Literature in times of scriptlessness: Low German literature from 1650 to 1800. Multilingual literary practices with Low German using the example of the wedding poem

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Doreen Brandt
• Subject Area: German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 567922774

From the 16th to the 17th century, a fundamental process of linguistic change took place in northern Germany. After Low German writing had emancipated itself from Latin in the second half of the 14th century, a second written language change in the history of the Low German language was heralded at the beginning of the 16th century with the adoption of High German. This was completed in the middle of the 17th century. It was not until the 19th century that the so-called 'reliterarization' of the Low German language. To put it in a nutshell, we can therefore say that the Low German language was not a written language in the period from about 1650 to 1800. Two questions therefore arise - on the one hand, how a literature in a language that was about to lose or had already lost its written-language status was actually constituted, and on the other hand, what literary production in Low German ultimately made possible in view of the change of written language. The “Niederdeutsche Bibliographie” by Conrad Borchling and Bruno Claußen (1931–1936, 1956) also lists 1619 printed works for this period of scriptlessness. Most of these are literary texts in the narrower sense, including more than 800 wedding poems. This indicates that when the Low German language was made literarily productive, this most likely happened with the wedding poem. So, if we want to close the research gap that exists between the Middle Low German literature up to the 17th century and the New Low German literature from the 19th century onwards and to gain insights into Low German literature after the change of written language, we have to look at the wedding poems. The project is intended as a research contribution to questions and phenomena of literary multilingualism and is therefore located at the intersection of literary studies and linguistics. A typographical, literary and linguistic analysis of a corpus of 182 prints with Low German and High German wedding poems is planned from a twofold comparative perspective: On the one hand, representatives of the genre from two places or regions will be examined comparatively. The basis for this is a corpus of poems from Bremen and Rostock. Secondly, these local corpora are composed of Low German and High German wedding poems, so that a relationship between Low German and High German texts can also be determined. The analyses outlined above are intended to test the hypothesis that the wedding poems are the result of literary practices with Low German and that these practices ensured the continued existence of Low German literature even after the change of written language.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants