Maria Radnoti-Alföldi


Maria Radnoti-Alföldi is a Hungarian-German archaeologist and numismatist specialising in the Roman period. She is known for her research into the analysis of the distribution of coin finds, Roman history, and the self-depiction of the Roman emperors.

Early life and education

Radnoti-Alföldi was born in 1926 in Budapest to Geza Alföldi and his wife Olga Alföldi. She completed high school in 1944 and then enrolled in the philosophy department at the Loránd Eötvös University in Budapest where she studied until 1949.

Career

In 1947 Radnoti-Alföld started work at the Hungarian National Museum and married the archaeologist Aladár Radnóti, and 1950 holding a winter-term lectureship in the winter-term at Loránd Eötvös University. She was forced to leave this work in 1957 when, after the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Radnoti-Alföldi and her husband fled via Vienna to Bavaria. Radnoti-Alföld then became a researcher on the Fundmünzen der Römischen Zeit in Deutschland project of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft from 1957 to 1962. In the summer of 1961 she received her Habilitation at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in the then new subject of ancient numismatics. In 1962, she moved with her husband to Frankfurt, where he had received a professorship at Goethe University Frankfurt focused on ancient medicine and Roman provincial history and culture.
In December 1972 Aladár Radnóti. died and Maria was appointed to the same professorship at Goethe as he had held. She taught from then until her retirement in 1991r within the 'Seminar for Greek and Roman History, Second Section' on Roman provincial archaeology and ancient medicine. Since her retirement in 1991, she has been an emerita professor at Goethe University Frankfurt.
She leads the Griechisches Münzwerk project of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the Fundmünzen der Antike project of the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, for which she has produced several volumes.

Awards and memberships

Radnoti-Alföldi was awarded the Cross of Merit on the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1992.
For her work on ancient numismatics, she was awarded the medal of the Royal Numismatic Society in 1995, and the Archer M. Huntington Medal of the American Numismatic Society in 2000.
She is a member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur and an ordinary member of the German Archaeological Institute.
Radnoti-Alföldi is also an honorary member of several learned societies: the, the, the Commission Internationale de Numismatique, the Hungarian Numismatic Society, and of the Hungarian Society for the Studies of Antiquity.

Select publications