Indexing and Digitalization of Ego-Documents from the Early Modern Period in the Archive of the Francke Foundations

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Thomas Müller-Bahlke
• Subject Area: Protestant Theology ; Early Modern History ; German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
• Term: from 2018 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 394292597

The project, which will run from April 2018 to March 2021, aims to index and digitize approximately 1,500 handwritten ego-documents of the early modern period from the archives of the Francke Foundations. It has been planned to continue the project for ten months and extend it to biographical sources, since the genre boundaries regarding autobiographical and biographical writing were fluid during this period. These are primarily posthumously written biographies and thanatographies, the so-called "Last Hours", which provide insights into models and practices of Pietistic piety and the way of life both in the immediate vicinity of the Halle orphanage and in the context of its diaspora work in India and North America. The newly accessible sources offer a variety of starting points for the study of Halle Pietism in its local, supra-regional and global contexts of interaction, for the exploration of religious practices and group formations, of Pietistic devotional literature as well as of autobiographies and biographies of the 18th century. The project focuses on three aims: 1. Supplements: Indexing and digitization of 61 ego-documents held in the archives of the Francke Foundations; 2. Indexing and digitization of 399 documents of life held in the archives of the Francke Foundations; 3.The advanced indexing of 39 documents will be done by transcription.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Co-Investigator: Dr. Britta Klosterberg