About the Book
This anthology assembles cross-disciplinary perspectives on the experience of and responses to forms of material and spiritual loss in early modern Germany, tracing how individuals and communities registered, coped with, and made sense of such events as war, religious reform, bankruptcy, religious marginalization, the death of spouses and children, and the loss of freedom of movement through a spectrum of activities including writing poetry, keeping diaries, erecting monuments, collecting books, singing, painting, reconfiguring space, repeatedly migrating, and painting, and thereby not only turned loss into gain but self-consciously made history. Emerging from the 2008 interdisiplinary conference of Frühe Neuzeit Interdisziplinär, the essays reveal how loss helped to create identity and gave rise to agency and creativity on the cusp of modernity.
Contributors are Rosalind J. Beiler, Claudia Benthien, Jill Bepler, Duane J. Corpis, Alexander J. Fisher, Ulrike Gleixner, Claudia Jarzebowski, Hans Medick, Barbara Lawatsch Melton, Christopher Ocker, Helmut Puff, Thomas Max Safley, Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Lynne Tatlock, Mara Wade, Lee Palmer Wandel, and Bethany Wiggin.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
List of Tables
List of Musical Examples
Contributors
Introduction, Lynne Tatlock
1. The Thirty Years’ War as Experience and Memory: Contemporary Perceptions of a Macro-Historical Event, Hans Medick
2. Vanitas, vanitatum, et omnia vanitas: The Baroque Transience Topos and its Structural Relation to Trauma, Claudia Benthien
3. Dürer’s Losses and the Dilemmas of Being, Jeffrey Chipps Smith
4. Memento Mori, Memento Mei: Albrecht Dürer and the Art of Dying, Helmut Puff
5. Enduring Loss and Memorializing Women: the Cultural Role of Dynastic Widows in Early Modern Germany, Jill Bepler
6. Paper Monuments and the Creation of Memory: The Personal and Dynastic Mourning of Princess Magdalena Sibylle of Saxony, Mara Wade
7. Loss and Emotion in Funeral Works for Children in Early Modern History, Claudia Jarzebowski
8. Enduring Death in Pietism: Regulating Mourning and the New Intimacy, Ulrike Gleixner
9. Between the Old Faith and the New: Spiritual Loss in Reformation Germany, Christopher Ocker
10. Loss and Gain in a Salzburg Convent: The Impact of Tridentine Reform and Princely Absolutism on the Nuns of Nonnberg (1620 to1685), Barbara Lawatsch Melton
11. Themes of Exile and (Re-) Enclosure in Music for the Franciscan Convents of Counter-Reformation Munich during the Thirty Years War, Alexander J. Fisher
12. Locating the Sacred in Biconfessional Augsburg, Lee Palmer Wandel
13. Losing One’s Place: Memory, History, and Space in post-Reformation Germany, Duane J. Corpis
14. Migration and the Loss of Spiritual Community: The Case of Daniel Falckner and Anna Maria Schuchart, Rosalind J. Beiler
15. Forecasting Loss: Christoph Saur’s German Calendar (1751 to1757), Bethany Wiggin
16. After the Fall: The Dynamics of Social Death and Rebirth in the Wake of the Höchstetter Bankruptcy, 1529 to 1586, Thomas Max Safley
Bibliography of Secondary Sources
Index
About the Author :
Lynne Tatlock (Ph.D. 1981, Indiana University) is Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. She has published widely on German literature and culture and recently translated meditations by Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg (Chicago, 2008).
Review :
"[T]he volume provides a wealth of valuable insights on culture and emotion in the German-speaking lands during a turbulent and troubled time. Given recent interest among cultural historians and literary scholars in issues of emotion and its representation and memory and its commemoration, the collection makes a valuable contribution. [...] The production quality of this substantial and handsome book is excellent, and the essays are enhanced by nearly fifty illustrations and figures, a comprehensive bibliography, and a detailed index." – Jason P. Coy, College of Charleston, in: The Journal of Modern History 84/3 (September 2012), pp. 758-760
