The Berlin Wednesday Society: Edition of the Möhsen Papers

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Kristina Engelhard; Professor Dr. Damien Tricoire
• Subject Area: Early Modern History ; History of Philosophy
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 511316619

The history of the Berlin Wednesday Society (hereafter BMG), founded in 1783, is considered “a key topic of Enlightenment research” (Hinske 1999, 63). The BMG brought together high-ranking civil servants, clerics, publicists and scholars and was undoubtedly one of the most influential societies in Brandenburg-Prussia in the late 18th century. The aim of the interdisciplinary project, the continuation of which is being applied for here, is the digital edition of the most important sources on the BMG according to standardized criteria and their annotation. These are papers from the possession of the founding member of the BMG, the royal personal physician Johann Karl Wilhelm Moehsen (“Moehsen Papers”, hereafter MP), which were bound together in a codex after his death and offer unique insights into discussions in Enlightenment circles in Berlin in the late 18th century. Thanks to the digital edition, an important chapter in the history of European ideas will be made accessible to researchers. We will create a freely accessible and searchable, critical and fully annotated edition that will also include deleted text and all relevant variants of preliminary stages and drafts. The overall introduction will place contextualise the texts of the MP in the history of the BMG and explain crucial focal points of the discussions. Our edition will enable and optimally facilitate further scholarly examination of all MP texts.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants