Philipp Jakob Sepener: Schriften. Herzens-Gespräche und Heilige Betrachtungen (1716/1717)

Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705), the influential 17th-century Lutheran theologian and churchman, signalled the start of Pietism with his 1675 work Pia Desideria oder herzliches Verlangen nach gottgefälliger Besserung der wahren evangelischen Kirche. The “Works” of Spener, published between 1979 and 2014 include many egodocuments in the form of letters. The young Spener’s self-reflections in the form of the contemplation of religious themes are contained in this edition of the 1653 Soliloquia et Meditationes (in German Herzens-Gespräche und Heilige Betrachtungen) first published in 1716. The pietist-influenced German translation by Henriette Catharina von Gersdorff (1648–1726) is also published here for the first time from the original manuscript. Gersdorff, the “female Saxon scholar” and Zinzendorf ’s grandmother, was close to Spener both personally and in her religious beliefs, and thus created a faithful translation. A detailed afterword by the editor gives more information about this, and about posthumous publications, the period of the text’s creation, and the accompanying texts. This provides new material for the study of mentality and German studies around translation, but most notably for the study of piety in the early modern age.