Meelis Friedenthal

Pro Futura Scientia Fellow, SCAS.
Senior Research Fellow, University of Tartu Library

Meelis Friedenthal studied theology at the universities of Tartu and Heidelberg. He received
his doctoral degree in 2008 from the University of Tartu for the thesis ‘The Tractatus moralis
de oculo of the Tallinn City Archives’. The thesis presented a transcription, translation and
commentary of a fourteenth-century manuscript containing a moral-allegorical treatise on
vision and seeing. From 2008 to 2013, Friedenthal worked on a University of Tartu Library
project about the intellectual history of the Baltic provinces of the Swedish and Russian empires.
In addition, Friedenthal led a project aiming to describe paper and watermarks of the seventeenth-
century Tartu University printshop. From 2014 to 2015, Friedenthal was a Fellow at the Lichten-
berg-Kolleg, Göttingen, with the research focus on the concept of tolerance in early modern
German university disputations. In 2018-19, Friedenthal was a Visiting Fellow at the Max-Weber-
Kolleg in Erfurt, working on university disputations concerning pneumatology.

His publications include a co-edited volume, Religiooni ja ateismi ajaloost Eestis (On the History
of Religion and Atheism in Estonia, with Atko Remmel, 2012) and Text and Its Materialities in
Early Modern Estonia (with Anu Lepp, 2014). He is also a co-author of the early Estonian printings
database (paber.ut.ee).

The goal of Friedenthal’s project at SCAS is to analyze the ideas pertaining to pneumatology, spirits
and immaterial substances in the Baltic Sea region during the period of the Swedish Empire (1611–1721),
based on university disputations.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2019-20.