oa ‘Nach dem Holländischen Jost van Vondels’

‘Nach dem Holländischen Jost van Vondels’. The seventeenth-century Maria Stuart-translation from the Saxion lawyer Christoph Kormart

Literary translations had an important role in the circulation of political ideas in Early Modern Europe. This article shows how the Saxon lawyer Christoph Kormart used Vondel’s martyr play Maria Stuart (1646) as a political instrument. In Saxony, elector Johann Georg II was not a sovereign ruler, but was politically dependent on the nobility and partially his brothers. Adding different political and baroque themes to the Vondel play, Kormart used the German translation (1672) to criticize this political constellation and warned against the dangers of a system with oligarchic tendencies.