The MGH are sad to announce the loss of Prof. Dr Pascal Ladner, who died at the age of 88 on December 23 2021. Pascal Ladner was a personally elected member of the MGH central board of directors since 1980. While his broad spectrum of scholarly interests ranged from the Early Middle Ages to the late-medieval scholastic scholar Heymericus de Campo, he particularly focused on the „Historische Grundwissenschaften“ (a collection of subjects including palaeography, codicology, numismatics, and other disciplines essential for the study of historical source material) and was always actively involved in selecting edition projects for Swiss scholarship programmes.
Pascal Ladner regularly participated in all plenary meetings of the MGH central board of directors with one single exception until 2011, when age made the trip to Munich too strenuous for him. Nevertheless, he continued to follow the progress of current edition projects and did his best to support them. Most recently, in 2021, Pascal Ladner collaborated with Prof. Dr Ernst Tremp to publish an article in Deutsches Archiv, volume 77, entitled „Aus der Welt der Sankt Galler Annalen“. The important Swiss abbey of St. Gall was a subject that had always been of particular interest to him: In 1984, for example, he held a speech at the annual sitting of the MGH and the Historische Kommission at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Arts entitled: „Notker der Dichter im Spiegel seiner Urkunden“, dedicated to the charters written by the St. Gall monk Notker Balbulus.
The Monumenta Germaniae Historica will honour and treasure the memory of Pascal Ladner.
Martina Hartmann
President of the MGH