The academic education of historian and father of ten Dr Pavel Blažek began in 1993 with his studies at University College London and led him through several internationally renowned educational institutions, from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa to the Catholic University of Louvain and the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, where he defended his dissertation on "The Medieval Reception of the Aristotelian Philosophy of Marriage" with summa cum laude in 2004. His dissertation was published in book form in 2007 by the renowned Brill publishing house in the Netherlands.
The medieval specialist from Moravia is one of the co-founders and organisers of the KAAD Alumni Association in the Czech Republic. Since 2008, he has been responsible for maintaining and strengthening the cohesion of the KAAD community in the Czech Republic. As a member of the KAAD partner committee, Pavel Blažek is in constant contact with the most important universities in his country.
Supported by a KAAD research grant and following on from a previous project funded by the German Research Foundation, in 2008 he researched the medieval Latin commentaries on the Penitential Psalms at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and edited the hitherto unedited, late medieval commentary on the Penitential Psalms by Johannes Streler.
From 2005 to 2011, Pavel Blažek was managing director of the International Society for Theological Medieval Studies, which supports academic exchange between researchers in the field of medieval theology.
Pavel Blažek 's research interests centre on the image of marriage and the family in medieval thought, the history of the medieval reception of Aristotle and the history of the Bible in the Middle Ages. In addition to the aforementioned research on medieval commentaries on the Penitential Psalms, in recent years he has published several studies on medieval household tracts, marriage sermons and discourses on celibacy and, above all, is researching the problem of polygamy in medieval theology and philosophy, the latter as part of a research stay in Munich and Dresden (2009 - 2011), which was supported by a scholarship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He is also preparing critical editions of several previously unpublished medieval texts, including an edition of the only medieval commentary on the work "De inundatione Nili" attributed to Aristotle , an ancient natural history treatise on the annual threshold of the Nile.
In 2015, Pavel Blažek is completing a second KAAD scholarship in collaboration with the Director of the Thomas Institute at the University of Cologne, Prof. Dr Andreas Speer, for a research stay on the topic of "The Wives of Abraham and Jacob: Durandus of Saint-Pourçain and the Controversy over the Legitimacy of Poligamy in the 14th Century".
Pavel Blažek is a research associate at the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic . Since the end of his first KAAD-funded research stay in 2008, he has been a member and secretary of the KAAD partner committee in Prague and our most important contact person in the Czech Republic. For this, he was honoured with the "Bene merenti" medal at the 2018 Annual Academy.
