Political Sermons

The Gotha Research Library has a reference collection for the history of Protestantism in Central Germany from the 16th to the 18th centuries. An extremely extensive collection of sermons is part of this outstanding tradition.

The corpus of edited texts encompasses three manuscripts and 183 printed books, which were produced in the Wettin territories and neighbouring dominions in the 16th and 17th centuries. The temporal framework of the corpus arises out of the inner-Protestant conflicts and those of the Wettin dynasty  since the 1530s in the run-up to the Interim and the death of Duke Ernest the Pious in 1675.

Along with the in-depth indexing of the sermons in terms of form and content, the digital processing of the sermon collection was a focal point of this project. In addition to feeding the metadata into the corresponding union catalogues and databases, 186 sermons (183 prints and 3 manuscripts) were made available online as full digital copies for scholarly use in the Digital Historical Library Erfurt/Gotha. All digital copies are indexed with structural data.

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