Léopold Genicot

Genicot was a Catholic and a political militant on behalf of the Walloon Movement who had been a member of Rénovation wallone and a candidate for Rassemblement wallon in the European elections. As a politician, in 1995, by the time of his demise, his patriotic views had become gradually more regionalistic, favouring either an independent Wallonia or its integration into France.

In 1972 he decided to start publishing a series of small monographs under the title Typologie des sources du Moyen Âge occidental ("typology of sources for the Western Middle Ages"), devising the editorial plan and writing an introductory volume the same year. The whole of this collection has acquired enormous academic prestige and has continued to be published by Brepols. This collection was to serve a scholarly base of medievalists ranging from graduate students to professors and has become one of the most successful collections of introductory and bibliographical aids ever presented to the academic community of medieval history scholars. By publishing three to four titles a year, the series has steadily grown to seventy-eight volumes, covering everything in medieval studies and culture, from necrological documents to Latin treatises on the virtues and the vices, from astronomy to arms, from armour to other daily hardware.

In 1964, he received the "Guaillarde d'Argent" and in 1982, he received an honorary degree from the Catholic University of Lublin. In 1988, he was awarded the prize "Personnalité Richelieu" by the Belgium and Luxembourg branch of "Richelieu International".

In 1963, persuaded of the academic value of interdisciplinarity, he established a Centre for Rural History (Centre d'Histoire Rurale) and later still a Centre for Historical Ecology (Centre d'écologie historique), inviting historians to work together with geographers, agronomers, and other specialists in Earth Sciences in the newly established Institut Interfacultaire d'Études Médiévales (better known as the Institut d'Études Médiévales).

He was the father of the architectural historian Luc-Francis Genicot (1938-2007), and the great uncle of Garance Genicot and Frédérique Genicot.

In 1935, he was offered a position as professor at the Catholic University of Leuven, receiving tenure there in 1947. He taught diplomatic, methodology, Belgian history and medieval history. In his research, he was particularly interested in the history of Wallonia.

Léopold Genicot (Forville, Namur, 18 March 1914 - Ottignies, Louvain-la-Neuve, 11 May 1995) was a Belgian historian and medievalist and an activist for the Walloon Movement. He established a centre for the study of rural history and an influential series of guides to medieval historical sources.

Léopold Genicot was born in Forville, Belgium, in 1914. After earning his BA in political economy, he worked as an archivist in the Namur branch of the Royal Archives from 1935 to 1944. During that time, he obtained a doctorate in History in 1937. His work at the archives also allowed him to hide escaped prisoners during the Second World War.