This volume is a collection of thirteen essays on aspects of German language, cultural, and textual history centered on the seventeenth century. It originated as a memorial festschrift for the historical linguist Jürgen Macha (d. 2014) and is structured around his research interests in this period, with focus on the relationship between language and religion, on witch trials, and on language contact, variation, and change.
Stephan Elspaß introduces the collection by outlining the relatively neglected place of the seventeenth century in German language historiography. Handbook chapters on Early New High German (a label which Elspaß eschews) deal mainly with the effects of the Reformation and early printing in the sixteenth century, presenting the seventeenth century, if at all, as an aftermath, the era of codification by early grammarians and lexicographers connected to Baroque language societies. The present volume takes a very different, sociolinguistic perspective, in line with the language history from below movement of which Elspaß is the main champion. Here, the focus is on how the huge increase in writing, writers, and text types allows access to real language variability in usage, not distracted by an artificial focus on an emerging standard.
The first group of essays focuses on how the division of German society into Catholic and Lutheran/Reformed affects linguistic choices, whether between Latin and German or in the elaboration of religious vocabulary. Contributions focus on inscriptions, naming traditions, and the evolution of intertextual writing. Tim Korokowski and Corinna Lucan present a satirical pamphlet from the Thirty Years’ War mocking the downfall of the Calvinist Union in the style of a will, while Claudia Wich-Reif offers a close study of the relationships between literary, documentary, and legal writing about witches.
Reports of witches’ trials offer a particularly rich source for Robert Möller's work on female appellations, in which he traces how naming conventions developed for women, showing both their individual roles and their belonging to a male head of household. The journey of the Northern belonging suffix, -sche (e.g., die Muellersche [Mrs. Mueller]), illustrates the shifts of usage and prestige between Low and High German: devalued as too dialectal for written use in the seventeenth century, it was reintroduced in literary writing in the nineteenth century to convey the local and folksy.
The second half of the volume is dedicated to studies that highlight local and regional language changes and interactions between regions. All five essays center on the Northwest, considering the interfaces between High German, Low German, and Dutch at a point of divergence and status change. Heinz Eickmans discusses the label given to Dutch in German in the seventeenth century, picking out a trend towards distinctiveness and recognition in the preference for the term Holländisch over earlier labels acknowledging the shared deutsch/duits (German/Dutch) history. Hermann Niebaum focuses on that sharing in the diary of a bilingual Dutch/Low German speaker where the writer either mixes languages or separates them, depending on his communicative intention.
The paper by Markus Denkler also focuses on language mixing, here in Westphalian lists of goods for probate, a valuable source for dialectally varied words for household goods, showing that Low German terms remain in texts with increasingly High German frames. The most substantial essay in the volume is a sociolinguistic contribution on city varieties by Arend Mihm, who compares texts from across the social spectrum in Cologne and Augsburg to demonstrate the influence of prestige on language change. In Cologne, the abrupt and lasting shift from Low to Upper German is reflected in writing by members of all layers of society. In Augsburg, changes are temporary, with accommodation to perceived prestige varieties seen in the writing of the highest social groups, but not spread down through the general population.
The main strength of this volume lies in it allowing multiple lines of access to a remarkably disparate and interesting range of little-known texts. The title cannot do full justice to its heterogeneity, while the generality of its terms may also seem to overpromise. The focus is on variety of voices, texts and regions, and readers who embrace the turn away from a linear narrative of standardization will find much here that is new and illuminating.
