FUNK, PHILIPP. – Historian, born on 26 June 1884 at Wasseralfingen (Württemberg), died on 14 January 1937 at Freiburg im Breisgau. He entered the seminary of Rottenburg; he did not, however, pursue an ecclesiastical career. Having left the seminary, and taken up with reformist ideas, he was drawn to modernism, and in 1910 assumed the direction of the official organ of the German modernists.
As a historian, he first made his mark in 1909 with a study on Cardinal Giacomo da Vitry (Jakob von Vitry, Leben und Werke, Leipzig 1909). Professor at Braunberg in 1927, two years later he succeeded H. Finke in the chair of medieval history at Freiburg im Breisgau. From 1929 he directed the Historisches Jahrbuch.
BIBL.: W. Kosch, Das katholische Deutschland, 1. Augsburg 1932, cols. 898–90; I. Seidel, P. F. zum Gedächtnis, in Historisches Jahrbuch, 57 (1937), pp. 1–15. Silvio Furlani