Johann Frauenlob (16th or 17th century – 17th century) is the pseudonym of a writer in

Baroque The Baroque (, ; ) is a style of architecture, music, dance, painting, sculpture, poetry, and other arts that flourished in Europe from the early 17th century until the 1750s. In the territories of the Spanish and Portuguese empires including t ...

who published an encyclopedia of "learned women" in 1631 and described himself on the title page as (their?) "General Notarium."

Frauenlob's identity

It is not clear who is behind the pseudonym ''Johann Frauenlob''. There is no identity with Heinrich von Meißen, who was also called Heinrich Frauenlob. He lived four centuries before Johann Frauenlob. Nevertheless, the similarity of names has led to confusion. Whether the pseudonym of the baroque Johann Frauenlob intentionally refers to Heinrich von Meißen has not been researched.

Elisabeth Gössmann Maria Elisabeth Gössmann née Placke (21 June 1928, Osnabrück; — 1 May 2019, Munich) was a German Roman Catholic theologian and prominent representative of feminist theology within the Roman Catholic Church. She saw herself as a representative ...

discusses a possible parallel to the "''General Notarium der löblichen Societet der gelehrten Weiber''" – as it says on the title page of the Baroque print of Frauenlob's Frauenlexikon – a possible real female learned society, of which Frauenlob may have been the secretary.

Linda Maria Koldau Linda Maria Koldau (born October 28, 1971) is a German musicologist and was Chair of Musicology and Cultural History (formerly Knud Jeppesen's Chair of Musicology) at Aarhus University in Denmark. Since 2013 she has been director of the Coastal Ac ...

cites the same source in ''Frauen – Musik – Kultur'', according to which Johann Frauenlob may have had a connection to a Coburg professor of Eloquenz, Israel Clauderus, or may have been identical to him. Koldau cites Frauenlob several times and, like Gössmann, has written about the many similar sources that appeared at the time in the course of the ''

Querelle des femmes "The woman question", which is translated from the French term ''querelle des femmes'' (literally, "dispute of women"), refers both in historiography to an intellectual debate from the 1400s to the 1700s on the nature of women and feminist campai ...

''.

Frauenlob's lexicon of women

Frauenlob's work ''Die Lobwürdige Gesellschafft der Gelehrten Weiber'' is a (small) encyclopaedia of women who have distinguished themselves through particular intelligence, knowledge and skill in ancient and modern times. It was published in 1631 at an unknown location and is around 40 pages long; with the exception of the preface, it is

paginated Pagination, also known as paging, is the process of dividing a document into discrete pages, either electronic pages or printed pages. In reference to books produced without a computer, pagination can mean the consecutive page numbering to ind ...

. This encyclopedia was published in 2000, together with other historical

feminist Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social equality of the sexes. Feminism incorporates the position that society prioritizes the male po ...

writings of the 16th–18th centuries, in a annotated reprint of the original by

: ''Eva Gottes Meisterwerk'' 2000, Kapitel II, S. 115–159. In his preface, Frauenlob holds up the learned women to the godless, arrogant ''Maidlin'' as an example against the sin against God and admonishes the parents to give the girls a good education. Despite his noticeable respect for learned women, he thus shows the ambivalent attitude of his time towards women's achievements. Although women's skills are not praised for their own sake, a valuable lexicon was created in the process, which today plays a role in feminist research. No further writings under the pseudonym Frauenlob are known. The lexicon had a second edition in 1633.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Frauenlob, Johann 17th-century deaths 17th-century German writers Biographical dictionaries of women