Heiko Oberman papers

Heiko Augustinus Oberman (1930-2001) was an acclaimed scholar and educator who made significant contributions to the study of the Reformation and late Medieval and Renaissance history. He was Regents Professor at the University of Arizona and recipient of the Heineken Prize for History in 1996, the highest award for the field.

Oberman was born in the city of Utrecht, the Netherlands on October 15, 1930. He graduated with a doctoral degree in Historical Theology from the University of Utrecht in 1957. He then joined the faculty at the Harvard Divinity School in Church History in 1958, where he was promoted quickly to full professor in 1963 and held the Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History. Oberman left Harvard in 1966 for the University of Tübingen, in Germany where he was a chair in the Theology Department and later Director of the Institute for Late Middle Ages and Reformation Research. He was also an observer at the four sessions of the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II), 1962-1965.

In 1984 Oberman joined the History department at the University of Arizona and founded the Center for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies. Amongst his many accomplishments was launching the annual Town and Gown and Summer Lecture Series which drew upon Oberman's extensive network of colleagues and brought many of Europe and North America's leading scholars to Tucson.

Professor Oberman is a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, and Corresponding fellow of the British Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received honorary degrees from Harvard University, the University of St. Louis and the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. In 1991 he was chosen as a member of the American Philosophical Society. He was author or editor of thirty books and some hundred articles. Oberman is particularly known for his prize-winning study The Harvest of Medieval Theology (Harvard University Press, 1963) and for his Luther: Man Between God and the Devil (English version, Yale University Press, 1982), for which he received the German Historischer Sachbuchpreis for "the most significant history book during the decade 1975-1985." Coincident with the diagnosis of his terminal illness, it was announced that a distinction for extraordinary representation of Dutch scholarship and culture would be conferred on Heiko Oberman by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands in April 2002.

Heiko Oberman passed away on April 22, 2001 from melanoma. In 2010 Oberman’s extensive personal library was transferred to the University of Arizona Libraries. The collection, nearly 10,000 volumes, centers on the late Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Reformation.