Margareta Klopstock’s Letters and Works – Digital Edition

Margareta Klopstock (1728–1758) was one of the most influential intellectuals of her time. She corresponded with important contemporaries in several languages, wrote literary texts, and collaborated with her famous husband, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, on his works. Nevertheless, like most women of the eighteenth century, she has increasingly fallen into oblivion today. She is remembered only as her husband’s muse and as the inventor of the sentimental “language of the heart,” but not as an author and public figure in her own right.

The edition is part of the SNSF project «META: Margareta Klopstock’s Aesthetic Feminism». The state of transmission is precarious: around 350 documents were edited in a printed edition of the letters in the 1950s and reused in the 1960s and 1980s, while the literary writings have survived only through reprints of the first edition, «Posthumous Writings of Margareta Klopstock» (1759), which F. G. Klopstock incorporated into his own collected works. The task of the digital edition is to re-edit the letters on the basis of the manuscripts, which are held in several archives. Even greater is the task of disentangling the literary writings from the highly problematic context of the «Posthumous Writings» and thereby reversing their appropriation by F. G. Klopstock (selection, arrangement, commentary, continuations, etc.). This corrective intervention in editorial practice is based on the research conducted within the META project.

Project website and edition in progress

• Transkribus for automatic text recognition, annotation of text regions, and correction
• TEI Publisher for generating the static frontend

The digital edition fulfills the desideratum of constituting Margareta Klopstock’s work and making it accessible to the public for the first time. This edition will provide new impulses both for research on this long-neglected author and for studies of the “female” or “feminist” Enlightenment. The digitized sources and the diplomatic transcription will be made available together with the editorial commentary via a static editorial website. The TEI-XML data will be shared and archived under an open license via a FAIR repository.

Co-editors: Prof. Dr. Frauke Berndt, Céline Martins-Thomas, MA