The Berlin Wednesday Society: Edition of the Möhsen Papers

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Kristina Engelhard; Professor Dr. Damien Tricoire
• Subject Area: Early Modern History ; History of Philosophy
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 511316619

The history of the Berlin Wednesday Society, which was founded in 1783, has been termed a “key topic of Enlightenment studies”. The Berlin Wednesday Society gathered famous state servants, clerics, publicists and scholars, and was without a doubt one of the most influential societies in late eighteenth-century Brandenburg-Prussia. The project aims at publishing a digital critical edition of the most important ensemble of sources on the Berlin Wednesday Society: the so-called “Möhsen Papers”, a codex of manuscripts that belonged to the royal physician Carl Wilhelm Möhsen. These papers give unique insights into the discussions among protagonists of the Enlightenment in late eighteenth-century Berlin. Thanks to this digital edition, a major chapter of the European history of ideas will be accessible to scholars.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants