Cataloguing of the correspondence and biographical documents of Veit Ludwig von Seckendorff (1626-1692)

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In the three-month extension period, the Gotha Research Library of the University of Erfurt will continue to catalogue the correspondence and biographical documents of the influential early modern scholar, statesman and constitutional theorist Veit Ludwig von Seckendorff (1626-1692), a project which has already been funded for 36 months (January 2020 to December 2022) by the German Research Foundation. Seckendorff is considered an outstanding representative of the “politicus practicus” in the German Protestant territories of the second half of the 17th century. The basis of the cataloguing project is a corpus of over 7,800 handwritten documents related to Seckendorff’s life and work. These documents are dispersed over numerous archives and libraries in the Federal Republic of Germany. Before the start of the project, these sources were largely untapped. Both their formal specifications and content will be recorded bibliographically in a high-level standardized fashion in the Kalliope Union Catalogue, thus making them systematically and comprehensively available for the first time. The project thus addresses a desideratum that has been clearly identified by scholars. Seckendorff’s vigorously cultivated and extensive network reflects his active participation in a wide variety of political, legal, theological and general scholarly discourses. The enormous potential of the project has already become apparent in the cataloguing phase to date, affording new insights into practices of erudition, everyday life, work methods, habitus and social strategies of Seckendorff and his correspondence partners. The project will therefore provide new impulses for source-based interdisciplinary research on Seckendorff, extending far beyond previous studies that have concentrated or have been based primarily on his publications. In the three-month extension period, which has already been planned in the context of the initial application, the remaining 531 documents of the corpus will be catalogued. The overall results of the project will then cover all aspects of the work and life of Veit Ludwig von Seckendorff and will be presented at an interdisciplinary and international conference. The aim of the conference, planned for March 2023, is to discuss the results in light of current research debates and in comparison to other scholars of the 17th century such as Johann Christian von Boineburg, Johann Heinrich Boecler and Philipp Jacob Spener.