6. Epistolary
In the module »Epistolary« August Hermann Francke's correspondence is provided in digital form. The nucleus of the manuscript tradition are the 3,000 letters from August Hermann Francke preserved in the Archives of the Francke Foundations. Moreover, about 2,000 letters from and to Francke preserved in over 50 national and international archives, libraries and private collections are made accessible.
In the August Hermann Francke study center, these letters were described within the scope of projects supported by the German Research Foundation in a formal and textual way by subject headings and short summaries.
In addition to a targeted search for people, places, dates and keywords, the database enables an overarching full text search in the transcribed letters. A calendar function (cf. LISTS] also enables access through the date of the letters.
Digital provisions
The letters from Francke in the Archives of the Francke Foundations are made available with metadata and digital copies in the Epistolary. Letters to Francke from the archive of the Francke Foundations are successively added in the same way, including the letters attached to his diaries in the collection ‘Tagebücher/Selbstzeugnisse’. All other letters to Francke in the Archives of the Francke Foundations are accessible in the Archive Database.
Letters from Francke located in foreign institutions and private collections are provided likewise with metadata and digital copies in the Epistolary, if a permission for publication was granted.
For letters to August Hermann Francke in foreign institutions, only metadata are available in the Epistolary.
The download of the documents in PDF format is only possible for letters owned by the Archives of the Francke Foundations for legal reasons. Unfortunately, letters from Francke in the holdings of the Evangelical-Lutheran Mission Works (shelf mark ALMW/DHM) can not be digitalized due to their bad conservation status.
Transcribed letters
Transcriptions of selected letters are be made available here. On the one hand, these were created by selected scholars with the help of an online editor; on the other, they were copied from transcriptions published in book form, such as Francke’s "Reisebriefe" to his wife Anna Magdalena Francke dating from 1717-18 that were published by Gustav Kramer in 1875 (cf. Neue Beiträge zur Geschichte August Hermann Franckes. Ed. by Gustav Kramer. Halle 1875, pp. 40-61) or Franckes letters to Carl Hildebrand von Canstein, published by Peter Schicketanz (cf. Der Briefwechsel Carl Hildebrand von Cansteins mit August Hermann Francke. Ed. by Peter Schicketanz. Berlin [u.a.], de Gruyter, 1972 (= Texte zur Geschichte des Pietismus, 3, 1). The transcribed letters are marked in green in the list view and can be accessed via the facet »With transcription«. They are presented in the Portal along with the associated digital versions in a synoptic format and are searchable with the help of keywords.
Index of Persons
The tab Index of Persons is used to call up and list the names of persons included in the collection Epistolary in alphabetical order. If you click on the name, the biography of the person is listed. Below that, up to three assigned titles are displayed in short form with a preview image and sorted by date. If necessary, further titles can be called up via the button [VIEW ALL]. Clicking on a short title or the preview image leads to the complete title display if the person is listed in the metadata. If a person is not in the title record but in the transcribed text of a manuscript, a preview with the text excerpt is called up first. Clicking on this will take you to the display of the page on which the person in question appears. Please note that persons appearing in the metadata of documents that have been transcribed are only displayed via the title record. It is recommended to search for the person you are looking for in the transcribed text using a separate search query in the field "Search in document".
It is also possible to search for biographies starting from the title record. For this purpose, persons who have a GND number are marked with a person symbol 
in the metadata. If a person does not have a GND number, no connection to the Bio-bibliographic Register can be made at this time. If a person is marked with a link in a transcribed text, this link leads directly to the biogram in the Bio-bibliographical Register.
Thanks
We thank all institutions for providing the digital images and giving the permission for the publication of the letters.
Requesting your cooperation
We are grateful for any information on Francke correspondence not included in the Epistolary, especially from the collections of other institutions. In addition, any information about possible errors in the transcriptions would be appreciated. Relevant notification is welcomed by Dr. Jürgen Gröschl.
