Occasional Writings

Occasional writings belong to a literary genre that is considered one of the most yielding sources of personal information for the early modern period. This type of writing is characterized by an everyday historical frame of reference focused on cities and regions, consisting of addressees, composers, authors and other persons involved.

The Gotha Research Library preserves a rich collection of occasional writings. It has its origins in dissolved older libraries of the Saxon and Thuringian area and the library of the Gotha Gymnasium that were integrated into the collections of the research library. This collection, in part illustrious, was also built up at the court library under the ducal house of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg.

The project aims at examining a reservoir of about 7,500 occasional writings from the early rise of humanism to the end of the 18th century. To this end, the sources are being indexed in a database by the Interdisciplinary Institute for the Cultural History of the Early Modern Period at the University of Osnabrück and digitized and presented online by the Gotha Research Library.

View digital copies in the Digital Historical Library