“Historische Fremdsprachenlehrwerke digital” captures and examines historical foreign language textbooks from the early modern period (15th to 17th century)

Historical foreign language manuals (Historische Fremdsprachenlehrwerke, FSL) are multilingual, practice-oriented texts for the acquisition of one or more foreign languages that have gained an ever-wider distribution since the 1500s. These works, written by so-called language masters, reflect Europe-wide linguistic interaction in the Early Modern period and are a valuable source for historical and cultural studies, the history of knowledge and historical linguistics. They provide a close insight into the practice of foreign language learning and a novel approach to the use of language in everyday life. However, they have hardly ever been the subject of comprehensive systematic studies.

This long-term project is dedicated to full-text collection and indexing, corpus linguistic processing, annotation and digital linking of the FSL and their analysis within the research fields of historical linguistics, cultural history and history of knowledge with a special focus on the material containing German. The project aims to investigate the practical forms of knowledge transfer about vernacular languages as well as written and, most notably, oral everyday communication in the multilingual context of Early Modern Europe. The FSL will be philologically edited, sustainably processed, and made available for further scientific analysis.

The project is jointly supported by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the Academy of Sciences and Literature, Mainz. It has research units in Berlin, Hamburg and Darmstadt.
The Academy research project “Historische Fremdsprachenlehrwerke digital“ is part of the Academies’ Programme, a research funding programme co-financed by the German federal government and individual federal states. Coordinated by the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities, the programme intends to retrieve and explore our cultural heritage, to make it accessible and highlight its relevance for the present, as well as to preserve it for the future.