Alongside his commercial, diplomatic, political and scholarly correspondence, Hainhofer also wrote travelogues for a court readership, created sophisticated cabinets of curiosities and traded in works of art, other luxury goods, books and manuscripts. There was a good deal of overlap in these diverse activities. These informed one another and converged in a series of travel accounts that form the core of his written legacy and provide an extraordinary resource for studying the art history and historiography of the early modern period and engaging with related disciplines. They shed light on a variety of topics, including (royal) residences and collections, the culture of the court, aristocracy and ceremonial practice, travel and art literature, cultural exchange and material culture and diplomatic and political history.

This project will present Hainhofer’s complete travel accounts for the first time in a digital edition. Its aim is to provide a modern and complex documentation of his travels in the form of facsimiles of the manuscripts and full texts together with extensive critical apparati and annotations of the text and illustrations. The first phase of the project was devoted to Hainhofer’s descriptions of his five journeys to the Munich court written between 1603 and 1636 and was concluded in 2020. It is already available on the ‘Edition’ website. The second phase will run until 2023 and will be concerned with his journeys to Nuremberg, Regensburg, Neuburg, Heidelberg (and the Upper Rhine) and Stuttgart. In the third funding phase Hainhofer’s accounts of his travels to Stettin (Szczecin), Innsbruck and Dresden will be published. The final phase of the project will be devoted to the travel journal that Hainhofer kept in his early years as a student and young adult as well as to several shorter accounts of stays in spa towns. This long-term project is scheduled to conclude in 2029.

Besides the long-awaited in-depth cataloguing of Hainhofer’s travel accounts in full, the project will also serve two key conceptual and structural scholarly objectives. One is to scrutinise the function and significance of cultural agency and transfer in a European context during a period of heightened political and confessional conflict. The other is to explore a new interdisciplinary approach in which the various disciplines will be integrated in equal measure.

Publications from the project

In cooperation with Trierer Arbeitsstelle für Künstlersozialgeschichte (Social History of the Artist Research Centre, Trier)

PURL: http://diglib.hab.de/?link=078

Funding: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation, DFG)
Duration of the current project phase: June 2020 – May 2023
Project participants: Prof. Peter Burschel (project lead, HAB), Prof. Andreas Tacke (project lead, Stiftung Leucorea), Dr Michael Wenzel (internal project lead), Dr Ursula Timann (team member), Martin de la Iglesia (team member), Stefanie Hübner (team member), Dr Nicole Brüderle-Krug (team member)

Cooperation partners / scientific advisory board: Prof. Wolfgang Augustyn (Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte / Central Institute of Art History, Munich), Prof. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, PhD (Princeton University), Dr Marika Keblusek (Universiteit Leiden), Prof. Ulinka Rublack (University of Cambridge), Prof. Kim Siebenhüner (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena)