2006 Hubert Wolf

Professor of Medieval and Modern Church History / Münster, Germany

Born in Wört in 1959, Hubert Wolf is one of the leading church historians in Germany. He studied catholic theology at the Eberhard Karls University Tübingen and the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. After graduating in 1983, he continued his education in the seminary. He was ordained a priest in 1985 and worked in his home diocese of Rottenburg-Stuttgart until 1990. After completing his doctorate and habilitation at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, he became professor at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main in 1992. Since then he has been researching the rich archive holdings of the Roman Inquisition and the Index Congregation, although they were not yet accessible at that time. In the same year he was appointed to the international scientific advisory board of the Archives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Wolf's book "Die Nonnen von Sant'Ambrogio" met with great public interest and ended up in 2013 on the non-fiction list of the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the Norddeutsche Rundfunk in 1st place. His DFG-long-term project "Roman Inquisition and Index Congregation" is closely related to Gutenberg's invention, since the letterpress printing introduced a whole new dimension to the issue of censorship. Therefore, in 2006, the theologian received the Gutenberg Prize of the City of Mainz and the International Gutenberg Society for his research on the papal book censorship and for his development work in the Roman archives.