Trauer und Gedächtnis

The present study comprises two edited diaries by Austrian aristocratic women of the 16th/17th centuries and a funeral sermon and focuses on the less well-known early modern everyday culture of this social stratum. The Protestant diarist Esther von Gera, who for religious reasons emigrated from Styria to Upper Austria, and her Catholic granddaughter Maria Susanna von Weiss discuss a number of problems: Alongside illness, birth, marriage, concern for their sons at war and festivities, the focus is particularly on death and the memory of the deceased. The two texts by the aristocratic women, entered together in a ”Book of Memory“, concern in particular the deaths of the two husbands and the following period of widowhood, in part described in lyrical form.