A Ruler’s Consort in Early Modern Germany: Aemilia Juliana of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt

Abstract

Court studies remains a booming business and nowhere is this more true, it seems, than in the German-speaking lands, blessed—or cursed as the case may be—with numerous large and medium-sized ‘major’ courts and almost innumerable duodecimo ones. Simultaneously, the interest in courts has also fructified, and been fructified by, several studies of princesses, margravines and duchesses that have, to a large extent, significantly shifted our understanding of courts and courtly environs. Judith P. Aikin’s volume about Aemilia Juliana of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt makes a worthy contribution to this literature and, like the best of the genre, offers far more than a finely-sketched portrait of a lady: it also provides a subtle study—as the title indicates—of a consort ’s part in the ruling of a territory and of the unique contributions Aemilia Juliana made in that role. Aikin’s task was not an especially easy one. She lacked some standard sources for a biography. Although Aemilia Juliana was a ‘prodigious correspondent’ (p. 7), the approximately 430 surviving letters are ‘limited in that nearly all address a single recipient over a relatively short period of just six years early in her marriage’ (p. 8), an apparently happy marriage to her cousin that lasted some forty-one years until her death in 1706. Thus, Aiken, unlike, for instance, Alisha Rankin (in Panaceia’s Daughers: Noblewomen as Healers in early modern Germany , 2013, her treatment of several such women as healers) could not draw on a vast correspondence to approach her subject. Nor did Aemilia Juliana and Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt dominate a political stage as did Landgravine Amalia Elisabeth and Hesse-Kassel (both so brilliantly handled by Tryntje Helfferich in The Iron Princess , 2013). One might certainly argue that Amelia Juliana deserves a book because she represented a type—the consort—central to many smaller principalities. That is indeed true and in fact forms one thread of Aikin’s argument. But Amelia Juliana was also unusual as a prolific writer of music and poems: she composed more than 700 songs and a large number of prayer texts that are still extant. Aikin skilfully mines this trove of materials, in combination with funerary and contemporary biographies, iconography, ephemera, archival records and the physical and built landscape, to produce her picture of a woman who was typical of many others in similar positions, linked to many ruling families (some of considerable political moment) and yet also an individual who developed an individualized style as a territorial female head of household ( Hausmutter ).