Religion and Politics in Protestant Sermons of the 16th and 17th Century in the Thuringian-Saxon Region

Due to its denominational anchoring, the Gotha Research Library has a reference collection for the history of Central German Protestantism in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. An extremely extensive collection of sermons is part of this outstanding tradition. The aim of the project is to make the collection of political sermons accessible to the interested public online. 
Although sermons were a central medium of communication in the early modern period, by means of which theological content could be transferred into congregational practice, historical research has so far only perceived and recorded them in the form of sermons from the dead. This project is dedicated to a very special group of sources, namely the political sermons that were delivered in the context of a political event and/or have political implications. The result will be a thesaurus of political language that not only opens up the texts on the basis of concrete concepts, but will also be suitable for other similar projects in the humanities and linguistics.