Contrafacture and parody are central intertextual procedures in both early modern poetry and vocal music. Both are based on the re-textualisation of an existing vocal composition or the (re-)textualisation of an adopted song or dance style. Counterfactures and parodies can thus, on the one hand, make use of the "communicative potential" (Verweyen/Witting 1979) of their originals. On the other hand, they stand under the sign of the poetic and also musical imitatio concept (Robert 2006). They are the subject of elaborate, poetological reflections. [read more…]

With the organisational participation of the Jewish Studies sub-project Pietist Mission to the Jews II, a one-day digital study day on the topic of "Musar in Context" will take place within the framework of SPP 2130. The collaborative workshop is dedicated to the literatures of moral edification in medieval and early modern Judaism in comparison with other religions. The central question is how traditions of ethical-religious thought and writing developed in mutual exchange and conflict in different social and cultural contexts in Europe, North Africa as well as the Ottoman Empire. [read more…]

Interdisciplinary workshop of the ‘Translational Anthropology’ project Offered within the framework of Regina Toepfer and Jennifer Hagedorn’s SPP subproject ‘Translational Anthropology, the workshop will inquire into hidden power structures in the translation cultures of the Early Modern period and seek to expose them with the aid of historical intersectionality research. The aim is to examine the preconditions, criteria, practices, and mechanisms with which minorities and persons subjected to multiple discrimination are made invisible by translation while at the same time the positions of the privileged members of society are strengthened by their standard-setting visibility. [read more…]

The event originally planned for January has been postponed to 3 May 2022. The SPP 2130 Mercator fellow Dr Marina Bezzi will give a workshop for postgraduate students, docs and post-docs and offer an introduction to the circulation of translated historical-geographical material throughout Portugal, Spain, France, and England in the sixteenth century. The aim is to explore the links between the broad fields of history and geography in Early Modern Europe and discuss how their articulation depended on translation, among other editorial practices. [read more…]

The publication of Gideon Toury’s much-discussed book Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond marked a turning point in positing the problem of norms in translation as central to historical approaches in translation studies. In the process, the problem of norms has been significantly extended. Thus, attention has been paid not only to the guidelines of particular translational decisions, but also to the fundamental parameters of translational activity (target orientation versus source orientation) and, above all, to the cultural filters that control the selection of texts for translation (translation policy). [read more…]

Citing the oeuvre of Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen by way of illustration, SPP-Mercator Fellow Levy Bastos (Rio de Janeiro, UERJ) will provide theoretical and practical insights into the translation of Early Modern literature. Grimmelshausen’s novels, and in particular his Simplicissimus Teutsch as well as its sequel Courasche, are among the few examples of German Baroque literature that are still read today, thanks in part to their relatively extensive translation history. [read more…]

To provide the scholars involved in the SPP 2130 sub-projects an opportunity to get to know each other in person, we are hosting a young scholars meeting. The new organization and reorganization of the TransUnits is also on the meeting agenda.

All docs, postdocs, and assistants who would like to participate in a TransUnit are invited to attend. Please register with Annkathrin Koppers (spp2130@uni-wuerzburg.de) by 31 March 2022.

Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink will give a lecture at a workshop on the role of China in the European knowledge order in the 17th and 18th centuries, organised by Mark Häberlein and Dorothee Schaab-Hanke at the University of Bamberg on 14 and 15 July 2022. It will focus on the question, which has hardly been considered in research so far, which economically oriented knowledge about China was conveyed in French encyclopaedias, especially in economic encyclopaedias, and which forms of perception, also of a stereotypical nature, were linked to this. [read more…]

The purpose of the two-day workshop, which will take place on 6-7 October 2022, is to jointly explore the field of investigation set out by the SPP subproject „Translation Semantics in Early Modern German Narrative Literature“ (Dirk Werle and Fiona Walter, Department of German Studies, University of Heidelberg) at an early stage. In search of an Early Modern theory of translation, participants will examine ‚proto-theoretical‘ semantics of translation (terms, metaphors, figurations and discourses) in Early Modern German narrative literature. [read more…]

The song has come to spark substantial interest in the research on the literature and music of the Early Modern period. Taking recent surveys as their point of departure, monographs, conferences, and collective volumes have (re)discovered the meaning of the subject for aesthetic and cultural-historical matters and called attention to the central role played by the song in all areas of the Early Modern lifeworld. New editions have also made song books by single authors as well as song anthologies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries accessible in analogue and digital form. [read more…]

With a focus on the scientific landscape of the long eighteenth century, the workshop will be devoted to the dynamics that evolved against the background of interlingual translations of texts and works in the period in question. Within that context, the aim will be to sound out the dichotomy that developed between the European and transatlantic République des lettres on the one hand and the establishment of ‘national’ appropriation strategies and self-assertion processes in the context of scientific translations on the other. The discussion will revolve primarily around three issues: translation between universality and particularity, the importance of translation for scientific controversy and debate, and centre versus periphery. [read more…]