Project Details
Projekt
Roots of Tolerance in Early Modern European Literature
Applicant
Professorin Dr. Sonja Klimek
Subject Area
German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
Term
since 2023
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 493131063
This project will investigate the inception, dissemination, and impact of ideas of tolerance in the literature (both theological writings and poetic texts) of the early modern period, using the “disapproval–respect model of tolerance” that will guide the work of our whole Research Unit as a lens for backward research. The project will explore to what extend the different components of tolerance can be regarded as being pre-formed and tested during the sixteenth and seventeenth century – that is, from the “age of confessionalism” (as defined by E. Troeltsch) in the wake of the Reformation to the early Enlightenment. When disapproval concerns religious convictions that are regularly “loaded with claims of absolute truth” and thus are regarded to be of the highest value – as it is the case in questions of ‘last things’ and religious dogma – how can a principle that by definition is of lower value nonetheless operate as a powerful restraining force? Is there already something like a “superordinate ingroup and identity” (on the “respect level”) to be identified in sixteenth century theological writing, and how (if at all) does it restrict disapproval from being translated into persecution of the outgroup? Starting with Sebastian Castellio’s anthology De haereticis from 1554 and the texts quoted by its author, the project will, in a first Work Package, study the roots of tolerance in early modern theological writings from the sixteenth century (mainly on the question of how to deal with heretics, especially with spiritualists or other religious groups one strongly disapproves of). In a second Work Package, we will focus on the fruits of these early Protestant debates on religious tolerance in poetic texts from the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth century in two different exemplary case studies: one on English Drama from around 1600, carried out by a Mercator Fellow, and one on German religious poetry by female Protestant writers from the seventeenth century, undertaken by a PhD student. Methodologically, the project is informed by historicist approaches to early modern literature, which comprehend literary texts as being embedded in wider political, social, and confessional cultures that need to be taken into account in order to fully gauge the potential meanings of literary texts and to understand them not only as semantic structures but also as textual acts that respond to their contexts and intervene in contemporary political, social, and confessional debates and practices. The project will make a contribution to the historical dimension of the overall Research Unit The Difficulty and Possibility of Tolerance: The Multifaceted Challenges of the Concept and Practice of Tolerance by bringing methods of literary analysis to bear on the question of tolerance in both fictional and non-fictional texts from the early modern period.
DFG Programme
Research Units
