About the Project

This site provides documents about Luise Kulmus's youth in Danzig and divides this period into three parts: general background and the period before she met Gottsched, the period of courtship, the period of engagement.

In his biography of his wife Johann Christoph Gottsched devoted a few paragraphs to her youth. For the first period we can use his information to ascertain quite a bit about the social circles in which the Kulmus family moved. We also possess some early poems she wrote. For the second and third periods there are a variety of sources including letters she wrote him and epistolary poems he wrote her. To help put certain issues or people into historical context some contemporary documents have also been supplied. I have written a narrative to accompany and interpret these. Readers may choose to go directly to the documents or to follow my interpretation.

About the Site

The Louise Kulmus web publication resulted from an STG faculty grant that Professor Kay Goodman received in academic year 2003-2004. Goodman was studying the life of Louise Kulmus (Gottsched), and wanted to publish a digital monograph accompanied by primary textual and visual source materials. After discussions about the different types of hypertext publication and their different rhetorical effects, we decided on the present format. The site has three main types of information: a narrative about Kulmus, a series of topics that provide context about people, places and events that are were influential in her life, and a series of primary texts written by her and her circle.

This site was designed to be easily expandable. It currently contains only information relevant to Louise Kulmus' childhood. As more materials pertaining to her courtship and engagement are produced, they will be added. Primary source materials are marked up in XML using the TEI guidelines, transformed on-the-fly to HTML via PHP's native XSL functionality.