MONE, FRANZ JOSEPH

Catholic historian; b. Mingolfsheim, Baden, Germany, May 12, 1796; d. Karlsruhe, Germany, March 12, 1871. He taught history at the University of Heidelberg from 1819 to 1827, and from 1825 he was in charge of the University library. In 1827 he was appointed to louvain University, but he returned to Germany in 1831 as a result of the Belgian Revolution. From 1825 until his retirement in 1868 he was director of the General State Archives in Karlsruhe. As a researcher, Mone was entirely dominated by the ideas of romanticism, as is shown by the letters of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Karl Lachmann, Freidrich Creuzer, and Joseph von Lassberg to him, which were published by Max von Waldberg in Neue Heidelberger Jahrbücher 7 (1897) 68. The breadth and variety of Mone's field of study can best be conveyed by the modern concept of the history of culture. His works on the Celts are an extreme example of Romantic infatuation with the past. Mone made a modest contribution by his literary-historical researches to the foundation of Germanic philology, although his conclusions are often at fault. Even before Jacob Grimm, Mone had tried to give an overall presentation of German mythology, and on the basis laid down by Wilhelm Grimm, he pursued still further researches on the Germanic heroic legends. His editions on the history of the liturgy and on ecclesiastical poetry in the Middle Ages are even today a scholarly achievement of great importance. The Lateinische und griechische Messen aus dem II. bis. VI. Jahrhundert (Frankfort 1850) presents the pure Frankish gallican form of the liturgy. Mone also devoted himself to the history of Baden, and he initiated the Baden Church-State struggle with his anonymously published Die katholischen Zustände in Baden (Conditions of Catholics in Baden), a polemical pamphlet, published in Karlsruhe in 1841 and 1843, in which he championed the Catholic Church's independence of state tutelage.

Bibliography: f. j. mone, Geschichte des Heidenthums im nördlichen Europa, 2 v. (Leipzig 1822–23), v. 5 and 6 of g. f. creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, 6 v. (2d ed. Leipzig 1819–23); Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der deutschen Heldensage (Quedlinberg 1836); Lateinische Hymnen des Mittelalters, 3 v. (Freiburg 1853–55); Celtische Forschungen zur Geschichte Mitteleuropas (Freiburg 1857); Quellensammlung der badischen Landesgeschichte, 4 v. (Karlsruhe 1848–67). a. schnÜtgen, "Der kirchenpolitische Kreis um f. j. mone," in Freiburger Diözesan-Archiv, NS 22 (1921): 68–122; 26 (1925): 1–66; 27 (1926): 153–226. a. wilmart, "L'Âge et l'ordre des messes de Mone," Revue Benedictine 28 (1911): 377–390. w. kosch, Das katholische Deutschland, 2 v. (Augsburg 1933) 3053–3054. f. von weech, Allgemeine deutsche Biographie (Leipzig 1875–1910) 22:165–166.

[h. rumpler]