Langballe Jensen, Dr. Mads (Alumni)

* 1985;

2006-2009 BA in History of Ideas at the University of Aarhus;

2009-2010 MA in Intellectual History and the History of Political Thought at Queen Mary, University of London and University College London;

2010-2014 PhD at Department of History, University College London with a dissertation on Philipp Melanchthon's Political Thought, published as "A Humanist in Reformation Politics: Philipp Melanchthon on Political Philosophy and Natural Law" (Brill, 2020). Doctoral and postdoctoral positions at German and British institutions, including IEG Mainz, MWK Erfurt, IZEA Halle, Royal Holloway London, UCL and KCL.

2020-2022 Carlsberg Reintegration Fellow at the Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen with the project "Contracts, conquest and conversion: the ideological legitimation of Danish colonialism c. 1650-1850".

From 2022 Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at IZEA and PI of the DFG-project "Academic Natural Law in Absolutist Denmark c. 1690-1773: Professionalisation and Politics".

 

I am a historian of early modern political thought with a particular interest in theories of natural law. My research explores the ways thinkers developed theories of natural law to tackle the religious and political developments of their time, from the Protestant reformation of the sixteenth century, over the enlightenment period in Denmark-Norway, to European overseas colonisation in West Africa and the Caribbean.

My DFG-funded project at IZEA is a history of academic natural law and its intellectual and practical significance in the kingdom of Denmark-Norway c. 1690-1773. From the 1690s, natural law was established as an academic discipline at the University of Copenhagen, with significant links to Halle, leading to an increase in lectures and publications in the subject. In practical terms, natural law was used to justify the absolutist monarchy, its domestic reforms, and overseas colonialism. The project aims to investigate the full extent of academic teaching of natural law in Denmark-Norway c. 1690-1773. It engages with a wide range of printed and manuscript sources, from student notes over printed works to administrative correspondence.

 

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Stipendium für Aufklärungsforschung 2020:
Aufenthalt: 01.02.2020-31.03.2020

Forschungsprojekt

Natural Law in the North: Christoph Heinrich Amthor's Philosophia Moralis (1738)

Christoph Heinrich Amthor (1677-1721) was one of the most prominent natural lawyers of the early enlightenment in Northern Europe. He was a prolific author and held prominent positions as professor of law and politics at the University of Kiel in the service of the Gottorp duchy and later as Justizrat and royal historiographer of the Danish monarch. Aspects of Amthor's work have been the subject of historical scholarship, but his substantial body of works on natural law has not, however, been the subject of detailed historical study. This project addresses this desideratum by analysing Amthor's Philosohia Moralis seu doctrina de justo, honesto et decoro (posthumous 1738) in the context of the academic teaching of natural law in Halle in the decades around 1700. The project aims to clarify the distinctive characteristics of the natural law theory and that Amthor's writings presented to his Danish and German audiences. In turn this will provide the basis for determining what other kinds of theory (Halle-inspired and otherwise) it competed with and its significance in Northern Europe.