Sebald Heyden's Formulae Puerilium Colloquiorum. The history of an early modern book of conversations

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Ekkehard Felder, since 7/2019
• Subject Area: Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics ; Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: from 2017 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 379704366

Sebald Heyden's early modern book of conversations Formulae Puerilium Colloquiorum has been neglected in German philological research so far. This seems surprising; after all, the educational book with pupils' conversations was popular from the Reformation until the end of the 18th century in the German language area and beyond, and it was used intensively, as the number of reprints shows. The books of conversations were originally designed for Latin lessons in order to teach the students with the help of the Latin dialogues to which a German translation was added. In the neighbouring countries, the books were used to learn German as a foreign language. About 100 prints are known until around 1800 (according to preliminary numbers), from at least 36 places of printing in almost all of central Europe, which allows us to draw conclusions about the relevance of German in the Early Modern Age. Moreover, it seems likely that the German variety of the respective region was used for the German translations within the German language area, which means that with the analysis of books of conversations, one can also give information on language variation and processes of standardisation of German. Furthermore, results can be expected concerning the confessional particularities of the text type book of conversations. The main objective of this project is the description of Formulae Puerilium Colloquiorum and its analysis concerning its place in Early Modern language history. This is why the complete compilation of all examples is a key prerequisite. At the end of the project, both a digital and a print edition of selected documents shall be published.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Professor Dr. Jörg Riecke, until 7/2019 (†)