Recent Publications

The Thirty Years' War is considered the greatest catastrophe and most traumatic war experience in German history before the Second World War. Indeed, in many regions, large parts of the population suffered severely from the war and its consequences. At the same time, however, there were also clear regional and social differences: While many lost possessions or even their lives, others came to terms with the war or were even able to profit from it, even in regions "in the middle of Germany" that were severely affected by the war. Basically, the Thirty Years' War was not only suffered passively by most people, but was always actively dealt with. This volume examines the practices of individual, collective and institutional actors that came into play in this process and thus analyses the various options for action and coping strategies.

Foreign coins from India, Japan or Arabia radiate an auspicious attraction. How did they get to Europe? What do the inscriptions and symbols they contain mean? And who were the people who used to pay with them? In this richly illustrated cultural-historical essay, Martin Mulsow tells the story of coin research using a wealth of hitherto completely unknown material from various European archives, thus drawing attention to an early chapter of globalisation. It is the story of a so-called intellectual encirclement of Asia. A group of scholars in the 17th and early 18th centuries explored the Middle and Far East from their armchairs with the help of these coinages: Arabia was captured on cardboard, China was chronicled in notebooks, and the Mughal emperor in India came to life by deciphering intricate Persian inscriptions. They minted the coins once again with their research and projections.

Martin Mulsow presents objects and intellectual adventurers of the early modern period and thus visualises their universe. Strange apparatuses, figures and caricatures crystallised a desire for radical thinking that was to unhinge the world. A peep box, an Indian figure, a sleeping fur, gold coins, a divining rod, branched trees and a silen bust: Martin Mulsow uses these seemingly antique, exotic or enchanted objects as a starting point to drill deep into the world around 1700 and lead us into the bubbling Age of Enlightenment. Far removed from heroic tales and the routines of triumphant history, the fates of scholars who were ready to explode the old world with their thoughts, but despaired of the grievances and comfort of their fellow human beings, come to the fore. Networks of knowledge consisting of rationality and the occult appear. In this way, the intellectual climate of an era becomes tangible, an era that rose to question what had been accepted for thousands of years: a thoroughly alien age that gave the starting signal for a revolution of scepticism that continues to this day.

The novel Die Zwei und vierzig jährige Äffin (1800), according to its subtitle "Das vermaledeiteste Märchen unter der Sonne" (The most wicked fairy tale under the sun), was a provocation when it appeared - anonymously, of course. As a hetaera, a black woman not only drives rows and rows of rich and powerful old men out of their minds, out of their money and sometimes out of their lives, she also becomes active in literature and ends up founding an academy. Now, on the 250th anniversary of the birth of its author Michael Kosmeli (1773-1844), the novel is being reissued, annotated and with an afterword by literary historian Dirk Sangmeister.

The volume edited by Markus Meumann, the Managing Director of the Gotha Research Centre, and Uta Wallenstein, the curator of the 2023 Friedenstein exhibition on Freemasonry, provide extensive insights into the lodge life of the Freemasons and the Illuminati Order in Gotha during the regency of Ernst II of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg. The enlightened duke had been a member of the Gotha Masonic Lodge "Zum Rautenkranz" since 1774 and was the Provincial Grand Master of the Great Provincial Lodge of Germany from 1775 to 1777. From 1782 he promoted secret lodge leadership through the Gotha-based Illuminati Order, which he joined in 1783. A look at Ernst II's private Masonic library reveals his great interest in the mysteries of Egypt. Supposedly the oldest and most perfect mystery culture, Ancient Egypt was considered by 18th century Freemasons to be the epitome of symbolic expression and mysteries. A special thematic section of the catalogue is dedicated to this spiritual enthusiasm for Egypt, which also left its mark in Gotha.

From about 1550 onwards, the Mantuan antiquary and architect Jacopo Strada (1515–1588) created a thirty-volume corpus for the Augsburg banker and politician Hans Jakob Fugger (1516–1575), depicting coins of the Roman Empire from Gaius Julius Caesar to Charles V: the Magnum ac Novum Opus. Now preserved in the Gotha Research Library, it contains almost nine thousand drawings of Roman Imperial coins. Strada also created an eleven-volume coin catalogue, A. A. A. NumismatΩn Antiquorum ΔΙΑΣΚΕΥΕ, of which two surviving manuscripts are preserved in Vienna and in Prague. The latter work contains coin descriptions that, Strada claimed, complemented the Magnum ac Novum Opus. In a project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), images and texts have been combined for the first time. The two works have been studied in their relationship to each other and have been placed in their antiquarian-numismatic and art historical context. The first results of this combination of diverse scholarly approaches are published in this volume. They include numerous new aspects of and perspectives on antiquarian scholarship during the second half of the sixteenth century, and thus represent an important contribution to the history of antiquarian studies, in particular of early numismatics.