The Adelaide Hymnbook: Its Cultural-Historical Location and Its Linguistic-Historical Classification

Abstract

The Adelaide Hymnbook. Its Cultural-Historical Location and its Linguistic-Historical Classification

In the autumn of 2021 Trudla Malinkowa discovered a handwritten Sorbian hymnbook in the Lutheran archives in Adelaide, which is examined scientifically in the following article for the first time. The hymnbook is influenced by Moravian and Lutheran Pietism, it arose in circles of extra-ecclesiastical piety. The included songs circulated in private worship gatherings, so called conventicles. The hymnbook, as an authentic historical text, provides documentary evidence of a Sorbian song and literary culture in the 19th century, which presents manifold examples of phenomena, which have partly been given little attention before in Sorbian studies, such as the orthographic originality of Sorbian manu­scripts. As a result, new perspectives for the description of cultural, literary and linguistic developments in Sorbian studies are opened up.