaching at grammar schools in 1960. From 1961 to 1971, he served as a research assistant at the Institute for Franconian-Palatinate History and Regional Studies at the University of Heidelberg. As outlined in a thesis by Bernd Schneidmüller, Moraw's Moravian homeland and his academic socialization in Heidelberg were pivotal in shaping his research interests in the Late Middle Ages. In Heidelberg, Moraw was influenced by Reinhart Koselleck, who opened up the perspective to cross-epochal questions and was open to interdisciplinary methods. Moraw named Werner Conze, Erich Maschke, Ahasver von Brandt, and Hermann Heimpel as the historians who influenced him. He received his doctorate under Fritz Ernst in 1961 at the age of 26 with a thesis on the St. Philipp Abbey in Zell in the Palatinate. Moraw had chosen this small and relatively insignificant abbey because its documents were in the Heidelberg University Archives and therefore on the floor below his study. By the standards of the time, the dissertation had a "classical-land-historical approach". His doctoral supervisor had already passed away by the time his dissertation was published. Moraw reoriented his methodological approach, expanding beyond conceptual history to encompass the history of individuals. He undertook a detailed study of Helmut Berve's Alexanderreich and the early works of the Tellenbach school. These works served as a catalyst for his development of a more nuanced understanding of pre-modern conditions, based on a prosopographical approach.

In the ten years between his dissertation and his habilitation, he was a habilitation fellow of the German Research Foundation (DFG), engaged for the first time with university history, translated central sources on the life and canonization of Hedwig of Silesia, and presented a map of the monasteries and convents with detailed explanations for the Palatinate Atlas of the Palatinate Society for the Advancement of Science. He completed his habilitation in medieval and modern history at the University of Heidelberg in 1971. His habilitation thesis, König, Reich und Territorium im späten Mittelalter (King, Empire and Territory in the Late Middle Ages), which was almost 1,000 typewritten pages long (818 pages of text and 172 pages of notes and bibliography), remained unpublished. Nevertheless, this work provided sufficient material for several pioneering studies in which he examined various aspects, including the councils and the chancellery of King Rupert of the Palatinate or the court, the council and the chancellery of Charles IV. He delivered his habilitation lecture on 17 July 1971, at the University of Heidelberg on the subject of Hessian collegiate churches in the Middle Ages. In 1971, Moraw assumed a position as a deputy professor of medieval history at the Technical University of Darmstadt.

In 1972, he was appointed Professor of General History with a focus on the auxiliary historical sciences at the Bielefeld University, where the history department was dedicated to the theoretical foundations of its own discipline. From the summer semester of 1973, Moraw succeeded František Graus as Professor of Medieval History and German Regional History with a particular emphasis on economic and social history at the University of Giessen. From 1973 to 1980, he collaborated closely with Volker Press, an early modern scholar, at the University of Giessen. At the beginning of the 1980s, Moraw, Press, and the sociologist Helge Pross offered courses at the University of Giessen, a notable occurrence at the time.

He declined appointments to Düsseldorf, Trier (1976) and Tübingen (1981). From 1979 to 1980 and again from 1997 to 1998, he served as Dean of the Department of History. From 1980 to 1981 and again from 1998 to 1999, he held the office of Vice Dean. In 1992, he co-founded and served as the inaugural speaker for the DFG Research Training Group on Medieval and Modern Statehood in Giessen. In 1997, he became a co-founder and project leader for the DFG's Collaborative Research Center on Cultures of Memory at the University of Giessen. He was awarded emeritus status there in the summer semester of 2003. On 23 July 2003, Moraw delivered his valedictory address on the empire in medieval Europe.

Moraw had been married since 1964. The marriage produced two daughters, including the classical archaeologist Susanne Moraw. His wife died in 1997 and due to a long illness, he was no longer able to take part in academic discourse in the last few years before his death on 8 April 2013.

Main research areas
Moraw's research encompassed the constitutional history of the German late Middle Ages, the social history of the Middle Ages, the German regional history of the Middle Ages and modern times, as well as the history of universities and education in the Middle Ages and modern times. He has published nine independent publications and more than 200 essays, handbook articles, and encyclopedia contributions on these topics. Moraw's contributions to the field of German late medieval studies have significantly advanced our understanding of this historically understudied period. From 1987 onwards, Moraw was engaged in the Lexikon des Mittelalters as a co-editor and expert advisor, for which he authored numerous articles on topics including Germany in the Late Middle Ages, Charles IV and the Imperial Diet, and others.

Development of new approaches since the 1970s
Moraw and Volker Press identified a significant deficiency in historical scholarship: the lack of integration between imperial and regional history. In 1977, Moraw proposed a method for addressing this issue: the development of a constitutional-historical territorial grammar. This approach involved identifying and analyzing the recurring situations, constellations, and processes that shape the evolution of political territories. Concerning the "personal relationships," the dynasty, the relationship between the king and the realm on the one hand and the territories on the other, as well as the territorial constitution, there were four aspects under which a "territorial grammar" could be written in the sense of "historical rule or reference systems." Moraw and Press regarded the separate consideration of royal actions and territorial developments as a significant obstacle to grasping the complexity of political processes. Both historians sought to expand the scope of constitutional and political history to encompass social history, thereby replacing the institutional model of the Old Kingdom and its institutions as understood through the lens of older constitutional history with a more nuanced understanding of the late medieval and early modern kingdom. Press and Moraw developed a program for the "structural analysis of the imperial body." Their starting point was that the king and emperor constituted the central legitimizing point of reference in the empire. They argued for placing the "royal/imperial court as the starting and finishing point of reciprocal interactions" at the center of their considerations and wanted a "draft of a political-structural map of the empire from the king." The objective was to combine social and constitutional history by analyzing the institutions of rule (Imperial Diet, Imperial Judiciary, Imperial Church, and Imperial Circles) and their supporters (political leadership groups). The "dualism of the power of kingship [...] and territories" was to be examined in more detail. The core idea of the project was "a constitutional and socio-historical synthesis with the ultimate, probably still distant goal of a unified overall view of the Holy Roman Empire."

Moraw turned away from the study of classical constitutional and administrative history because he believed that institutions were still subordinate to individuals and that offices were shaped by individuals. He also rejected the term "civil servants" and instead referred to those who brought money and power with them into an employment relationship as "co-entrepreneurs." A person who had ties to more than one employer was a "professional politician." Only by researching personal relationships and associations is it possible to make statements about institutions.

From "open constitution" to "designed densification"
In 1989, Moraw published a new, comprehensive account of German history from the 13th to 15th centuries in the "Propylaea History of Germany" series. Since Hermann Heimpel's seminal work, Germany in the Later Middle Ages, which first appeared in 1938 and then again in a new edition in 1957, no single historian had addressed the period as a whole for decades. Moraw described the evolution of the empire from an "open constitution" to a "designed consolidation." He conceptualized the "open constitution" as the "legacy of the defeat of the Hohenstaufen," whereby the institutionalized moment was constrained to a minimum, a select few participated in the power play of the entire empire, and the scope of new challenges to the members of the empire was limited. Moraw posited that the "designed consolidation" was the consequence of the emergence of new challenges at the end of the Middle Ages. These challenges included the rise and consolidation of the Habsburg dynasty and the establishment of the institutionalized dualism of the imperial estates, which culminated in the Imperial Diet. The great dynasty and the estates were now dependent on each other.

Relationship between central and local powers
Moraw published numerous studies on the spatial and power structure of the empire, especially for the time of Charles IV. In 1982, he called for "research into the mechanisms and scope of political rule" in the late medieval empire in order to gain a better understanding. In an essay published in 1987, he wondered "how a great empire could survive when it was administered with so few resources and by so few people. To answer this question, "the mechanical-technical history of administration must be extended to include the methods of historical personal research. At the end of the Middle Ages, the empire was less a "state in the abstract sense of an institutional state" than a polycentric structure of regions with different levels of development and proximity (or distance) to the king. According to Moraw, the empire was divided into three main zones: the hereditary land, landscapes close to the king, and the "vast remainder," which had extremely little to contribute to the royal court. In a finer subdivision, based on the concrete example of two landscapes (Hesse, Franconia), he proceeded from the idea of a "punctual royal court" from which "lines of power" emanated and led to it. He was able to divide the empire into six zones or areas with the territories of the reigning king, the territories of the rival dynasties and the electors, the landscapes close to the king, the landscapes open to the king, and the landscapes distant from the king. In contrast to the work of Eckhard Müller-Mertens, the study of the rulers' itineraries was of secondary importance for Moraw. With regard to Franconia, Moraw defined "proximity to the king" in terms of persons such as "royal servants" and "royal partners". In addition to the zonal model, he made other observations about the structure of the empire. He divided the northern Alpine empire, especially in the second half of the 14th century, into fourteen "largely self-sufficient" regions.

Moraw's point of departure in examining the history of territories and regions was the perspective of kingship. In several essays, he showed that late medieval kingship could not encompass all of the empire's landscapes equally. Moraw divided the empire into different zones with landscapes "close to the king" and "distant from the king. By "close to the king" Moraw meant "Franconia with Nuremberg as its capital, the Middle Rhine-Upper Main region with Frankfurt, parts of Swabia temporarily centered in Augsburg, and, to a lesser extent, the Middle Elbe-Saale region. For him, the "Upper Rhine and, to a lesser extent, the Lower Rhine" were "open to the king. He considered the "territories of the rival great dynasties and the non-royal electors" to be "politically distant from the king. The northern third of the empire and the Romanesque west and southwest were geographically distant from the king.

In his 1987 essay "On Developmental Differences and Developmental Equalization in the German and European Middle Ages," Moraw advocated a developmental model of a west–east and south–north cultural divide. According to Moraw, the interface ran through the medieval empire. Germania Slavica, which was largely located on the Baltic Sea, was particularly disadvantaged. Only at the end of the Middle Ages was a certain balance achieved. In this essay he also developed a model for understanding the different stages of development in Europe. The criteria were the influences of Roman antiquity, which had a decisive impact on southern and western Europe ("older Europe"), while in areas such as central, northern, and eastern Europe ("younger Europe") they were absent or at best had only sparse effects. The concept was usually used as a pair of terms to describe something along the lines of Moraw. The model has also been used to try to explain differences between European universities.

Moraw argued for a greater inclusion of dynastic thought in the study of late medieval constitutional and social history. He characterized dynastic action as an essential part of political action. In a statement formulated in 1983, Moraw made clear the importance of the dynasty for the political-social order: "The king also acted first according to dynastic considerations and only then thought about his territories and his empire." Moraw divided the individual dynasties into "great dynasties," "secondary powers," "middle powers," and principalities with little or no political leeway. This classification was criticized by Karl-Heinz Spiess because of the difficulty of measuring the "capacity to act" factor. Moraw sympathized with great dynasties and centralizing tendencies. For him, the great dynasties were the "decisive forces in German history. In contrast, the period from the interregnum to the beginning of the second quarter of the fourteenth century was for him a phase of "relative stagnation in constitutional development. For Moraw, the late medieval rulers of this period, from Rudolf of Habsburg to Henry VII, were "small kings" by European standards. "For they did not belong to a powerful dynasty with an old royal tradition, their position of power in the empire was modest, and their means of rule [...] were relatively underdeveloped and hardly 'modern.' They could do little or nothing to change the existing political conditions on a large scale. He characterized Sigismund's reign as one of "exertion and excessive demands. For Moraw, the princes were mostly underpowered and had little or no room for maneuver within the late medieval imperial structure.

Moraw held the person and "strong reign" of Charles IV in high esteem. For him, Charles IV was the "greatest ruler of the German late Middle Ages" and his reign a "high point of late medieval royal power. His chancellery was also a high point in the administrative history of the late medieval empire.

Court and Imperial Diet research
Moraw used prosopography in his research to understand the social rules of clientelism and patronage, kinship and friendship in late medieval chancelleries and courts. In his view, kingship should be interpreted in terms of its individuals and their relationships rather than its institutions. In a personal history of the court of the Roman-German kings from Rudolf of Habsburg to Frederick III, Moraw identified 230 learned jurists.

Friedrich Battenberg's dissertation, published in 1974, led to a research discourse with Moraw on the degree of institutionalization of the court and its dependence on the king, first in personal letters and then in research articles. In his study of the court chancellery, Battenberg argued that the court had become largely independent of the king by 1430 at the latest, due to a high degree of professionalization. Moraw considered the idea that part of the court organization had pursued an independent policy against the interests of the sovereign to be too modern and therefore anachronistic.

From the 1980s, research on the Imperial Diet became a focus of Moraw's academic work. In his essay on the Origins of the Imperial Diet, published in 1980, he historicized the History of Imperial Assemblies. These took on an institutional form only in the last third of the 15th century. According to Moraw, it is possible to speak of an imperial diet from the 70s or 80s of the 15th century at the earliest. The term itself does not appear in sources before 1495. Moraw called for a critical examination of the compiled source material for the edition of the imperial dietary records of the 15th century (the so-called Older Series). He argued that the Great Edition "created the Imperial Diet in the first place, or at least consolidated it. Moraw thus attempted to equalize the phenomenon of the "Reichstag" and to create an awareness that the edition of the Imperial Diet Records was a scholarly product. Some of the sessions presented as Reichstag in the edition were later downgraded by scholars.

Moraw made fundamental contributions to the study of the German royal court in the late Middle Ages. His merit lies in the fact that he repeatedly pointed out that medieval imperial assemblies are not to be equated with modern representative bodies and that the Imperial Diet at the end of the 15th century was still a court day (curia), i.e. a meeting of the king with his faithful, which differed from the daily court of the ruler in its festive and public character. The double conference he organized for the Constance Working Group in 1992/93, German Royal Court, Court Diet and Imperial Diet in the Late Middle Ages (12th-15th centuries), was "primarily concerned with constitutional history and then also with social history, and only to a much lesser extent with literary and cultural history. The focus of interest was on questions of "the functional network of effects, the processes of the modernization of rule, the significance of the legal legitimation potential and the integrative power of the court and the imperial diet in the cultural-political sense. Moraw contributed a paper on the court of Charles IV. For Moraw, in contrast to older scholarship, the court was no longer the central political authority, but rather the ruler's court mutated into the "most important emanation of the medieval sovereign in our cultural sphere and at the same time his decisive sphere of life and action, without which he could not exist"; the court was the "most essential core area of extended public existence.

University history
Moraw was considered an expert in the history of the university, to which he devoted more than five decades. His dissertation already touched on the history of the university. After the Reformation, the Palatine monastery of St. Philipp zu Zell had contributed to the financial endowment of Heidelberg University. His first independent publication on university history was published in 1961 on the Heidelberg Faculty of Philosophy, and his last publication was a final commentary on the conference of the Society for the History of Universities and Science, published in 2007. As an academic teacher, he supervised nine doctoral dissertations and two postdoctoral theses on university history.

Until the 1940s, research had attempted to describe and depict the functioning of individual universities on the basis of legal sources. In contrast to earlier scholarship, Moraw focused on individuals rather than institutions. By paying more attention to socio-historical aspects, he gained new insights into the late medieval and early modern university. On the occasion of the 575th anniversary of the University of Heidelberg, he and Theodor Karst published an article on the relationship between the University of Heidelberg and Neustadt an der Haardt. In this study, Moraw was the first to reveal a social and personal network between an educational institution and a town community. The study was based on a list of Neustadt students and thus on a serial source. This type of source was hardly considered by historians at the time.

In an essay published in the Giessen University Papers in 1975, he argued for greater consideration of social history in university history research. His approach was based on personal and social history data. A sufficiently large and well-defined group of people is studied in their respective political, social, and cultural contexts. He was an early adopter of the social science approaches to university history of Lawrence Stone, Jacques Le Goff, and Jacques Verger, who had considered the interrelationships between society, university, and education earlier than German-speaking scholars. For Moraw, universities were "nodes of personal relations.

The 375th anniversary of the University of Giessen in 1982 provided the impetus for a more intensive and continuous study of the university's history. His Kleine Geschichte der Universität Gießen (1607-1982), first published in 1982 and in a second edition in 1990, is still the only comprehensive account of Giessen's university history. In this work he also paid more attention to social history. For this monograph, he was awarded the Justus Liebig University Prize in 1983 for his work on the history of the University of Giessen. Moraw always understood the history of universities in a cross-epochal way. In 1982 he distinguished three dimensions of university history research (institutional, scientific, and environmental). In an essay published in 1983, he argued that the university should be "emphatically placed in its environment" and that a "social history of the university" should be developed. He exemplified this in the late Middle Ages by examining the relationship between the University of Heidelberg and the court of the Count Palatine and the social relationship between the university and the city of Heidelberg.

Moraw was one of the foremost experts on the history of Charles University in Prague, to which he devoted a large number of works. In 1986, he published an account of the main features of the history of Prague University from its foundation in 1347/48 to 1417/19 with a focus on constitutional and social history. He studied the Prague Faculty of Law from the perspective of constitutional and social history. He has also studied other German and Central European universities. Together with Rainer Christoph Schwinges he initiated the Repertorium Academicum Germanicum. From 2001 to 2019, this research project will record 64,000 scholars of the Old Kingdom between 1250 and 1550 at the two workplaces in Giessen and Bern, with as complete a curriculum vitae as possible. The project aims to combine institutional history (universities and administrations) with social and cultural history (origins, studies, social networks) and with the history of science (learning content and knowledge transfer) in order to obtain as accurate a picture as possible of scholars in pre-modern society.

Collegiate churches
His dissertation on St. Philipp Abbey in Zell was his first contribution to collegiate churches. In five sections he dealt with the foundation, the internal conditions, the external conditions, the ownership and the end of the abbey. The work was well received by the experts. In 1964 and 1965, two essays were published in the Archive for Middle Rhine Church History as direct offshoots of his dissertation. One essay, on 28 printed pages, dealt with the difficult situation of the small collegiate monastery of St. Fabian in Hornbach. The other essay on patronage research was inspired by the naming of several patrons for the monastery of St. Philipp in Zell. Moraw investigated the problem of multiple patrocinia and was able to show that when different patrons were named, it could be assumed that there were multiple patrocinia and not changes of patrocinia. Subsequently, he continued the research focus established in his dissertation by developing comparative research approaches and critical reviews, rather than through further monastic monographs. As an academic teacher, he only supervised one monograph as a dissertation.

In 1977 and 1980, Moraw published programmatic essays on the Hessian and German collegiate churches in typological, chronological, and geographical terms. In his attempt at a typology of the German collegiate church in the Middle Ages, he summarized the numerous studies on individual collegiate churches. According to Moraw, monasticism, episcopacy, and the secular structure of government were the three main forces that decisively determined the institution of the collegiate church. He also distinguished three types of collegiate foundations (monastic collegiate churches, episcopal collegiate foundations, and lay foundations). Moraw emphasized that "the most important research goal" is to study the collegiate church as a central "place of encounter between church and world" in its transformation from the 9th to the 16th century. However, a canonical or church-historical approach to the object of study could be largely dispensed with. Chronologically, Moraw distinguished three "foundation periods". The "Carolingian-pre-Germanic period" lasted from 816 to 900, with a break around 900 due to the general crisis. The "early German-archaic" period lasted from the middle of the 10th to the third quarter of the 11th century and was closely linked to the so-called Ottonian-Salian imperial church system. The "Old European-territorial phase" began in the 13th century and lasted until the Reformation. Moraw also showed that collegiate churches and their endowments could serve as a "Leitfossil" for "the general level of socio-economic development" in Germany and throughout Europe.

Hessian state history
Moraw's work on Hessian regional history was primarily intended to clarify overarching questions. He pursued regional history from the perspective of kingship. Here, too, the functioning of the Holy Roman Empire was the focus of his research. Moraw thus changed his perspective and looked from the kingdom to the territory rather than from the territory or region to the king. The focus was on political-social structures rather than on the population and its environment. He was only peripherally involved in areas of regional history such as settlement research, road research, or linguistic history.

The Landgraviate of Hesse was therefore of particular interest to Moraw for the development of his theoretical concepts. He integrated regional historical findings into an overarching model. In his essay on Hesse and German kingship, he argued that the landgraviate of Hesse was distant from the kings. However, his models were based more on the research of other historians than on his own source work. According to Christine Reinle, Moraw's works on the history of the country show a low density of sources. He also did not initiate any editions of regional history, but he supervised numerous works in the field of Hessian regional history. Moraw was instrumental in organizing the Hessian State Exhibition Hesse and Thuringia in 1992. He gave numerous lectures on topics of Hessian regional history for the Hessian Broadcasting Corporation, the Upper Hessian Historical Society, or at a celebration of the 750th anniversary of the separation of Hesse from Thuringia in connection with the 100th anniversary of the Commission for Hesse.

Journal for Historical Research
From 1974 he was one of the co-editors of the then newly founded Journal of Historical Research. The journal's editorial board opted for a new model of periodization. The late Middle Ages were separated from traditional medieval studies and combined with the early modern period to form an "Old European Era" (roughly 12th to 18th or early 19th centuries), from which an "Archaic Middle Ages" (up to the 11th/12th centuries) and an "Industrial Era" (18th/19th centuries) were to be distinguished. Moraw was responsible for the Late Middle Ages and was in charge of this area for more than two decades. Already in the first volume, with his review of selected essays and lectures by Alfons Lhotsky, he established the journal's commitment to the late Middle Ages. Moraw also left his mark on the journal by including issues of personal history. This happened especially in the second volume, where he commented on personal research and German kingship and, together with Volker Press, presented the program of the new DFG research focus Problems of the Social and Constitutional History of the Holy Roman Empire in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period, 13th-18th Century. He made a special contribution to the development of the review section. His last reviews appeared in 1993 in volume 20 of the Journal of Historical Research.

Residences Commission
Hans Patze had initiated the large-scale residences project at the Göttingen Academy of Sciences in the early 1980s. In a 1991 programmatic review of the first volume of the Residences Research series, Moraw criticized the Residences Commission's approach to topography and material culture, which had been shaped by Patze. Moraw called for the Residences program to focus on the question of what "can be called the center of action or even the center of legitimation of the older polity, and on which all those strands that make up the late medieval 'state' constitution converge. It was not the residence, but dynasties and courts that were to be researched more intensively. In response to Moraw's criticism, the Residence Commission placed court research on an equal footing with residence research in 1991. Because of his critical opinion, his personal involvement in the Ansbach symposium on everyday life at court (1992), and the conference on the royal court at Reichenau that he organized, he was asked by the Residence Commission to play an active role and was elected a member in October 1992. He summarized the 1994 Potsdam symposium on ceremonial and space and the 1996 Sigmaringen symposium on courts and court orders. He improved the Heidelberg volume of Residence Research. He contributed the article on King Ruprecht of the Palatinate to the Handbook.

Constance working group
After attending his first conferences and giving three lectures on Reichenau, Moraw was co-opted into the Constance Working Group on Medieval History in 1983. After his election he participated regularly in the conferences with few exceptions. In the fall of 1992 and spring of 1993, he organized the double conference German Royal Court, Court Diet and Imperial Diet in the Late Middle Ages (12th-15th centuries) for the Constance Working Group. In 1994, he was elected as the successor of Harald Zimmermann. Under his chairmanship, the conferences became more open to young scholars. He also suggested that suggestions for conference topics could come from outside the working group and that academic trends should be taken up more quickly. As chairman of the working group, he organized a conference on the topic of spatial recording and spatial perception in the Late Middle Ages (12th to 15th centuries). He made the spatial turn, which had not yet been widely accepted as a research trend, at least in Germany, a fruitful topic for the working group at an early stage. Under his chairmanship, a new conference venue had to be found. The Hotel Kaiserpfalz in Reichenau-Mittelzell was the meeting place for medieval historians for about four decades until the lease was terminated. Together with Traute Endemann, Moraw was able to secure the Archdiocese of Freiburg's family resort on the southern shore of Lake Constance as a new conference venue. The first conference was held there in the spring of 1997.

In the autumn of 2001, together with Rudolf Schieffer, he organized the conference The German-speaking Medieval Studies in the 20th Century on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the foundation of the Constance Working Group for Medieval Studies. He contributed a paper on German and German-language medieval studies from 1945 to 1970. He cited the increased focus on the late Middle Ages as a major achievement of medieval studies. Moraw last attended a conference organized by Werner Maleczek in the spring of 2003. For health reasons, he was unable to attend conferences of the Reichenau Working Group during the last decade of his life.

Regesta Imperii
Moraw's motivation to work on the Regesta Imperii stemmed from his personal history questions and a departure from a purely kingship-oriented approach. These made him believe that a "completion, revision, and continuation of the Regesta Imperii" was objectively and methodologically necessary. Paul-Joachim Heinig sees Moraw's institutional merits in the establishment of the registers Friedrichs III. by establishing a cooperation project with Evamaria Engel at the Central Institute for History of the German Academy of Sciences at Berlin in 1988 and securing the "institutional future" of this project after the end of the GDR "within the framework of the academy landscape" in the newly founded Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW). As a full member of the BBAW, he was also responsible for this department and was elected a member of the German Registers Commission as a delegate of the BBAW in 1996. He supported a "coordinated new edition of the Regesta Imperii of Charles IV". In the medium term, he also advocated the linking of all Regesta Imperii files.

Awards and memberships
Moraw received numerous scientific awards and memberships for his research. Moraw became a member of many influential scholarly organizations. He was a corresponding member of the Palatinate Society for the Promotion of Science (1972), a member of the Hessian Historical Commission (1973), a corresponding member of the Commission for Historical Regional Studies in Baden-Württemberg (1979), a member of the Association for Constitutional History (1981) and its vice-chairman from 1989 to 1997, a member of the Collegium Carolinum Munich (1984), and a member of the Medieval Study Group of the Herzog August Library, full member of the Historical Commission of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (1987), full member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences (1996), member of the Commission for Research into the Culture of the Late Middle Ages of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, member of the Historical Commission for Silesia (1996), corresponding member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences (1997).

Since 1995 he has been a member of the Commission for the Editing of the Regesta Imperii at the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz. Moraw was also a member of the Constance Working Group for Medieval History from 1983 and its chairman from 1994 to 1998. From 1986 to 1994 he was a reviewer for the German Research Foundation (DFG). The Sudeten German Academy of Sciences and Arts elected him a full member of the humanities class in 1980. In 1993 Moraw became a member of the Academia Europaea. In 1998, the University of Prague awarded him the Medal of Honor on the occasion of its 650th anniversary. In the same year, Moraw became a member of the Central Directorate of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica and remained a member until 2006. In 1999 he received an honorary doctorate from the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. The Upper Hessian Historical Society made him an honorary member in 2007.

Scientific repercussions
In the field of medieval studies, the German history of the Late Middle Ages was previously regarded as an era characterized by the collapse of statehood at the imperial level. However, the constitutional and social history research of Peter Moraw and Ernst Schubert led to a shift in interest and thus a reassessment. Moraw's students produced major studies on Sigmund's political system, the court of Frederick III, and university visitors in the late medieval empire for further research into the Late Middle Ages. This new interest in the Late Middle Ages was also accompanied by a shift in perspective, moving away from the traditional image of decline. Instead, the historical development of the Late Middle Ages is now understood as a process of progress and "modernizing condensation." Moraw had described the "densification" of the late Middle Ages primarily in institutional terms at the Royal Court, Court Diet, and Imperial Diet. More recent studies have expanded upon this term, applying it to princely practices of celebrating festivals, waging wars, or courtly dress practices.

In terms of personal history, Moraw's suggestions have been "most successfully" implemented in the collegiate church research of Gerhard Fouquet for the Speyer cathedral chapter and the collegiate monastery of St. Michael in Pforzheim. In his two-volume work on the Speyer cathedral chapter in the late Middle Ages, published in 1987, Fouquet wants to investigate "the effective social and political network of relationships in Speyer" and "ask about its continuities and discontinuities. The question is "about the fields of reference of the corporations supporting the individual imperial churches (cathedral and collegiate chapters), about their social parent groups, about the influence of territorial constellations, possibly of educational institutions, and about the effect of such structures on the election of bishops and prelates. Oliver Auge continued Moraw's approach in his dissertation. Moraw's suggestions had an influence far beyond the field of collegiate studies. In contrast to Moraw, who saw collegiate churches primarily as "places where the church and the world met," Guy P. Marchal and Michael Borgolte emphasized the importance of the internal development of the abbeys. According to Borgolte, Moraw's view needs to be complemented by "a history that emphasizes the self-image and religious tasks of the canons". In contrast to Moraw, Marchal did not see the collegiate chapters as externally determined, but as the "entrepreneurial institution par excellence".

The model of "close to the king," "distant from the king," and "open to the king" became the dominant doctrine for describing the political structure of the late medieval empire. It has also been applied to the early modern period. Paul-Joachim Heinig has modified the thesis of the distance of the landgraves of Hesse from the king for the time of Landgrave Ludwig I. A further study has shown that Moraw's model cannot be sufficiently applied to political practice for the period around 1470, since a person could be "close to the king" and then "distant from the king" again, depending on the situation. Moraw's idea of a west–east and south–north cultural divide in the empire and Europe is widely accepted in research. Oliver Auge has modified this view for the Baltic region on the basis of early urban centers, the monastic system, and the Hanseatic trade.

Moraw's comments on the "smallness" of late medieval German kings, especially in the case of Rupert of the Palatinate, continue to influence research to this day. Heinz Thomas challenged the characterization of Rudolph of Habsburg as a "small king". Oliver Auge focused his research on the "minor" princes, who have received little attention in research, and, in the case of Ruprecht of the Palatinate, on a "minor" king. He was able to show that "minor" princes could also be important in the history of the Holy Roman Empire.

Moraw's work From Open Constitutions to Designed Compacts: The Empire in the Late Middle Ages 1250-1490 is considered by experts to be one of the best accounts of the period. Moraw's thesis of the consolidation of the late medieval German empire was confirmed by Oliver Auge (2009) in his study of the southern Baltic region from the mid-12th century to the early Reformation. According to a 2016 thesis by early modern historian Georg Schmidt, Moraw's concept of "condensation" was intended to show that "German development was delayed compared to the West, but not fundamentally different". According to Schmidt, the process of "condensation" ended with the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, "a structure of complementary multi-level statehood.

Moraw's socio-historical approach became established in historical scholarship. He also played a significant role in the renewed intensity of research on the court in recent decades. Moraw's understanding of the imperial court not as an institution but as a social structure has been further deepened by more recent scholarship. More recent scholarship on the Imperial Diet is essentially based on Moraw's constitutional and social-historical reflections on the origins of the late medieval Imperial Diet. This research has led to a departure from the anachronistic orientation towards modern parliamentary institutions and has opened up the prospect of a more appropriate description of the forms of action and communication. A number of studies, such as those by Gabriele Annas and Thomas Michael Martin, have examined the functioning of the imperial assemblies and attempted to locate their significance within the constitutional structure of the late medieval empire. One result of these research activities is the prosopographical analysis of the assemblies in the 14th and 15th centuries. In his 1993 study of the period from 1314 to 1410, Thomas Martin emphasized the variety of conference types and, in addition to court days, spoke of "council days" as days without a king and with the participation of the royal family.

In university and academic history, socio-historical research has received increased attention in recent decades. The works of Rainer Christoph Schwinges, Sylvia Paletschek, and Marian Füssel have demonstrated that the university functions as a site of social relations. The "cultural-historical dimension", i.e. the representation of universities and scholars through symbols, rituals, and public acts, is considered a fourth dimension in contemporary university historiography. According to Matthias Asche, Peter Moraw had already "mentally prepared" this dimension in the 1970s and 1980s. In 2008, 18 of his works on university history published since 1982 were published in a single volume.

In January 2014, the conference State and Perspectives of the Social and Constitutional History of the Roman and German Empire: Peter Moraw's Impact on the German Mediaeval Studies took place in Gießen at Moraw's memorial. The conference papers were edited by Christine Reinle in 2016. Bernd Schneidmüller saw at the conference the insistence on social, structural, and constitutional history in the Journal of Historical Research as an obstacle to methodological innovation. The turn towards "cultural-historical Renaissance research" and later "turns" unfolded outside the Journal of Historical Research. Schneidmüller credited Johannes Kunisch and, above all, Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, but not Peter Moraw, with the "consistent opening" of the journal "to topics in cultural studies. The new periodization of the entire first editorial board of the Journal of Historical Research into an archaic Middle Ages, a long epoch of ancient Europe, and the modern industrial world did not prevail in historical scholarship. The epochal concept of Ancient Europe, still new in 1974, has long been controversial among historians. Only two of the 229 articles published in the Journal of Historical Research between 1974 and 2011 include the term in their titles.

Publications (selection)
Essay collections


 * Collected contributions to German and European university history. Structures – Persons – Developments (= Education and society in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Vol. 31). Brill, Leiden et al. 2008, ISBN 978-90-04-16280-8.
 * Rainer Christoph Schwinges (Ed.): On King and Empire. Essays on the German constitutional history of the late Middle Ages. Essays on the occasion of Peter Moraw's 60th birthday on August 31, 1995. Thorbecke, Sigmaringen 1995, ISBN 3-7995-7076-4.

Monographies


 * A brief history of the University of Giessen from its beginnings to the present day. 2nd edition. Ferber, Giessen 1990, ISBN 3-927835-00-5.
 * From an Open Constitution to a Structured Consolidation. The Empire in the late Middle Ages 1250 to 1490 (= Propylaea History of Germany. Volume 3). Propyläen Publisher, Frankfurt am Main 1989, ISBN 3-548-04792-0.
 * With Theodor Karst: The University of Heidelberg and Neustadt an der Haardt (= Publications on the history of the town and district of Neustadt an der Weinstraße. Volume 3). Published by the Historical Society of the Palatinate, Speyer 1963.
 * The monastery of St. Philipp in Zell in der Pfalz. A contribution to medieval Church History (= Heidelberg Publications on Regional History and Regional Studies. Publication series of the Institute for Franconian-Palatinate History and Regional Studies. Volume 9). Winter, Heidelberg 1964 (also: Heidelberg, university, dissertation, 1961).

Editorships of anthologies


 * with Rudolf Schieffer: German-language Medieval Studies in the 20th Century (= Lectures and Research. Vol. 62). Thorbecke, Ostfildern 2005, ISBN 3-7995-6862-X (digitized version).
 * Space Survey and Spatial Awareness in the Later Middle Ages (= Lectures and Research. Vol. 49). Thorbecke, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-7995-6649-X (digitized version)
 * German Royal Court, Court Day and Imperial Diet in the Later Middle Ages (= Lectures and Research. Vol. 48). Thorbecke, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-7995-6648-1 (digitized version)
 * Acculturation and Self-assertion: Studies on the History of the Development of the Lands between the Elbe/Saale and Oder rivers in the Late Middle Ages (= Reports and Papers. Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Special Volume 6). Academy Publishing House, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-05-003557-9.
 * Regional Identity and Social Groups in the German Middle Ages (= Journal for Historical Research. Supplement. Volume 14). Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1992, ISBN 3-428-07472-6.
 * The Geographical World View around 1300. Politics in the Field of tension between Knowledge, Myth and Fiction (= Journal of Historical Research. Supplement. Volume 6 = German Historians' Conference. Volume 36). Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-428-06613-8.
 * ""Alliance systems" and "Foreign Policy" in the Later Middle Ages" (= Journal of Historical Research. Supplement. Vol. 5). Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-428-06456-9.
 * Travelling in the Late Middle Ages (= Journal of Historical Research. Supplement. Vol. 1). Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1985, ISBN 3-428-05918-2.
 * with Hans Georg Gundel, Volker Press: Academia Gissensis: Contributions to the Older University History of Giessen (= Publications of the Historical Commission for Hesse. Volume 45). 2 parts. Elwert, Marburg 1982, ISBN 3-7708-0734-0.

Editorships of series and journals


 * Journal for Historical Research, 1974 ff; Supplements 1985 ff.
 * Contributions to the Social and Constitutional History of the Old Reich, 1977 ff.
 * Propylaea History of Germany in 9 volumes, 1983 ff.
 * Lexikon des Mittelalters 1987 ff., from vol. 4, Munich / Zürich 1989
 * New German History in 10 volumes, Munich 1984 ff.
 * Studia Giessensia, 1990 ff.
 * Research on Medieval History N. F., 1998 ff.