28 June 2022

As Duchess of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, Princess Sophie of the Polish Jagiellon dynasty maintained an extensive correspondence in Latin, Italian and Polish, acted as a diplomat mediating between the Polish royal court and the German imperial princes, possessed a considerable private library with a number of highly precious bindings from the Polish royal collection and maintained a field dispensary with accompanying medical literature. Two years after the death of her Catholic husband and having immersed herself in Lutheran texts, she openly professed the Lutheran faith. As a widow, she became homo oeconomicus, managing the two districts under her jurisdiction, Schöningen and Jerxheim, with considerable financial success. She also overhauled the financial administration and initiated the structural refurbishment of the palace and public buildings in these districts. Sophie’s considerable inheritance and personal economic success meant that cities and princes from across Poland and the Reich often approached her to request substantial loans. Did this make her an exception? Quite the contrary!

The cultural, political and communicative activities of early modern princesses, their personal religious standpoints and their medical and economic interests were very much knowledge-driven and informed by education – acquired from books, other reading material and private book ownership. In the 18th century, a princess might have several thousand titles in her possession. While some of them were particularly interested in Bible editions, others collected historical-political works and biographies. Of course, there were always novels among the books – after all, these women wanted to be up-to-date and participate in discussions about new publications. It was also common for princesses to bequeath generous endowments to any regional universities there might be, if only because the professors were among their close correspondents. The promotion of scholarship was close to their hearts, in part because they themselves were involved in this erudite form of social activity.

Why is there no general, systematically compiled historiography of princesses and their cultural activities, their libraries and their networks of scholarship? Why is there no economic history of the administration of the estates of royal widows? The answers are many and varied, ranging from ignorance to a lack of interest and disdain. The Herzog August Bibliothek does not want to stop at this one finding. In its old holdings, the library owns several handwritten inventories of the private libraries of princesses as well the books in their possession. Together with the Universität Trier, it is planning an extensive research and in-depth cataloguing project on the libraries of princesses in German-speaking countries.

PURL: http://diglib.hab.de/?link=129