Enlightenment Feminism and Cultural Transfer. Christiana Mariana von Ziegler (1695-1760) - Annotated Edition

• Applicant: Privatdozentin Dr. Astrid Dröse
• Subject Area: German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 535766518

The project aims to fill a gap in research on the European Enlightenment: It will provide the first annotated edition of the works of Christiana Mariana von Ziegler (1695–1760). The Leipzig author, who has recently attracted a lot of interest (Martus 2018; Becker-Cantarino 2019), was part of Gottsched’s intellectual circle, a member of the ‘Deutsche Gesellschaft’ and crowned Poeta Laureata by the University of Wittenberg. Her complete lyrical and essayistic works are crucial to gender history, the European ‘égalité des sexes’ discourse of the early Enlightenment and European cultural transfer in the 18th century. Ziegler’s poetry is also interesting from a literary and socio-historical perspective: Her texts combine the rhetoric of the late Baroque and new tendencies such as gallantry and pietistically influenced 'Empfindsamkeit’. Her musical poetry (songs, cantatas), set to music by J. S. Bach, allows insights into the musical milieu of Leipzig’s elite of her time. Ziegler’s literary oeuvre includes two volumes of poetry (1728/29), a collection of epistolary essays (“Moralische Sendschreiben”, 1731) and a collection of “Vermischte Schriften” (1739), which includes translations from French texts by Fontenelle and Madame de La Suze, among others. Her most extensive translation work was a partial translation of Madeleine de Scudéry’s “Conversations sur divers sujets” in 1735. The planned five-volume edition – in Project Phase I we are working on Volumes 1–3 – will be published in the new series ‘Feministische Aufklärung’ (Metzler, eds. Isabel Karremann and Gideon Stiening) as an open access publication (‘golden path’). It is aimed at Enlightenment researchers oriented towards literary and cultural history, but also at scholars of historical gender research, cultural transfer and translation research, musicology, and regional history (Leipzig). The texts are made accessible for the first time by a concise footnote commentary (word explanation, factual commentary) as well as extensive introductions to the respective volumes of the edition with a focus on the central contexts. The XML data obtained in the project are converted into the DTA basic format. The research data archive FDAT, managed by the DH Centre at the University of Tübingen, archives the data. The project will draw on previous work by the applicant and the planned researcher (edition of selected texts by Ziegler, publications in scientific journals, DFG project on song culture and translation research) and will use synergy effects with other (edition) projects with which cooperation already exists or has been agreed (series 'Feministische Aufklärung’/Metzler; hybrid edition of the works of Martin Opitz, Tübingen; Johann Christoph Gottsched’s correspondence, historical-critical edition, Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig).

• DFG Programme: Research Grants