Annotated digital edition of Philipp Hainhofer's travel and collection accounts

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The Augsburg citizen Philipp Hainhofer was the leading agent for art objects as well as for political and cultural information in the first half of the 17th century north of the Alps. As “cultural broker” of the 17th century he constantly crossed denominational and political boundaries. There was a versatile exchange between his mercantile, diplomatic-political, and academic correspondence, his travel accounts and description of artworks for courtly recipients, his complex Kunstkammerschränke and his trading with art objects, other luxuries, books and manuscripts, which outlined content and structure of the respective areas of activity. In this manner Hainhofer created classified microcosms as an answer to a denominational and political world drifting apart on the eve of the Thirty Years’ War. Hainhofer’s above mentioned spheres of action were converged in his travel accounts. They form the core of his written inheritance and provide a large store for art historical and historical research in the early modern period as well as related disciplines and this in a rich diversity concerning the study of residencies, collections, courtly, nobility, and ceremonial culture, travel and art literature, cultural exchange and material culture, history of diplomacy and politics, and travelogues as ego-document just to mention a few. This project will present Hainhofer’s complete travel accounts for the first time in an annotated digital edition. It is intended to provide a modern and complex documentation of his travels with renditions of the originals, full text, extensive critical instruments and annotations of text and image and cartographic addendum. Besides the long-awaited complete and systematical indexing of Hainhofer’s travel accounts, the project serves two conceptual-structural academic approaches. One is that it aims at focusing on the question of function and importance of cultural agency and transfer in the pan-European area during increased political and denominational conflicts, the other is that it wishes to apply an interdisciplinary approach in which the different fields of study are combined to the same degree.