Klaus Zechiel-Eckes

Klaus Zechiel-Eckes (12 May 1959 in Pforzheim – 23 February 2010 in Cologne) was a German historian and medievalist.

Klaus Zechiel-Eckes graduated high school in 1978. From 1979 to 1990 he studied history and Romance and Middle Latin philology in Saarland University and the University of Freiburg. At Freiburg he was a student of Hubert Mordek's. In 1985 he sat the State Examination. In 1990 he received his doctorate in Freiburg in Medieval history with a thesis on the Concordia canonum of Cresconius. In 1998 he completed his habilitation in Freiburg in the fields of Medieval History and the historical sciences, with a focus on Florus of Lyon. He followed this with professorships at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (1999/2000) and the University of Zurich (2002/3). In the winter of 2003/4 he succeeded Tilman Struve as professor of History of the Early and High Middle Ages at the University of Cologne.

His research focused on the political, church and canonical history of the early and high Middle Ages. He also studied intellectual and book history, especially of the Carolingian period, and specialized in the historical sciences, especially codicology. His research, grounded in source and manuscript studies, led to revolutionary discoveries about the origin of the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals, namely that they were assembled at the monastery of Corbie under the direction of Paschasius Radbertus in the later 830s.[1]

From 2007, Zechiel-Eckes was a regular member of the executive board of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica and member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts.