WERMINGHOFF, ALBERT. - Historian and jurist, b. 3 Aug. 1869 at Wiesbaden, d. 2 Feb. 1923 at Halle.
A pupil of Scheffer-Boichorst in Berlin, from his first work onward (his dissertation on the pawning of the imperial cities of the middle and lower Rhine in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries), he was chiefly interested in the juridical-institutional aspects of medieval history. In 1896 he began his collaboration with the MGH and, with exemplary diligence, edited the Concilia aevi Karolini (1904–1908). Meanwhile he had obtained his habilitation in medieval history at the University of Greifswald, and in 1907 had been appointed full professor at Königsberg. The study of medieval ecclesiastical law naturally led him to write the Geschichte der deutschen Kirchenverfassung im Mittelalter (Hanover 1905; 2nd ed., under the title Verfassungsgeschichte der deutschen Kirche im Mittelalter, Leipzig 1913), still today a fundamental work on the subject. At the same time, together with Stutz, he directed the canon-law section of the Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte. Called to the University of Halle in 1913, he devoted the final years of his life to studies on fifteenth-century Germany. His Ludwig Eyb der Ältere (1919) is in fact an important contribution to the history of humanism in Germany. In 1921 the University of Leipzig invited him to join its faculty, but a serious liver disease, which prevented him from teaching, led to his death. 4