Sprache und Konfession in Fürstentestamenten des Konfessionellen Zeitalters (1555–1648)

Based on a corpus of twelve wills of Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist sovereigns of three territories of the Holy Roman Empire from the period of the Confessional Age, this study investigates the influence of the confession of the testator princes on the use of language in their wills. For this purpose, three different linguistic levels (text structure, authority references, graphy) are taken into consideration. In order to classify the linguistic results, the socio-cultural background of the texts is also taken into account by using the tools of the historical pragmatics. In the appendix of the thesis the transcripts of the wills are made available for further research.