Completed projects

Project description

Reaching for Atlantis' focuses on telling the history of objects that were subject to the massive reinterpretation of material culture under the Swedish Empire (ca. 1650-1720). Establishing a digital repository will allow to bring together contemporary as well as previous and later contextualisations of selected objects. Opening up a diachronic view on their multi-layered 'cultural biographies' with the help of a digital visualisation, the project will break new ground to make objects the oculars of paradigmatic shifts in antiquarianism and the pre-Linnaean history of science, permitting deep insights into the social dimensions and epistemological frameworks of early modern collecting. The project is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation (Freigeist Fellowship).

contact: Dr. Bernhard Schirg

May 2018 - April 2023, affiliation with Erfurt university until October 2020, from June 2021 affiliation with Hamburg university

Project

The research project consists of two partner projects, which are carried out in parallel in France (funded by ANR) and in Germany (funded by DFG). The aim of the research project is the systematic collection, classification and analysis of historical maps from and about Ethiopia, many of which are unknown in Ethiopian research. Findings of map material that is still completely unknown even to the participating researchers, which will offer important cultural-historical and historical insights, are to be expected in the process. This will not only close a gap in the global history of cartography, but also make an important contribution to the preservation of indigenous territorial knowledge, which was incorporated into maps produced on the basis of local employees, especially in the phase before colonization, and thus of original African cultural heritage. This is also a contribution to "nation-building" in Ethiopia, where reliable material on socio-political territorial history hardly exists. The project combines digital methods with historically grown Northeast African or Ethiopian research and a fund of historical map archive treasures that are largely unprocessed. The goal is the publication of a book documenting, analyzing and indexing the most important maps, and a digital database to be created by the French partners in cooperation with the German partners to document and index map material important for research.

For more information, please visit LA LETTRE De L'EHESS.

Duration: 01/2016 - 01/2019

Funding: DFG

Cooperation partners: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris - main partner through ANR funding of the French partner project Gotha Research Centre and Gotha Research Library of the University of Erfurt Mekelle University, Tigray, Ethiopia Max Planck Institute for Ethnology, Halle/Saale Centre français des études éthiopiennes (CFEE), Addis Ababa, Ethiopia Job-Ludolf Centre for Ethiopian Studies, University of Hamburg.

Researcher(s): Dr. Eloi Ficquet (project manager / EHESS, Paris) Assoc.-Prof. Dr. Wolbert Smidt (project manager / Mekelle University, Ethiopia) Prof. Dr. Iris Schröder (Deputy Director of the Gotha Research Centre / University of Erfurt) Fesseha Berhe (Department of History and Heritage Management / Mekelle University, Ethiopia / Herzog-Ernst scholarship holder at the Gotha Research Centre 2016).

Publication: A publication is in preparation.

^{Image: Ethiopia, excerpt from: Hermann Berghaus, Chart of the World, 6th edition, Gotha: Justus Perthes 1871, © Gotha Research Library of the University of Erfurt.}

Project

Around 1700, Philadelphia, the idea of an interdenominational covenant of the "children of God," became a widespread ideal of German Pietism. The idea was propagated especially by the followers of the English community of 'Philadelphians'. Research has long suspected that the English Philadelphians possessed substantial influence on both radical Pietism and the Herrnhuters, as well as on broader social debates in the Old Kingdom. But what exactly were these influences? In the Gotha Research Library lies - almost untouched by research - a geographically arranged 'Catalogus amicorum in Germania', which served the Philadelphians as a starting point for their German mission, together with a volume of letters from this group. In addition, there are important holdings in other archives that have also received little attention from scholars.

Based on these sources, the project will reconstruct the early network of Philadelphians between England and Germany as well as the social and cultural mediating role of their ideas. Particular attention will be paid to the role of language: Many German contemporaries saw the language of the Philadelphians - which had ultimately emerged through translations from English - as the Pietist language par excellence. But it remains to be specified what linguistic and cultural contribution the group actually made. The project thus aims to elicit the emergence of the language of Pietism, perceived as identity-forming, through the example of the German Philadelphians, and in doing so to investigate the role that translations played in the service of cultural transfer.

Contact person:Dr. Lucinda Martin

Funding: DFG

Duration: 07/2014 - 07/2017

^{Image: page from the "Catalogus amiconi in Germania" of the Philadelphia Society, 1702, FB Gotha Chart A297, 7.}

Project

funded within the HERA project "Encounters with the Orient in Early Modern Scholarship", in cooperation with Prof. Charles Burnett (The Warburg Institute, London UK), Dr. Jan Loop (University of Kent at Canterbury, UK), Prof. Bernd Roling, Freie Universität Berlin), Prof. Outi Merisalo (University Jyväskylä, Finland), Prof. Gerard Wiegers, (University of Amsterdam). Duration: 3 years, 2013-2016

Johann Gerhard, orientalist educated theologian and one of the leading Lutherans in Germany, considered Hebrew the "matrix omnium aliarum linguarum"; the newer idioms were burdened with the original sin of Babel, only those of the Semites were not, because they had not participated in the building of the tower. Gerhard's son, Johann Ernst Gerhard the Elder (1621-1668), directed his interest early on to these "Semitic" languages. At the age of 26, in 1647, he republished Wilhelm Schickard's Hebrew grammar and wrote as an appendix his own Harmonia linguarum orientalium, scil. It is the time when something like a Semitic language family is just beginning to emerge in research : Christian Rave publishes his Generall Grammer for the Ebrew, Samaritan, Calde, Syriac, Arabic, and Ethiopic Tongue in 1648.

For Johann Ernst Gerhard there is an unusually favorable source situation: In the Gotha Research Library not only his printed works and the 6000 volume library (by him and his father) are preserved, but also 1450 letters to him, notebooks, the travel diary of his Peregrinatio academica as well as the annotated Wittenberg dissertations. In addition, the genealogical book he kept on his peregrinatio has been made available to us from a private source. This makes it possible to examine him as an example of the type of theologically influenced Orientalist.

Since 1644 Gerhard had a friendship and a close exchange of letters with Hiob Ludolf, the three years younger - at that time twenty years old - student from Erfurt, who was interested in oriental languages and especially in Ethiopian. Ludolf studied in Leiden from 1646 with Jacob Golius and Contantin L'Empereur, and then traveled to Paris as a tutor to Grotius's successor as Swedish envoy to the French capital, Baron Schering von Rosenhahn. After Rosenhahn sent him to Rome, where Ludolf came into contact with Ethiopians, Ludolf followed his master around 1650 to Ninköping and Stockholm, where numerous scholars had gathered in Queen Christina's circle, not least the linguists Christian Rave and Samuel Bochart. From there, Ludolf recommended his friend Gerhard to numerous Orientalists in the Netherlands when the latter embarked on his own peregrinatio academica in the spring of 1650.

After his studies in Wittenberg and his peregrinatio to Holland, France and Switzerland, Gerhard first made a career as a theologian at the University of Jena. He published on the harmony of the Gospels and on numerous exegetical and theological questions. It was not until the mid-1660s that he returned to his orientalist interests. And he did so with two series of publications pursued simultaneously: In the first, he illuminated the various Oriental churches; the second was even more ambitious, for it led beyond the circle of Oriental churches, endeavoring to tract the religions of the whole world.

Funding: HERA

Duration: 2013 - 2016

Researcher: Dr. Asaph Ben-Tov

Further on:

HERA project "Encounters with the Orient in Early Modern Europe."

Asaph Ben-Tov's J.E. Gerhard Blog

Publication:

As the first fruit of the HERA project, the anthology "The Teaching and Learning of Arabic in Early Modern Europe," edited by Jan Loop, Alastair Hamilton, and Charles Burnett, was published by Brill in Leiden in February 2017. Through 13 case studies, this volume offers an innovative look at the efforts of early modern Europeans to master the Arabic language. Like the HERA project in general, the careful case studies in this volume strive to explain the contemporary contexts that made learning a difficult Oriental language possible and prestigious-even in parts of early modern Europe where such knowledge served no immediate practical purpose. The book is also available via open access.

To the Brill Verlag website

^{Image: Johann Ernst Gerhard (1621-1668), from Leichenpredigt.}

Project

The goal of the Illuminati Order, founded in 1776, was the enlightenment and moral perfection of its members; this was to be achieved through the imparting of knowledge and the education of its members by their superiors in various "classes" and secret degrees. The previous research on the Illuminati has therefore mainly concentrated on the organizational structure as well as on the so-called 'higher knowledge' of the order as its actual arcanum. As documents of the order one knew consequently so far above all printed papers, degree drafts and the correspondence of the leading members among themselves; the temporal emphasis lay thereby in the years up to the prohibition of the order in Bavaria 1784/85.

In contrast, the project pursued at the Gotha Research Centre since autumn 2013 focuses on a completely new source corpus that has received little attention from researchers to date: it involves around 150 unprinted essays from the years 1783-1787 that have survived in the estate of Johann Joachim Christoph Bode (1731-1793), the so-called "Schwedenkiste". The spectrum of topics covered by these texts, most of which were read out at the meetings of central German Illuminati, is broad: it ranges from epistemology and practical Philosophy to ideological-moral questions and proposals for economic and social reform. The essays thus reflect the interests of the late Enlightenment public in the sum of their diversity and thus allow an insight not only into Enlightenment-motivated reform efforts of the Illuminati, but also into the possibilities and scope of so-called 'popular enlightenment', which had one of its centers especially in Gotha.

From the evaluation of this unique source material and its embedding in neighboring sources such as the protocols of the Gotha "Minervalkirche" and the secret corresp ondence between the local members of the lower degrees and their 'Unknown Superior' Bode, the opportunity arises to explore both the communicative practice within the Illuminati Order and the relations of the internal debates to general discourses of the German late Enlightenment far more profoundly than before. The corpus radically changes the view of the order: the focus of analysis is no longer on secrecy, exclusivity, and degree order, but on everyday order practice, membership leadership, and the relationship to the institutions and issues of the publicly visible Enlightenment. The culture of discussion within local groupings can be meticulously contextualized microhistorically by comparing the essays with other sources. As close as one can get to and within the Illuminati Order here, this was previously unthinkable. The nimbus of the nebulous and conspiratorial, which is still attached to the Illuminati Order and its members, can thus be countered by serious, source-based research on a new level. On the other hand, the essays - often one topic found several competing editors - can be related to each other as well as to published writings of 'public' discourse, revealing a topography of debates and shedding new light on the Late Enlightenment as a whole.

With the connection to the Gotha Research Centre, our project returns geographically to the place where most of the essays were written and for which we can most densely describe the interconnectedness of societies, citizens, and court. With the establishment of an internet platform inviting researchers from all over the world to participate, The Gotha Illuminati Research Base, we are working at the same moment to develop the Gotha site with its rich archive and library holdings into a center of Illuminati research.

Contact:

Dr. Markus Meumann

Dr. Olaf Simons

Funding: DFG

Duration: 2013 - 2016

^{Image: source from "Schwedenkiste".}

Project

In the trade fair city of Leipzig, not only were many books printed, published and negotiated in the past, but also many books that, in the eyes of the authorities, violated the dictates of religion and state or "good morals" were banned and confiscated. Many of the book bans of the time are documented in countless files of the Leipzig Book Commission, which are kept in the Leipzig City Archives, as well as in the corresponding fascicles of the Dresden High Consistory and the Secret Council of the Saxon State Government, which are preserved in the Saxon Main State Archives in Dresden; extensive material on book bans and confiscations in the Residenz has also survived the course of time in the Dresden City Archives.

The aim of the research project is to use these enormously extensive holdings of records in Leipzig and Dresden, some of which have not yet been finely indexed and the majority of which have not yet been taken into account by researchers, to compile a bibliographie raisonnée which not only covers the corpus of books banned in Saxony between 1750 and 1850, but also, if possible, names the authors of the works, most of which were published under anonymous or pseudonymous names, supplements the often incomplete imprints and resolves the falsifications in the case of masked literature, provides specific information on the dates, reasons and backgrounds of the bans, and finally also refers precisely to the corresponding archival records for the purpose of further research. In a second index, all those works will be listed that were confiscated and locked away by the Book Commission in Leipzig over a period of about 100 years - partly due to concerns about content, partly due to violations of privileges or copyrights - in total more than 70,000 copies, which were almost without exception destroyed in 1870 by being processed into roofing felt at the behest of the city council.

Since the corpus of literature banned in Austria in the period 1750-1848 has been indexed and processed for several years by a project headed by Prof. Dr. Norbert Bachleitner (University of Vienna), the bibliographic results of which have already been published in the form of a database [Link: https: //www.univie.ac.at/censorship/info.php], it will be possible after the completion of both projects to take a comparative look at the censorship and prohibition practices as well as the limits of freedom of opinion and freedom of the press in two of the leading territories in the German-speaking world and thus obtain fundamental insights into book printing and trade in the German-speaking world from the Enlightenment to the Vormärz. At the same time, a wealth of clandestine, heterodox, satirical, politically advanced or even revolutionary and erotic-pornographic works from the basement and underground of literature will become visible, which were confiscated at the time, consequently in many cases have survived only sparsely and therefore in part have remained unnoticed until today.

Contact: Dirk Sangmeister

Funding: Gerda Henkel Foundation, Düsseldorf

Duration: 2015 - 2016

^{Image: Title copy of the Index librorum prohibitorum from 1711, via Wikimedia Commons.}

Project

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) is known in modern times primarily as the founder of physical anthropology. His field of activity, however, spanned what was called "natural history" in the 18th century. In addition to his actual profession as a physician, he would therefore be called an anthropologist, physiologist, zoologist, mineralogist, and geologist, according to modern usage. He also left his mark on Egyptology. In the present discussion, however, interests are concentrated mainly on his anthropological works and his theory of the educational instinct.

While the aforementioned fields of activity are accessible to science on the basis of the relevant publications, there has long been a lack of indexing of his correspondence. It allows Blumenbach to emerge directly in his activities as a scientist and teacher. With more than sixty years of teaching at the University of Göttingen, numerous lines intersect in his person, revealing him as a crossroads in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In this interconnectedness, Blumenbach transcended the narrow boundaries of his subjects and gained general cultural-historical significance. The correspondence not only sheds light on Blumenbach's involvement in the extensive epistolary exchange of the time, but also on his correspondents, and sometimes allows us to adequately understand facts that, to the extent that letters are available at all, have remained obscure in parallel traditions. Blumenbach's correspondence therefore makes it possible to correct some existing views and interpretations. The importance of Blumenbach's correspondence lies to no small extent in this critical function.

Blumenbach was born in Gotha. His family was closely connected with the ducal family there. Throughout his life he cultivated this bond. Again and again he returned to his hometown. The close ties were also reflected in his correspondence with members of the princely house. These ties to his home and father city as well as his childhood and youth in Gotha, although there are only a few statements about them, have not yet been sufficiently illuminated. Nevertheless, it was in Gotha that Blumenbach experienced the decisive influences that ultimately made him what he then became and what he still is to the world today. This genius loci should not remain without influence on the edition of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's correspondence, which has now found a home and connection to the Gotha Research Centre, sponsored by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

To the publisher's page of the Blumenbach edition.

Funding:DFG

Duration: 2010 - 2015

Edited by: Dr. Norbert Klatt

^{Image: Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840).}

Project

In the course of the changes around 1700, a multifaceted nonconformist milieu had emerged in Europe, which had previously been recorded only in fragments. One of the best experts on this milieu in the Protestant countries was the Lutheran clergyman and dissident Friedrich Breckling (1629-1711), whose manuscript estate is kept by the Gotha Research Library. In exile in the Netherlands since 1660, he worked from there as a contact point, communicator and info-broker. His contributions to Gottfried Arnold's famous and widespread "Unpartheyische Kirchen- und Ketzerhistorie" (Unparthey Church and Heresy History) of 1699/1700 have had a particular impact on posterity, which also made possible a reception into the Enlightenment. Among these contributions, a list of so-called "truth witnesses" of early Pietism stands out, which Breckling presents in short biographies and evaluates for their religious merit. Even better suited for understanding and analyzing the networks of nonconformism that become tangible here is a hitherto completely unexplored, geographically arranged catalog from the Gotha estate, which forms the main source of the project.

Entitled "catalogus testium veritatis," the document lists some 1050 names of contemporaries on 18 pages, arranged according to 100 places and regions. The entries vary in length and give different information. There are details of profession, status, family status, address, other places of residence and activity, references to local relationships among persons, publications, and spiritual specialty. Crosses - often inserted later - note the death of a listed person. Attributes ("bonus", "electus", etc.) given to some names refer to a graded system of esteem. The aim of the project is to present this body of information in the form of a handbook, in which the persons - as far as possible - are recorded bio-bibliographically, maps show internal and external networks, and the overall data material is subjected to analysis and evaluation. While this unique document does not provide an objective inventory of Pietism around 1700, it does provide a very rich set of names from the nonconformist spectrum that has not yet been tapped in this way and may therefore be of importance for the study of regional as well as European constellations of the same. In addition, parallel to the handbook, all Brecklingiana not on site in Gotha will be brought together in copy or digitalized form and an edition of Breckling's correspondence (ca. 450 letters with over 100 persons from the period 1660 to 1711) will be prepared in order to gain further information on individual "truth witnesses". Pieces from the correspondence will supplement the handbook and illustrate the relationships between the correspondents and their exchanges.

An exhibition on the 300th anniversary of Friedrich Breckling's death in 2011 presented the first results of the project to a wider public in Gotha and Halle.

Contact person: Guido Naschert

Student assistants: Dennis Vöste, B. A.; Kai H. Schwahn

Funding: DFG

Duration: 01/2010 - 12/2012

^{Image: Friedrich Breckling, AFSt Halle BÖTT B 600.}