Head of HEDIT

Ludger Lieb (born in 1967, five children) studied German language and literature and philosophy at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and at the College of Philosophy SJ in Munich. He received his doctorate from LMU Munich in 1995 with a thesis on the most comprehensive collection of fables from the 16th century (Burkard Waldis, Esopus). From 1995 to 2004, he was a research assistant at the Institute of German Studies at the Technical University of Dresden (chair of Prof. Dr. Peter Strohschneider), interrupted in 1999/2000 by a one-year research stay in Oxford. In 2003, he completed his habilitation at the Technical University of Dresden with a thesis on repetitions in the first German Arthurian novel (Hartmann von Aue's Erec). After several chair substitutions in Paderborn, Munich and Dresden, he was appointed professor of early German literature at Christian Albrecht University in Kiel in 2008. 

Ludger Lieb has been Professor of Old German Philology at Heidelberg University since 2010. From 2013 to 2023, he headed the Heidelberg Collaborative Research Centre ‘Material Text Cultures’ (SFB 933). His research focuses on courtly epic poetry of the High Middle Ages (especially Hartmann von Aue and Gottfried von Straßburg), German love poetry of the High and Late Middle Ages (Minnesang, Minnerede, Liebeslied), as well as narrative research and editorial philology. 

Ludger Lieb has distinguished himself editorially primarily in the field of early modern fables and late medieval courtly love poetry:

• Minnereden. Auswahledition. Hg. von Iulia-Emilia Dorobanţu, Jacob Klingner und Ludger Lieb. Berlin, Boston: de Gruyter 2017. [513 Seiten]
• Burkard Waldis, Esopus. 400 Fabeln und Erzählungen nach der Erstausgabe von 1548. Teil 1: Text, Teil 2: Kommentar. Hg. von Ludger Lieb, Jan Mohr und Herfried Vögel. (Frühe Neuzeit 154) Berlin, New York: de Gruyter 2011. [1.077 Seiten]
• Erasmus Alberus, Die Fabeln. Die erweiterte Ausgabe von 1550 mit Kommentar sowie die Erstfassung von 1534. Hg. von Wolfgang Harms und Herfried Vögel in Verbindung mit Ludger Lieb. (Frühe Neuzeit 33) Tübingen: Niemeyer 1997. [412 Seiten]

Together with Jacob Klingner, he has compiled a completely revised handbook covering the extensive genre of minnereden (579 texts):

• Jacob Klingner und Ludger Lieb: Handbuch Minnereden. Mit Beiträgen von Iulia-Emilia Dorobanţu, Stefan Matter, Martin Muschick, Melitta Rheinheimer und Clara Strijbosch. 2 Bände. Berlin, Boston: de Gruyter 2013. [1.485 Seiten]

Ludger Lieb is planning a complete digital edition of the Minnereden, together with Mirna Kjorveziroska (University of Bonn), as well as book editions of some influential Minnereden, author corpora and manuscript collections.