The complete plays of Hans Sachs 1517–1565: Critical and annotated edition of all shrovetide plays, comedies, and tragedies, including thematically related works

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Nathanael Busch; Professor Dr. Hans-Rudolf Velten
• Subject Area: German Medieval Studies (Medieval German Literature)
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 559108210

Today Hans Sachs is considered the most prolific, acknowledged and influential German speaking poet and playwright of the 16th century. His works underwent a continuous, consistent, wheras controversial literary reception up to the present day, comparable only to those of Martin Luther. Within his oeuvre, which embraces more than 6,200 texts, the 203 dramatic plays are most significant. They stand out for their dramatic quality, linguistic precision and lexical abundance and can justifiably be described as the most important German-language corpus of theatrical texts of the period. But to the present day there is no satisfactory edition of these plays. The existent editions are not reliable, obstruct the access to the texts and devalue their assessment. The project aims at an annotated, critical edition of all play-texts of Hans Sachs, i.e. tragedies, comedies and shrove-tide plays including an extensive linguistic and historico-critical commentary. For the first time, this new edition will embrace also those master songs and didactic poems which address the same subject matters as do the plays. Over decades, Sachs devoted himself to the same materials in different performative and literary genres. The conjoint edition of play- texts and appurtenant master songs and poems will not only give insight into the formation process of the plays, but also into the dramatic qualities of Sachs. There are three main objectives the project pursues: 1. The edition will finally originate a philologically reliable groundwork for future investigation in the dramatic works of Hans Sachs, both from a literary, cultural, theatrical and linguistic point of view. 2. For the first time, the edition allows access to the formation process of all theatre works by Hans Sachs, by means of the incorporation of topically adjoint master songs and didactic poems. The plays will thus unveil their highly influential character as media of popularization. 3. The detailed commentary facilitates access to the work complexes and difficult passages for the first time. The final outcome of the project is planned to be a hybrid edition, published both online (digital transcription in DTA) and in print (with adjoint E-book). Such an edition will allow traditional hermeneutic approaches as well as automatic browsing and further processing of corpus data. The work schedule extends over 7.5 years and will be realized in two closely coordinated working groups in Marburg and Siegen. Once concluded, the new edition will put future research on the plays of Hans Sachs on a sound and authoritative basis. Furthermore, it will contribute to new research in the fields of early modern theatre history, cultural and religious history and history of knowledge, as a valuable source not only for philologists, literary scholars and linguists, but also for scholars of history, religion and science history.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants