Work-packages

I The genre aspects of noble literature

Taking into account comparative knowledge from other countries and later literary practices of the Livonian nobles, we assume that there exist paradigmatic genres worth of special attention in order discern literary change. These may include:

  • chronicles, other pieces of Landesgeschichtsschreibung, and treatises about statecraft and politics;
  • speeches (the importance of oratory can be assumed since the Middle Ages, because the Livonian vassal not only had a military duty to his master but was also expected to be an assistant advisor, e.g. in court proceedings, requiring knowledge of practical life (laws) and the ability to express them orally);
  • secular poems (a notable part of poems written by the nobles were panegyrics dedicated to the current royalty. This could also occur at the turn of the 16th/17th and 17th/18th centuries, critical transition periods from Polish to Swedish, and from Swedish to Russian rule. Thereby we hypothesize that poetic panegyrics to the royalty dignitaries may have functioned as a repercussion of the oath of allegiance of the mediaeval vassals to their masters (lat. homagium));
  • religious poetry (one of the permanent general hallmarks of the Baltic German literature);
  • travelogues (traveling from one court, estate and, in the EM time, also from one university to another was a traditional part of the life of a noble, but also of Early Modern non-noble students.

We will observe whether there were changes in typical genres of the old nobility with the addition of newcomers. Did the old nobility become even more conservative preferring their „original“ genres during the decades of transition? Did the preferred key genres of several categories of nobility become similar during the Early Modern time?

 

II Shared concepts – changing concepts

This work-package is focused on the analysis of which characteristic concepts of Early Modern literature dominated in the texts of the old nobility and the recently ennobled authors, and how literary change influenced some paradigmatic concepts. We will observe whether the apologetical self-stylization as nobilitas vera, typical for Early Modern humanist discourse all over Europe, was represented in Livonia, or whether this concept lost its relevance because of the intensive ennoblement of educated people? Was its avoidance a specific feature of Livonian Early Modern literature, as the integration of many Early Modern migrants to the heterogeneous group of nobility took place to form the upper strata of corporative local society, at least until the time when local nobility was fixed in the nobility matricles in the 1740s? The question is also important here, whether and to what extent was the rhetorical argumentation of the old and new Livonian nobles influenced by the rich reception of Classical Antiquity, by the concept of homo novus and Cicero as its main example? The potential shift of topics will also be analyzed for the group of academic writings, i.e disputes, academic speeches and congratulatory poems, written by young noblemen who studied both at local educational institutions in Tartu, Riga, and Tallinn, as well as elsewhere in Europe.

 

III Writing, communicating and publishing strategies and models

In this work-package we will focus on the following questions:

  • Whether and when did the old nobility adopt the strategy of distributing their literary works in print (typical strategy of the scholars and citizens) and give up manuscript form? What role did the press play in supporting or suppressing the literary activities of the nobility?
  • Whether and how did the literary activity of ennobled writers and their children change, against the background of general change? Did it change their lifestyle and make them gentry or did they remain ‘bourgeois’ scholars in the cities? Do their descendants drop out of academic education? Did they start using topics typical of noble literature, e.g. the topic of heroic nobility?
  • Which mixing strategies typical of Early Modern literature (e.g. intertextuality, incl. between religious and secular texts, combining of visual and literary forms, multilingual practices) were activated as a result of this general change?
  • Did the literature written and published by the foreign nobility living/working in Livonia function as an additional model for the Baltic German nobility?
  • Does the literature by the Early Modern nobility provide a strongly interrelated network of texts, e.g. with regard to Knighthoods, or does it mainly reflect individual interests of the authors?