A Ruler’s Consort in Early Modern Germany: Aemilia Juliana of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt by Judith P. Aikin (review)

This is a fascinating and ground-breaking study of the many cultural and social activities of a ruler’s wife in a small principality in Thuringia in seventeenth-century Germany. Aikin presents a full picture and large-scale study of a ruler’s consort, set within a lively, historical picture of her surroundings and her time. Aemilia Juliana of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt (1637–1706) was born into the class of imperial counts in the midst of the Thirty Years’ War. Orphaned at age five, she was raised by her aunt and godmother Aemilia Antonia and educated at Rudolstadt with her cousins under the care of court tutors. Her aunt was instrumental in preserving Aemilia Juliana’s inheritance and in arranging in 1665 her marriage with her son—Aemilia Juliana’s first cousin—Count Albert Anton II of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt. In her position as a ruler’s consort, Aemilia Juliana lived through the seventeenth century and contributed to the important years of reconstruction after the great war.

Aemilia Juliana is best known today as perhaps the most productive of German female authors of devotional songs, leaving some 700 hymn texts—and a similar number of rhymed prayers and prose texts; many were published in Rudolstadt in collections like Geistliches Weiber-Aqua-Vit / Das ist / Christliche Lieder und Gebete (1683) and Kühlwasser in grosser Hitze des Creutzes (1699) during her lifetime and after her death in the eighteenth century. She also wrote about 300 letters per year for about 50 years (only one relatively small corpus of 430 letters addressed to her eldest sister-in-law from 1664–71 has survived), and had some responsibility for about a dozen devotional and educational publications. It is much to Aikin’s credit that she has painstakingly assembled a complete bibliography and analyzed the surviving texts, as well as the documents created on Aemilia Juliana’s behalf, for the “archival record of the public, official, and legal life of this seventeenth-century countess contains much of interest for the study of the legal rights and activities of women of her class” (8). Aikin is thus able to read and interpret many of the devotional texts that have until now been the only focus of attention and to acknowledge that such texts “reflect an aesthetic no longer appreciated or well understood” (12). Aikin can first present a vivid picture of the vagaries, ceremonies, duties, and significance of “Becoming a Ruler’s Consort” (19–56). With this role the cultural activities in “Enthroned at the Court of Muses” (57–100) assume a new meaning, such as the laudatory poems addressed to her as the “tenth Muse,” the devotional paintings, allegorical frontispieces and representations, the staging of performances and musical events. Patronage, organization, and representation are important activities. The chapter “Partner in a State Marriage” (101–136) establishes Aemilia Juliana’s “Practical Interventions” (119) as an unofficial participation in governance through her poetry, prayers, and charity work, her sense of responsibility for the poor and destitute, her support for pharmaceutical information and supplies, and her entrepreneurial involvement (in timber production and mining) in the economic recovery of the principality. Though not directly involved in governance, “Aemilia Juliana was a full partner to her husband, her activities on behalf of the principality and its inhabitants complementing and supplementing his” (129).

The most interesting chapter (for this reviewer), “Advocate for Women” (137–174), outlines Aemilia Juliana’s role as a learned woman and her efforts for the education of girls. Rudolstadt can be considered a model in the Lutheran territories for the push for universal education started in the Reformation. Through her texts, among them role-playing songs, and her practical interventions focusing on the professionals who led the churches and schools, Aemilia Juliana contributed to improving the education of children. She also wrote for and comforted pregnant and birthing women. In the networks for...