IEG - Leibniz Institute of European History

Prof. Dr. Nicole Reinhardt

Director (executive director)

Room: 02/305
Phone: +49 6131 39 28864

Personal Details:

Nicole Reinhardt received her doctorate from the European University Institute, Florence (EUI) in 1997. After working as a DAAD lecturer at the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris and as a Maître de conférence for Early Modern History at the University of Lyon II, she moved to Durham University in the UK in 2009. At the History Department there, she first taught as a Lecturer and was appointed Professor of Early Modern European History in 2017.
Since October 2022, she is Director of the Department Abendländische Religionsgeschichte of the Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG) in Mainz.

Research Interests:

interaction between religion and politics

norms, ethics and institutions in early modern Europe, especially in Italy, France and the Iberian Peninsula

Publications (a selection)

Reinhardt, Nicole (2023). Orizzonti (non) solo europei in un archivio patrizio Bolognese. La collezione di manoscritti di Vincenzo Ferdinando Ranuzzi Cospi tra Bologna, Londra e Austin/Texas. In Il patriziato bolognese e l’Europa, ed. Salvatore Alongi, Francesca Boris und Maria Teresa Guerrini, 202-218 Bologna: il Chiostro dei Celestini.

Reinhardt, Nicole (2021). ’For the love of God?’ The First Commandment and sacramental confession in early modern Catholic Europe. In Rules and Ethics: Perspectives from anthropology and history, ed. Emily Corran und Morgan Clarke, 124-144, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Reinhardt, Nicole (2017). Hernando de Mendoça, General Acquaviva, and the Controversy over Confession, Counsel, and Obedience. Journal of Jesuit Studies 4: 209–229

Reinhardt, Nicole (2016). Voices of Conscience. Royal Confessors and Political Counsel in Seventeenth-Century Spain and France. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Reinhardt, Nicole (2000). Macht und Ohnmacht der Verflechtung. Rom und Bologna unter Paul V. Studien zur frühneuzeitlichen Mikropolitik im Kirchenstaat. Tübingen: Bibliotheca Academica Verlag.

Research projects:

EGO | European History Online

EGO | European History Online is an transcultural history of Europe published by the IEG in Open Access in German and English. The now more than 470 contributions (incl. translations), which cover 500 years of modern European history across national, subject and methodological boundaries in ten thematic strands, are constantly being added to.

Faith, Friendship, and Natural Philosophy: The Oziosi Academy in Counter-Reformation Bologna

In this monograph project, Nicole Reinhardt examines a Bolognese academy in which primarily students of medicine and philosophy gathered between 1563 and 1567. The brief existence of the Oziosi Academy raises a number of questions, not least that of the social, intellectual and religious classification of the students of natural philosophy at the university and in the immediate final phase of the Council of Trent.

IEG activities in the "Leibniz ScienceCampus – Byzantium between Orient and Occident – Mainz / Frankfurt"

The aim of the ScienceCampus Mainz / Frankfurt is to establish a broad institutional platform for interdisciplinary Byzantium research. All subjects are involved that contribute or can contribute to the research of the Byzantine Empire and its culture: Christian archeology / Byzantine art history, medieval history, prehistoric and early historical archeology (focus on medieval archeology), Byzantine studies, Eastern European history, early modern churches and the history of theology, Musicology and Modern History (Early Modern Times).

The Counter-Reformation Self

Although the Renaissance as the supposed birthplace of the "modern individual" has largely been debunked as a myth, historians usually locate signs of early modern individuality among those who deviated from the norm, i.e. mostly among "heroes" and "heretics". With this micro-historical project "The Counter-Reformation Self", Nicole Reinhardt takes a deliberately different approach and follows the career of a conformist in the age of the Counter-Reformation (ca. 1540-1610).