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1. Galantry as a European concept Within the cultural history of the early modern period, the term  galant literature denotes an important European literary movement (Literature) of the 17th and early 18th centuries; in Germany it dominated poetry between the Baroque and the Enlightenment. It reduced the Baroque rhetoricality of texts, decreased learned allusions, and thus focused on increased intelligibility of poetic language. For music, see galant style.Fundamental to galant literature is galantry, an ideal of conduct and converse (Communication) based o…

1. ConceptA comedy (German Komödie,  Lustspiel) is a drama presenting primarily comic characters and light-hearted situations. Although no fixed definition exists, some dominant characteristics can be discerned in the early modern period. The ending is generally a happy one, not infrequently a wedding as a reconciliatory celebration of life, the “ending in peace.” The setting is often an everyday or private environment, certainly not a political one. The characters are people from the lower social o…

1. DefinitionHistorical dramas are dramatic texts (Drama) based on historical material, not limited to a specific generic presentation (see Genre), but usually falling within the subcategory of  tragedy. This vague definition can be supplemented by noting several distinguishing features: historical drama claims historical authenticity for the dramatic events by means of stage directions and by-play or para-textual materials; the historical material is represented as not merely the past, but as fi…

1. Ceremonial as a readable system of signs The concept of Ceremonial (from Latin caerimonia, French cérémonial) denotes forms, rules, and behaviors that were valued as necessary and constitutive in respect of standardized, often solemnized actions in the course of social intercourse, political processes, and religious events. To this extent, it is reasonable to call ceremonial a “semiotic supersystem […] that is capable of rendering visible the political, legal, social, or religious order, and of regulating it within limits [5. 1500 f.]. Ceremonial might include visual ima…

1. DefinitionThe term school drama (or  school play) in the narrower sense denotes plays written primarily for didactic and representative purposes for performance in schools; in the broadest sense, it also includes academies and universities (in early modern England:  university drama or  university play). In early modern Europe, they were usually associated with instruction in rhetoric. They promoted practice in oratory and also provided instruction in historical, political, mythological, and theological material. A central aspect…

1. ConceptThe word “stage,” from the Vulgar Latin staticum (place to stand) via the Old French  estage, took on the sense of a raised platform for performance in the 14th century, and today generally denotes a place that is regularly used for public performance, for example, in debating, theater, or opera. In the early modern period, it could also refer to “performances” in legal proceedings or anatomy (Anatomical theater). It separates the performing space from the audience via its raised and highly visible …

1. ConceptThe folk play (German Volksstück) was a specific form of popular theater. The term is generally used in the context of German-language theater history. The most characteristic form emerged in the Vienna  Volkstheater in the late 18th century. Its heyday came in the 19th century and it spawned successors in variants of boulevard theater as well as (to this day) in sophisticated, sometimes socially critical plays. The Volkstheater [5] was relatively unstandardized and adopted effective modes of portrayal from a range of stage traditions, including m…

1. IntroductionThe word “theater” (from the Greek theatron, “place for viewing,” via Latin  theatrum, “[open-air] place for viewing [spectacles or plays]”) in the early modern period had a social sense that went far beyond watching or performing drama, and that was considerably wider in scope than today. It was neither associated with institutions, nor properly susceptible to experience and description as a single, coherent phenomenon. The fundamental characteristics of early modern theater were plurimedial…

1. Institutions and genres 1.1. Principles of lemmatization The distinction between different literary genres as specific forms of poetic expression is already found in the  Poetics  of Aristotle. The increasing criticism incurred by normative claims of genre definition, from the 18th century at the latest, and the subsequent acknowledgement that genres are phenomena subject to historical change, and hence fluid, have not diminished their significance in the classification of literary forms. On the contrary: the m…

1. Introduction The term Baroque defines an era within the early modern period perceived by scholarly consensus in terms of its specific aesthetic and cultural characteristics in the spheres of art, literature, and music. It is therefore not a term drawn from the era itself (as were, for instance, Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Romanticism), but a retrospective chronological and thematic construction of scholars seeking to characterize works of art, literature, and music and their particular desi…

1. Modernity and the late modern periodThe transition from the early to the late modern period, in the sense defined in the introductory chapter to this encyclopedia, came as a result of the range of profound changes - political, economic, technological, social, and cultural - that took place in the first half of the 19th century, culminating in the “year of revolutions” of 1848/49. Those changes came to define “modernity” in a new sense that endures to this day. To claim validity as a term for an epo…