Making early baroque poetry digitally explorable

The hybrid edition of Paul Fleming's works is being created collaboratively at three locations

18.07.2022 | Press Releases, Project News, Academic exchange

“Nevertheless be undaunted! Nevertheless do not give up!” The beginning of one of his best-known poems, “To himself,” exemplifies how his texts reflect the literary, artistic, scientific, and confessional discourses and spheres of life typical of the 17th century. Since June 2022, Fleming's complete works have been reedited using digital methods as part of the eight-year research project “Complete Edition of the Latin and German Works of Paul Fleming with Translation of the Latin Works and Commentary and Indexes to the Complete Works.”

Paul Fleming 1854 Zweihundert Bildnisse und Lebensabrisse berühmter deutscher Männer, 3rd ed., Leipzig 1870, editor Ludwig Bechstein (Google Books); already present in first edition (1854) sowie CAMENA. Lateinische Texte der Frühen Neuzeit der Universität Mannheim, im XML-Format verfügbar (https://www2.uni-mannheim.de/mateo/camena/AUTBIO/fleming.html)

The participating researchers from German Studies, Latin Studies, and Digital Humanities at the Universities of Bonn, Heidelberg, and Trier will publish the results of this large-scale project together with the Publisher Anton Hiersemann in the form of a hybrid edition of the work, consisting of a printed edition with translation as well as detailed commentary and indexes, and a modern digital web application.

An important aim of the interdisciplinary project is the clear editing of the complete work and the contextualization of its genesis and transmission history. In addition, a translation of the Latin poetry will greatly facilitate access to the work, especially since Fleming's use of language sometimes deviates from the classical norm and is characterized by mannerisms as well as abbreviations. Beginning in 1630, he published the first prints of his texts written in Latin and German. He had only ten years of life left for his work.

A multidisciplinary team

For many years, the TCDH has been working cooperatively with national and international research partners. The respective research groups around PD Dr. Beate Hintzen, Prof. Dr. Gernot Michael Müller (Latin Studies, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn), Prof. Dr. Dirk Werle (German Studies, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg) and Dr. Thomas Burch (TCDH, Universität Trier) have been conducting research in their fields for many years and complement each other ideally with their respective expertise. Beate Hintzen, as a recognized Fleming expert, has experience in the field of editing and translating 17th century Latin texts. Gernot Michael Müller brings a broad general experience in the field of editing and commenting on early modern Latin texts. Dirk Werle has extensive expertise in the field of literature of the German cultural area in the early modern period, especially in the history of poetry. Since the end of the 1990s, Thomas Burch and his team in Trier have been designing and coordinating digital humanities projects, especially in the field of digital editions and digital lexicography.

Experience baroque poetry hybrid: in user-friendly virtual design, translated and annotated

The hybrid edition will present the printed edition of his works, intended for seven volumes, as a group of collections as Fleming demonstrably originally planned. Introductory texts as well as the commentaries will also describe and make known the occasional character. In addition to the advantages already mentioned, a digital edition will allow specific problems of Fleming's work to be worked through and researched by edition scholars in the first place. Thus, it will be possible to present poems that conceptually belong together and were accordingly published together in the first printings, but which appear separated by Fleming's later division of his work into a Latin and a German part, in each case both in their original context of the first printing and in the context of the Latin and German poetry collections, respectively. The edition project follows the established single-source publishing principle. The basis of the printed as well as the digital edition is the data - collected in the virtual research environment for the humanities and social sciences FuD - and their interconnections. This research data is available free of charge for subsequent scientific use. A beta version of the digital edition as well as the first two volumes of the print edition will present the status achieved by then after three years.