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

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments ❧ Newspapers have played an important role in my life as far back as I can remember. So have novels ever since I picked the first one off the bookshelf in my parent’s home in Germany. As a teenager, I thought I might like to be a journalist. Instead, I entered the academy, studied comparative literature, and specialized first in medieval and later in early modern German and French literature and culture. As I progressed in my chosen field, I discovered that this period, specifically the seventeenth century, gave birth to one of my favorite media—namely, newspapers as we understand them today. Moreover, in the course of my research on the prolific journalist/ writer Johannes Praetorius (1630–80), I realized that news reports exerted an extraordinary influence on his literary production. Through my work on Praetorius, I found my way to another hugely successful writer of the period, Eberhard Werner Happel (1647–90), who, like Praetorius, also excelled in journalistic writings. Beyond this, however, Happel produced lengthy and immensely popular novels, many, though not all, based on news reports. Happel’s novelistic masterworks have attracted and kept my attention for the past several years, eventually resulting in the study you have before you. As is always the case with a multidisciplinary and multimedia research project, many debts have been incurred, which I would like to acknowledge with much gratitude. First, I am thankful to Washington University’s generous research support in both time and money, without which this project could not have been undertaken. I was able to significantly advance this work during two sabbatical leaves. The resources of Washington University’s Olin Library provided materials on-site and access to resources elsewhere, through the library’s excellent loan services and the expert assistance of Brian Vetruba. xii • Acknowledgments This project, as others before it, has benefited from Carol Jenkins’s incomparable research and editorial skills. John Morris once again, lent his impeccable editorial assistance as I moved toward completion of the volume . I have worked with both of them in productive and enjoyable cooperation for many years. Without Jill Edwards’s professional support and warm friendship, many tasks might have never seen completion. Having discovered Happel’s novels much earlier, my colleague and friend Lynne Tatlock supported this project through her own research on this author. Moreover, she supplied me with a copy of the Ungarische KriegsRoman , all six volumes of it. This generous act of sharing made it possible for me to do much of the work in my St. Louis home. Regular research sojourns at the Herzog-August-Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel , Germany, moved the project forward at a steady pace. I am happy to express my deep gratitude to the library’s professional and helpful staff, particularly Jill Bepler, Volker Bauer, and Christian Hogrefe. I would like to thank Megan Armstrong for first introducing me to her group of “Ottomans,” scholars researching the Ottoman/European interaction in the early modern Mediterranean. I am indebted to the ever helpful and knowledgeable Holger Boening, director of the Institut für Deutsche Pressforschung at the University of Bremen , Germany. He and Volker Bauer hosted a conference on early modern media at the Herzog August Bibliothek through which I met a number of helpful colleagues in the field. Following this conference, Holger Böning introduced me to Albert Gelver, whose tireless sleuthing and copying provided me valuable newspaper materials from the holdings of the institute. Albert Gelver put me in touch with Peter Bode, who made available to me a copy of Fürst Abaffi’s Manifesto. I am most grateful to all of them. My colleagues Magnus Ressel, Markus Friedrich, Wolfgang Kaiser, and Anna Busquets Alemany permitted me access to their research, some of it yet to be published. My book is infinitely richer because of their generosity. At a conference on the topic of outsiders (Aussenseiter) that was hosted by Rudolf Schlögl and held in Konstanz, Germany, I met colleagues whose research on pirates and corsairs proved to be very important to this book. My colleague from Down Under, Matthew Glozier, alerted me to his monograph on Friedrich von Schomberg, thus introducing me to information that I otherwise would have missed. During the last ten or so years, my colleague and friend Flemming Schock, expert in all things Happel, helped me in ways too numerous to count. He provided information about online and print resources. He [18.119.120.120] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 07...