Excellent dissertation

The Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BAdW) awards several prizes at its ceremonial annual meeting. One of these, the Peregrinus Prize, awarded for outstanding work in the humanities, will go to Würzburg lawyer Dr Josef Bongartz in 2025.

Bongartz is being honoured for his dissertation entitled "Gericht und Verfahren in der Stadt und im Hochstift Würzburg. The princely chancellery as the centre of (appellate) jurisdiction until 1618".

"Both his research and his involvement in interdisciplinary networks make a significant contribution to legal history and strengthen the interdisciplinary dialogue between jurisprudence and history," reads the BAdW press release.

Changing court landscape at the transition from the Middle Ages to the early modern period

In his work, Josef Bongartz uses the example of the chancellery of the Würzburg prince-bishops to examine the far-reaching changes in jurisdiction from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period. The focus is on the professionalisation and territorialisation of the courts: proceedings were increasingly conducted in writing, lay judges were replaced by university-educated lawyers and new lines of authority were created through the spread of appeals - i.e. the possibility of appeal - which changed the relationship between the courts.

Josef Bongartz shows the interactions between professionally trained court personnel, the emerging higher jurisdiction and the growing pressure on courts characterised by the late Middle Ages. The work emphasises a dimension of the reception of Roman law that has received little attention to date. At the same time, the conflicts over jurisdiction in the Hochstift of Würzburg reveal the tensions that accompanied the consolidation of territorial rule by the prince-bishops. The Würzburg Chancery Court is the first comprehensive analysis of a hitherto little-researched territorial high court.

Josef Bongartz

Josef Bongartz studied law at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) and the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (Netherlands), specialising in the foundations of law, and also studied philosophy, Catholic theology and public law in his master's degree.

In 2012, he became a research assistant at the Chair of German and European History of Law, Canon Law and Civil Law (Professor Anja Amend-Traut), where - in addition to successfully completing his master's degree - he wrote his dissertation on early modern legal history.

He was also a lecturer at the Chair of Modern History at the University of Würzburg (Professor Anuschka Tischer). In 2020, after his legal clerkship and a period as a research assistant at an international commercial law firm, he joined the higher judicial service of the state of Baden-Württemberg as a judge, where he first worked at the Mosbach public prosecutor's office and then at the Baden-Baden Regional Court. He has been a professor of private and commercial law at Furtwangen University since 1 October 2023 and a post-doctoral candidate at the Faculty of Law at JMU since 2024.