Walter Ullmann

Who was Walter Ullmann?

Walter Ullmann was an Austrian-Jewish scholar, who settled in the United Kingdom after leaving Austria in the late 1930s. He was a recognised authority on medieval political thought, and in particular legal theory, an area in which he published prolifically.

Ullmann was the son of a doctor he attended the classical languages school in Horn and studied law at Vienna and Innsbruck. Having a non-Aryan grandfather made it dangerous for him to remain in Austria, so he left for England in 1939 and took up a position a Catholic boarding school in Leicestershire.

In 1940 he enlisted, and served in the engineering corps for three years before withdrawing due to ill health.

After the war he had positions at the University of Leeds, and then from 1949 at the University of Cambridge. He became Professor of Medieval History, and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1972.

Notable people who studied under Ullman include Janet Nelson.

Ullmann principally concerned himself with the history of thought in the mediaeval period and the history of the Papacy in the Middle Ages.