Wolf Liebeschuetz, classical historian, made a distinctive contribution to the study of late antiquity. His family, escaping the Nazi regime, came from Hamburg to England in 1938. In the late 1940s, when he began his undergraduate degree, the period now known as late antiquity was absent from most UK university courses in Classics or in History. By 1992, when he entered his productive retirement, it was a flourishing international field of study. His books address central questions which continue to be debated: the decline or transformation of the classical city and of the Roman empire; the impact or integration of non-Roman ‘barbarian’ peoples; religious change and the effect of Christianity.
Posted to Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy, 21