Mediating Culture in the Seventeenth-Century German Novel: Eberhard Werner Happel, 1647-1690

Preface

Preface ❧ Parle afin que ie te voye —Madame de Scudéry, Ibrahim (1641) Seventeenth-century German literature is increasingly attracting the critical attention of scholars, who survey a variety of early modern texts in the context of culture, gender, class, media and translation studies, and, of course, history. To this we might add celebrity studies,1 or its seventeenth-century iteration, which explored and exploited the fame and notoriety of media stars like Imre Thököly (1659–1705) and Marshal Schomberg (1615–90), whom we will meet in chapter 2. Recent inquiries into what Doris Bachmann-Medick and others have called “cultural turns” have also opened exciting avenues for the study of texts that, in the past, were often set aside as mere epigones or unwieldy amalgamations in print, variously called Theatra, Universalbibliotheken , Pandecten, commonplace books, or novels.2 Eberhard Werner Happel (1647–90),3 much like his contemporaries, delighted in turning out endless series of novels, and in the process of collecting , reordering, and reorganizing knowledge, he provided, in writing, space for the permutations of history and fiction much prized by his readers.4 He 1. Joseph A. Boone and Nancy J. Vickers, eds., “Celebrity, Fame, Notoriety,” special issue, PMLA 126, no. 4 (2011). 2. Gerhild Scholz Williams, Ways of Knowing in Early Modern Germany: Johannes Praetorius as a Witness to His Time (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 11. 3. Gerhard Dünnhaupt, ed., Personalbibliographien zu den Drucken des Barock, Hiersemanns bibliographische Handbücher 3 (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1991); Walter Killy with Hans Fromm, eds., Literaturlexikon: Autoren und Werke deutscher Sprache, vol. 4 (Gütersloh: Bertelmanns Lexikon, 1989), 653–55. 4. Sylvie Thorel-Cailletteau, “The Poetry of Mediocrity,” in The Novel, vol. 2, Forms and Themes, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 71–74. viii • Preface excelled as much as a journalist as he did as a writer of knowledge literature , a fact recently explored in breadth and depth by Flemming Schock.5 Moreover, with the help and support of librarians and technicians, scholars have made significant progress in digitizing and investigating the massive encyclopedic and novelistic writings of this period while parsing their role in knowledge production and dissemination and thus their subsequent impact on the public discourse.6 While mostly neglected throughout the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century, Happel attracted a bit of critical attention in the 1930s, when Gerhard Lock devoted a study to Happel’s “courtly-gallant novels.”7 Lock contributed to critically confining Happel and his novels within a concept that, as we will see, did not at all do justice to his writerly distinction. The seventeenth-century designation of “gallant,” according to McCarthy, “originally referred to the polished manners and correct demeanor of educated aristocratic men toward others, especially toward women.” While this aspect is present in much poetry and many novels of the time, it is by no means a dominant feature of Happel’s novels.8 Moreover, Lock’s suggestion that Happel was satirized by contemporaries because of his “gallant” style lacks documentation. In fact, quite the opposite was true, as we will see in the reaction of contemporary writers discussed later in this study.9 I intend to show that to pigeonhole Happel as a mere writer on gallant topics is to seriously misread him. My proposed reevaluation of Happel’s novels will be aided by 5. Flemming Schock, Die Text-Kunstkammer: Populäre Wissenssammlungen des Barock am Beispiel der “Relationes Curiosae” von E. W. Happel, Beihefte zum Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 68 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2011). 6. Pamela H. Smith and Benjamin Schmidt, eds., Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe: Practices, Objects, and Texts, 1400–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), introduction. A selection of two hundred Theatrum texts has been digitized (along with its secondary literature) by a project funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, started at the University of Darmstadt, and transferred, with Nikola Roßbach, to Kassel (with cooperation of the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel): Welt und Wissen auf der Bühne: Die TheatrumLiteratur der Frühen Neuzeit; Repertorium, ed. Nikola Roßbach and Thomas Stäcker with Flemming Schock, Constanze Baum, Imke Harjes, and Sabine Kalff (Wolfenbüttel: Herzog August Bibliothek, 2011), http://diglib.hab.de/edoc/ed000132/startx.htm. 7. Gerhard Lock, Der höfisch-galante Roman des 17. Jahrhunderts bei Eberhard Werner Happel (Würzburg: Konrad Triltsch, 1939). 8. John A. McCarthy, “The Gallant Novel and the German Enlightenment (1670–1750),” Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 59 (1985): 49; Lock...