MÜLLER, JOHANNES. - Historian, b. at Schaffhausen on 3 Jan. 1752, d. at Kassel on 11 May 1809.
He was among the first historians who, overcoming Enlightenment hostility toward the “Gothic” age, rediscovered the appeal of the Middle Ages (Reisen der Päpste [1782]). In his masterpiece, the Geschichte der Schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft (1786), he depicts medieval Switzerland as an age of organic Christian civilization.
M., a Protestant and Pietist, still retained the eighteenth-century antipathy toward monks, but he was among the first to portray the medieval papacy as a shaper of civil liberties, although his view arose from a specific and contingent polemic against the state absolutism of his own time.
BIBL.: K. Henking, J. von M., 2 vols., Stoccarda 1909-27; P. Requadt, J. von M. und der Frühhistorismus, Monaco 1929; W. Kirchner, Studien zu einer Darstellung J. V. s., Heidelberg 1931; G. Falco, La polemica sul medio evo, Torino 1933, p. 363 ff.; further bibliography in J. Körner, Bibliographisches Handbuch des deutschen Schrifttums, Berna 1949, p. 341.