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

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 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 und vermischte 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 – 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.