Festival Culture Online - 17th Century German Imprints of Baroque Festival Culture

In its project "Festival Culture Online - 17th-Century German Imprints of Baroque Festival Culture" the Herzog August Bibliothek has digitized 314 imprints and indexed them at page level. The project was carried out in close co-operation with the project of the University of Warwick/British library, which was itself originally inspired by the Wolfenbuettel example. Metadata of 253 imprints from the Warwick/BL project could be added to the database to the effect that now 567 imprints can be searched online.

Besides presenting and indexing the digitized imprints we aimed to develop procedures to index sources distributed on the web according to shared standards. This was achieved on the basis of the festival thesaurus.

The 314 imprints from Wolfenbüttel mainly originate from the German-speaking area and date from the 16th to the beginning of the 18th century. The Warwick/BL project focused on French, Italian and English festival books, dating from 1475 till 1700.

The main criterion for selecting a title for the database was that the book (festival description, libretto, drama, etc) could be linked to a concrete event (birthday, entry, etc.). In addition, some works were chosen which can be taken as festival books in a broader sense as they contribute to our understanding of the festival culture of the early modern period.

• Database
• Project information
• Inventory of digitized imprints ordered by court residences
• Selection of Reference Bibliography
• Thesaurus for early modern Festival Books
• ICONCLASS-Browser