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

2015; Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies; Volume: 32; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/pgn.2015.0051

1832-8334

Sybil M. Jack,

Reviewed by: A Ruler’s Consort in Early Modern Germany: Aemilia Juliana of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt by Judith P. Aikin Sybil M. Jack Aikin, Judith P., A Ruler’s Consort in Early Modern Germany: Aemilia Juliana of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World), Farnham, Ashgate, 2014; hardback; pp. 254; 30 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £60.00; ISBN 9781472423849. Early modern culture made a sharp distinction between public and private spheres, and as women rarely had a role in the public sphere their function until recently was largely ignored by historians whose interests were tightly focused on the public. Two decades of investigation into the private sphere have now cast considerable light on what women did and its significance. While the formal expectations of a royal consort could be deduced from the occasional reference to women’s actions in contemporary narrative accounts, careful examination of the duller court records have enabled historians to analyse the substantive role in which consorts were trained and expected to perform. The opening of the East German record offices after 1989 has meant that researchers like Judith Aikin have been able to carry these investigations into the many smaller courts and countries – once part of the Holy Roman Empire – that had previously been inaccessible to researchers. These investigations show both a general similarity to the role of the consort in more Western courts and a number of differences that relate to the size and expectations of the different areas. Aemilia Juliana, wife of Albert Anton, Count of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, is an exceptionally valuable subject not only because her more mundane activities can be recovered, but so also – because she was one of the great poets of late seventeenth-century Germany – can her thoughts and views. Aikin has recovered from Aemilia’s voluminous, specific and detailed writings the views that she chose to express about her life. The otherwise modest court of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt was a centre of the literary Muses with its own playwrights, artists, musicians, and even scientists, and Aikin is able to recreate many of the events that Aemilia experienced. In her discussion of the process by which her marriage was arranged and celebrated with plays, music, sonnets, banquets, and other performances, she is able to demonstrate how the ideas of the Querelle des Femmes were exploited in deference to Aemilia. Later, she gives a vivid impression of daily life in a busy court as it moved from place to place, entertained guests, both welcome and unpopular, and kept in touch with friends and neighbours. [End Page 213] Aikin warns readers that the cultural norms of Aemilia’s period are very different from those with which even committed Christians can empathise today, and despite the careful and lengthy translations of hymns of praise and sorrow she provides, it is hard for readers to put themselves in Aemilia’s place and understand what she found satisfactory about her role as a partner – a full partner but not an identical one – as she only acted in the public sphere in an unofficial way. In part, this is because we get little impression of what her husband’s political role as the count of a small state inside the Holy Roman Empire involved. Both were deeply pious Lutherans who promoted a daily religious hour, formal prayers, and household prayer meetings. The couple were publicly modest – Anton turned down the emperor’s first attempt to raise him to princely rank – but this did not deflect them from the public demonstration of their own lineage and standing or sense of their position in the wider world. For Aemilia, Aikin shows, this meant a commitment to assisting her subjects and especially the women. She became a focus for a variety of feminine networks, both local and at a distance, and her letters reveal the ways in which women near and far shared support and information. Having received an excellent education in making medicines of all sorts, Aemilia’s court, already well known for its theology, became a centre for medical knowledge and especially for the most up-to-date understandings of pregnancy, childbirth, and childcare. The works she produced to this end, with their emphasis...