Karl Gotthard Lamprecht

Karl Gotthard Lamprecht (February 25, 1856 – May 10, 1915) was a German historian who specialized in German art and economic history.

Biography

Lamprecht was born in Jessen in the Province of Saxony. As a student, he trained in history, political science, economics, and art at the universities of Göttingen, Leipzig, and Münich. Lamprecht taught at the university in Marburg and later at Leipzig, where he founded a center dedicated to comparative world and cultural history (Institut für Kultur- und Universalgeschichte).

Lamprecht was employee at the successful edition project “The Chronicles of the German Cities” under the leadership of the well-known and highly reputated German historian Karl von Hegel.

Lamprecht studied German and European social and economic history, particularly of the Middle Ages. He aroused considerable controversy with his loose interdisciplinary methods and focus on broad social, environmental, and even psychological, questions in history. To him, history meant as much the revelation of sociology as of political events.