Mourning a Daughter: Parental Grief in a Public Sphere.

• In Event: Mourning Women at the Courts of Early Modern Germany

Abstract

When her eldest daughter, Eleonore Dorothea, died at the age of nine in 1683, Magdalena Sibylle, Duchess of Württemberg, was a widow who had already been regent for six years. There was a distinct culture of mourning cultivated at the Württemberg court to which Magdalena Sibylle brought her own traditions with her from her native court of Hesse-Darmstadt. The paper will examine the richness of these traditions in the light of the elaborate publication that the Duchess commissioned to commemorate her daughter. It will also highlight her role as author and patron and the conscious use of mourning as an element of her representional strategies as regent. Dynastic women of the German-speaking territories were well aware of the potential of funerary publications and their distribution within court circles for as an element of their own self-fashioning and as a means of cementing their own image for posterity.

Author

• Jill Bepler, Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel