German History Vol. 28, No. 3, pp.

296–309

Person and Gender: The Memoirs of the

Countess of Schwerin

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Claudia Ulbrich

Between 1723 and 1726 Charlotte Louise von Schwerin recorded her daily life. The text
she wrote survived in a copy manuscript produced in 1731 in Cologne. A superscription
says ‘Histoire De la Vie de madame la comtesse de Scheverin écrite par elle-même à ses
enfants’.1 In it the Countess of Schwerin recounts her life from the death of her mother
in 1687 until, after her conversion from Calvinism to Catholicism in 1719, she was
rejected by her husband’s family and separated from her children in 1721. Unsuccessful
attempts were made to reconvert her, until the king ordered that she be banned from
Prussia.2 She stayed for a while in Warmia (in the diocese of Ermland), Breslau, Dresden
and Cologne. The printed account of her conversion appeared in Cologne, and it has
little in common with her autobiography, of which only a copy has survived.3 Charlotte
Louise eventually made her home at the Viennese court, where conversions abounded
and were much discussed around 1700.4 From there she fought—without success—to
retain her inheritance and her marriage.
The text was compiled anonymously, but there are so many indicators pointing to a
particular context that it is not difficult to identify the compiler as Charlotte Louise,
Baroness of Heiden, born in 1684. In 1704 she had married Friedrich Wilhelm von
Schwerin, hereditary Treasurer of the Kurmark region, who since 1709 had been Lord
Chamberlain at the court of Queen Sophie Louise in Prussia.5 Historians of Prussia,
who have focused more or less exclusively on male protagonists, have hardly noticed
Charlotte Louise, who died in the Laurentius convent in Vienna in 1732, and yet many
traces of her are to be found in documents of the time.6 The wife of his minister was of

1 Bibliothèque Méjanes., Aix-en-Provence, ms. 1190–91 (662–63), 2 vols (vol 1: 698 pp.; vol. 2: 742 pp.; henceforth
Histoire). An annotated edition is due to appear in 2010, edited by Maurice Daumas and Claudia Ulbrich. The reader is
referred to this edition for detailed research. I am grateful to Maurice Daumas for transcribing the text, and to Sebastian
Kühn (Berlin), Ines Peper (Vienna) and Nina Mönich (Berlin) for their generous help in making the text accessible, and
to Gabriele Jancke (Berlin), Eva von Redecker (Berlin) and Ines Peper (Vienna) for their critical reading of this article.
2 Rome, Archivio Segreto Vaticano Segr. Stato, Germania 532–33, fol. 24, no date. I am grateful to Mrs Garms-
Cornides, who contributed to this project by conducting research in Rome.
3 Motiva, Oder Beweg=Ursachen / Warumb eine eiffrig=Reformirte Glaubens=Genoßin Diesen Glauben verlassen /
Und die Wahre allein Seeligmachende Roemisch-Catholische Religion angenohmen (Coelln, 1727).
4 On the conversions in Vienna, see Ines Peper, Konversionen im Umkreis des Wiener Hofes um 1700 (Veröffentlichungen
des Instituts für österreichische Geschichtsforschung, 55, Vienna, 2010).
5 Louis Gollmert, Geschichte des Geschlechts von Schwerin, 3 vols and 2 supplements (Berlin 1878–1928), vol. 2,
p. 356; Johann Heinrich Zedlers, Grosses vollständiges Universallexicon aller Wissenschaften und Künste (Leipzig
1743), vol. 36, p. 457.
6 In 1724, for example, after she had been expelled from Prussia and separated from her husband and children
following her conversion, Louise Charlotte von Schwerin commissioned a lawyer to monitor the interests of ‘herself,
her husband and her children, and to take appropriate legal action if he were to detect any detriment’. This gave rise
to copious documents (Berlin: Geheimes Staatsarchiv Berlin [GSTA] I Rep. 7 Nr. 13 Lit H 34). She also appealed to the
Aulic Council in Vienna and Düsseldorf.

© The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the German History Society.
All rights reserved. doi:10.1093/gerhis/ghq067
 Person and Gender: The Memoirs of the Countess of Schwerin   297

importance to the Prussian king, to the extent that he asked his envoy to send reports on
her contacts in Vienna.7 And if one is to believe the statements of Charlotte Louise in her
memoirs, the Prussian queen was so interested in certain aspects of Vienna court life that
she ordered the countess to send regular reports from Vienna to Berlin.8 It was not until

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historiography became professionalized and masculinized in the nineteenth century that
knowledge of the role of women in politics was lost: they were relegated to the domestic
sphere, and their activities were interpreted in the context of separate spheres.9 In the
last twenty years historians have devoted increasing research attention to autobiographical
texts, and this may enable such misapprehensions to be put right. This opportunity has
not so far been taken up as much as it might, since research into self testimony sources has
so far mainly focused on historical subjectivities. In this regard, it is worth noting that the
study of the history of the individual and the self, and the history of self testimony have
become established in different fields that only occasionally intersect.10 Researches into
the history of the self tend to marginalize self testimony,11 enquiring instead into names,
signatures, portraits,12 religious affiliation,13 and literature, culture and philosophy,14 or
else focusing on the family or the state as the central issue of their investigations.15
Self testimony research, on the other hand, tends to start from the sources. In 1992
Winfried Schulze declared that ego-documents would bring him ‘nearer to people in
history’. He wanted to describe as an ego-document any source ‘in which someone
gave information about themselves, whether of their own volition—say in a personal
letter, a diary, the record of a dream or an autobiographical sketch—or in other
circumstances.’16 Schulze adopted the term Ego-Dokument from Dutch academic
discourse, giving it a new meaning. His critics meanwhile also turned to the concept

7 Gollmert , vol. 2, p. 356; and GSTA, 1 HA Rep 1, Nr. 280, p. 127: Gen. Lieut. von Borck on the return [to Vienna] of
the Countess of Schwerin.
8 Histoire, tome 1, fol 49ff. : ‘J’avais eu des ordres très précis de Sa Majesté la reine de Prusse de lui envoyer des rela-
tions de tout ce qui se passerait de particulier à Vienne’ (I had received specific orders from Her Majesty the Queen of
Prussia to send reports on every particular detail of life in Vienna).
9 Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (Cambridge, Mass., 1998).
10 Peter von Moos gives an overview of the important research in ‘Einleitung’, in von Moos, Persönliche Identität und
Identifikation vor der Moderne. Zum Wechselspiel von sozialer Zuschreibung und Selbstbeschreibung (Cologne,
2004), pp. 1–25.
11 References to autobiographical writings are generally to classical writers such as Augustine, Montaigne and
Rousseau.
12 Cf., for example, Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak and Dominique Iogna-Prat, L’individu au Moyen Age: Individuation et
Individualisation avant la modernité (Paris, 2005).
13 Cf. Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Did the Twelth Century Discover the Individual?’, in Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in
the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley and London, 1982), pp. 82–109.
14 Particularly notable among more recent studies is Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and
Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (Yale, 2004). Autobiographical texts and writings, though, are not consid-
ered in Wahrman’s study.
15 Natalie Z. Davis, ‘Boundaries and the Sense of the Self in Sixteenth-Century France’, in Thomas C. Heller et al. (eds),
Reconstructing Individualism. Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought (Stanford, 1986), pp. 53–63;
David Warren Sabean, ‘Production of the Self During the Age of Confessionalism’, Central European History, 29, 1
(1996), pp. 1–18.
16 Winfried Schulze, ‘Ego-Dokumente: Annäherung an den Menschen in der Geschichte’, in Bea Lundt and Helma
Reimöller (eds), Von Aufbruch und Utopie. Perspektiven einer neuen Gesellschaftsgeschichte des Mittelalters. Für
und mit Ferdinand Seibt aus Anlass seines 65. Geburtstages (Cologne, 1992), pp. 417–50, here pp. 428–29.
298    Claudia Ulbrich

of Egodocuments,17 but for the German-speaking world proposed the word Selbstzeugnis
(self testimony) to describe texts in which the thematization of the self was to be explored
through a specific individual.18
Both these approaches focus on the issue of the self in the early modern era.19 The

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interpretation of this issue is often rather glibly ascribed to the notion that the western
idea of the individual has developed since the Renaissance. This has led to a string of
questions. Has a particular stage of consciousness or personhood yet been reached?
Has an author become independent of traditions and of religious and social relations?
What significance is accorded to a person’s ‘inner life’, and the degree to which a self-
representation is based on self-reflective intellectualization?20 The distinctiveness of
earlier epochs and societies is thus systematically ignored.21 The few works that have
explored the autobiographical writings of premodern women have been dogged by the
problem of persistent presuppositions.22 Many researchers assume that gender roles
defined women as ‘dependent, immature and cut off from “real life”’ and consigned
them to a marginalized position.23 Instead of asking about the range of this essentially
bourgeois normative discourse, whether and how the women writers had appropriated
these normative notions, and which relationships of power were effective, such
researchers have often sought to identify behind the sources an autonomous identity and
an authentic experience, in order to find a perspective from which to demonstrate that
women were forced into given roles.24

17 Rudolf Dekker, ‘Introduction’, in Dekker (ed.), Egodocuments and History: Autobiographical Writing in its Social
Context since the Middle Ages (Hilversum, 2002), pp. 7–21.
18 ‘Selbstthematisierung durch ein explizites Selbst’: Benigna von Krusenstjern, ‘Was sind Selbstzeugnisse?
Begriffskritische und quellenkundliche Überlegungen anhand von Beispielen aus dem 17. Jahrhundert’, Historische
Anthropologie, 2 (1994), pp. 462–71, here p. 463.
19 Andreas Rutz, ‘Ego-Dokument oder Ich-Konstruktion? Selbstzeugnisse als Quellen für die Erforschung des früh-
neuzeitlichen Menschen’, Zeitenblicke, 1, 2 (2002), www.zeitenblicke.historicum.net/2002/02/rutz/index.html
(consulted 3 Jan. 2010).
20 Gabriele Jancke, Autobiographie als soziale Praxis. Beziehungskonzepte in Selbstzeugnissen des 15. und 16.
Jahrhunderts im deutschsprachigen Raum (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, 10, Cologne, 2002), p. 5.
21 This is true of a number of research pieces on the self. John Jeffries, in Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism
(Basingstoke, 2004), bases his argument on a clear difference between the internal and the external self. Cf. Andreas
Bähr, Peter Burschel and Gabriele Jancke, ‘Räume des Selbst. Eine Einleitung’, in Bähr, Burschel and Jancke, Räume des
Selbst. Selbstzeugnisforschung transkulturell (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, 19, Cologne, 2007), pp. 1–12, here p. 8.
22 See the comprehensive review of the current state of research by Eva Kormann in Ich, Welt und Gott. Autobiographik
im 17. Jahrhundert (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, 13, Cologne, 2004), esp. pp. 78–93.
23 Michaela Holdenried, Autobiographie (Stuttgart, 2000), pp. 65–6. Magdalena Heuser similarly points out the sig-
nificance of ‘gender roles’, which are described as an ‘alternative reality’ and set against literary representations:
‘Einleitung’, in Heuser, Autobiographien von Frauen. Beiträge zu ihrer Geschichte (Untersuchungen zur deutschen
Literaturgeschichte, 85, Tübingen, 1996), pp. 1–12, here p. 3. On the differing ways in which historical and literary
research have gleaned material from autobiographical texts, see James S. Amelang, ‘Saving the Self from
Autobiography’, in Kaspar von Greyerz (ed.), Selbstzeugnisse in der Frühen Neuzeit. Individualisierungsweisen in
interdisziplinärer Perspektive (Schriften des Historischen Kollegs, 68, Munich, 2007), pp. 129–40.
24 This becomes especially clear when particular remarks by women are described as modesty topoi. Essentialist
notions of the individual often become the measure by which a judgement can be made about when the ‘real I’ is
speaking and when a woman writer is adopting a mask. The same is true of research on uneducated men. See
Claudia Ulbrich, ‘Schreibsucht? Zu den Leidenschaften eines gelehrten Bauern’, in Alf Lüdtke and Reiner Prass (eds),
Gelehrtenleben. Wissenschaftspraxis in der Neuzeit (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, 18, Cologne, 2008), pp. 103–12,
here pp. 111–2.
 Person and Gender: The Memoirs of the Countess of Schwerin   299

The link to the private, intimate and individual sphere is clearer still in France, where
in recent years much research had been brought together under the heading Les écrits du
for privé (ego-documents).25 This field includes the research of Maurice Daumas, who
discovered the copy of the manuscript of the Countess of Schwerin and first explored it

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in his work on the love-match in the early modern era.26 Daumas is principally interested
in the religious ideas of the countess, and shows that she was torn between her love for
God and her love for her husband. One of his central points is that with the growth of
the notion of a reciprocal relationship based on mutual love, women especially found
it difficult to accept the model—derived from Chapter 7 of Paul’s first letter to the
Corinthians—of love owed partly to God and partly to the spouse. The countess of
Schwerin, separated because of her conversion from husband and children, is for
Daumas a confirmation that religious belief had gained the upper hand in the world.
His exploration of the tension within married life between love for God and love for the
spouse points to a discourse that altered the understanding of marriage in Christian
Europe in the seventeenth century. Was there also a change in the understanding of the
self, of the person?
In order to answer this question, we need first of all systematically to historicize the
idea of the self, of the person, and to establish that the European concept of the
autonomous individual is limited both in time and in space. It cannot be called a universal
category, nor can it be used as an explanatory concept for different historical eras.27
Instead of following Marcel Mauss’s reflections and setting up against this ego-centric
concept of the person an opposing socio-centric one,28 the following reflections should
be seen as arising out of a concept of the person as related to their context and their
social circumstances, and taking integral account of their personal agency.29 The ‘person’
should be understood as a cultural and historical category, and interpreted from a
perspective centered on the agent. This approach enables us to understand self-narration
as a form of communicative action in which writers present themselves within their own

25 Jean Pierre Bardet and Francois-Joseph Ruggiu (eds), Au plus près du secret des cœurs? Nouvelles lectures
historiques des écrits du for privé en Europe du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 2005).
26 Maurice Daumas, Le mariage amoureux. Histoire du lien conjugal sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris, 2004).
27 Ute Luig, ‘Dynamische Konstrukte: Vorstellungen zu Person, Selbst und Geschlecht in afrikanischen Gesellschaften’,
in Gabriele Jancke and Claudia Ulbrich (eds), Vom Individuum zur Person. Neue Konzepte im Spannungsfeld von
Autobiographietheorie und Selbstzeugnisforschung (Querelles. Jahrbuch für Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung
10, Berlin 2005), pp. 29–50.
28 Marcel Mauss, ‘Une Catégorie de l’Esprit Humain: La Notion de Personne, Celle de “Moi”’, Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute, 68 (1938), pp. 263–81 (Huxley Memorial Lecture; Engl. trans.: ‘A Category of the Human
Mind: The Notion of Person; The Notion of Self’, in Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins and Steven Lukes (eds), The
Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 1-25; also in Paul du Gay, Jessica
Evans and Peter Redman (eds), Identity: A Reader (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi, 2000), pp. 325–45. The
problem of the opposition between the egocentric and the sociocentric resides in their tendency to ignore the social
and the agency respectively.
29 This is the approach of the DFG Forschergruppe 530, ‘Self Testimony in Transcultural Perspective’ (www­­.
fu-berlin.de/dfg-fg/fg530). The concept is further explained in Jancke and Ulbrich, Vom Individuum zur Person,
pp. 7–27. (This article is forthcoming 2010 in English, entitled ‘From the Individual to the Person: Challenging
Autobiography Theory’, in Kaspar von Greyerz, Lorenz Heiligensetzer and Claudia Ulbrich, eds, Mapping the I,
Research on Self Testimony in Germany and Switzerland.).
300    Claudia Ulbrich

network of relationships.30 As Gabriele Jancke emphasizes, self testimony can thus be

read as ‘sources for the self-integration of the authors into the social contexts of their
time’—a self-integration that works not only pragmatically, but often also conceptually.31
This assumes that a good description is available of ‘all the aspects of the situation in

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which the author finds her- or himself and in which she or he is autobiographically
active.’32
Gabriele Jancke insists, both correctly and importantly, that the writing of a text
should be the starting-point for analysing it, but in practice it is very hard to achieve
this and it rarely happens. In general, we know little about the biography of writers,
and indeed when they are little known, finding further information is often a difficult
and demanding task. Charlotte Louise, Countess of Schwerin, lived in a world where
writing was widespread. Her 1400-page life-story points to other possible sources of
information about her, and it is thus possible to create a coherent picture of her from
a variety of documents. There is insufficient space in this essay to explore her life in
detail, but Section I below discusses the relationship between her biography and her
autobiography. Alongside the biographical context, the texts themselves often pose a
problem. For those wanting to read self testimony as a record that will bring together
and make sense of perceptions and experiences that are personal and related to the
individual self,33 it is necessary to have critical editions, but these are usually only
available for the well-known classics. The writers are generally Christian, non-
aristocratic, educated, white, European, male authors of multiple works.34 The
Countess of Schwerin’s life-story is itself not available in the original, but the copy
we have was compiled during her lifetime. There are many misspellings and marginal
comments, which suggest that the copyist may have made changes to the text. There
are even errors about times and places. Did the copyist make these mistakes? Was
this deliberate, in order to confuse the reader, or did the copyist make careless errors?
After a short analysis of these transmission issues in Section II, we shall explore the
extent to which such memoirs can be read as self testimony. Adopting the actor-centric
approach leads to an assumption that writers create social reality for themselves and
their audience through their writing. An example examined in Section III will show
how multi-layered and contradictory this can be. In the light of the concrete findings
of this enquiry we shall conduct a brief concluding systematic investigation of the
concepts of the person and of gender, and assess the significance of self testimony as
sources of norms and normalization practices and their value as sources on issues of
norms, society and public life.

30 Gabriele Jancke, ‘Autobiographische Texte—Handlungen in einem Beziehungsnetz. Überlegungen zu

Gattungsfragen und Machtaspekten im deutschen Sprachraum von 1400–1620’, in Winfried Schulze (ed.),
Ego-Dokumente. Annäherung an den Menschen in der Geschichte (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, 2, Berlin,
1996), pp. 73–106 (English trans: ‘Autobiographical Texts: Acting within a Network. Observations on Text Type
and Power Relations in the German-Language Regions from 1400 to 1620’, in v. Greyerz et al., Mapping
the I).
31 Jancke, Autobiographische Texte, p. 75.
32 Jancke, Autobiographische Texte, p. 76f (emphasis in original).
33 This is described as an intention of the series ‘Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit’.
34 Ulbrich and Jancke, ‘Einleitung’, Vom Individuum zur Person, p. 13.
 Person and Gender: The Memoirs of the Countess of Schwerin   301

The memoirs of the Countess of Schwerin exemplify the ways in which biography and
autobiography shed mutual light on each other. This is true both in terms of research

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and of subjects. Without her memoirs, it would be practically impossible to conduct
research into the life of Charlotte Louise von Schwerin: the sources touching her and her
family are scattered among many different archives, and the family relationships are so
complicated—due to many marriages between close relatives, and the consequent
inheritance rights and conflicts—that it is difficult to distinguish between different
families and to make sense of the genealogical data.35 Charlotte Louise’s father took as
his second wife Louise Charlotte von Schwerin, who, the memoirs record, played a
decisive part in ensuring a match between her almost identically named stepdaughter36
and her brother Friedrich Wilhelm; this suggests that the writer of the memoirs to a
certain extent considered the two families, von Schwerin and von Heiden, to be the same
family, and it is clear that families competed against each other, so the question as to what
exactly was meant by ‘family’ can only be answered in a context-specific way.
For the nobility among whom she lived, name and family crest were more important
in determining status than paternal ancestry.37 When Charlotte Louise, Countess of
Schwerin, commissioned a lawyer in 1724 to represent the interests of herself, her
husband and her children at the reading of her father’s will, this implied that—on a
formal level at least—he was also representing the interests of Friedrich Wilhelm against
his sister, who was also his mother-in-law and the widow of the late General von Heiden.38
At this point Friedrich Wilhelm was already separated from his wife. Even after her
divorce in 1725, she was not willing to acknowledge the separation and still called herself
Countess of Schwerin. From Vienna, she made objections to the divorce proceedings.
In her petition to the Vatican in 1731 she still described herself as the dowager Countess
of Schwerin—in effect claiming to be treated as if she were a widow, with the status
appropriate to her union with Friedrich Wilhelm von Schwerin, and clearly belonging to
the von Schwerin family.39
These complicated and highly volatile relationships cannot be explored in full here,
but they indicate how difficult it is to see marriage and family as secure institutions, giving
structure to the lives of women. Accessible sources such as treatises show that there were
clear normative expectations. A quick examination of legal documents show that in real
life, things were more complicated. Changes in family affiliations made it difficult to
identify even the duties associated with an individual’s status. A cursory look at the family

35 A further difficulty is the lack of access to a large proportion of the archival material concerning the aristocracy.
Genealogical information, the European genealogical tables for example, can be particularly unreliable where
women are concerned. It was difficult to determine the date of birth of Charlotte Louise, Baroness von Heiden, from
the archive of the Evangelische Kirche in Wesel. I am grateful to Herr Gottaut for his kind help in discovering the date
of her baptism in that same archive. References to her age in the Histoire are unclear and on occasion wrong.
36 Both are referred to in the sources as Louise Charlotte or Charlotte Louise. It is only through establishing clearly their
respective families of origin that we are able to distinguish them.
37 The father of Charlotte Louise ordered, for example, that in certain circumstances his sister’s sons should inherit
from him. This assumed that they would take on his name and his crest (Source: his will.).
38 GSTPK I Rep. 7, Nr. 13, unpag.
39 Rome, Archivio Segreto Vaticano (ASV) Segr. Stato, Germania 288 and 532–33.
302    Claudia Ulbrich

relationships between the Heidens and Schwerins is sufficient to establish that any
investigation of the concept of the person will require a closer analysis of the relationship
between name, crest, marriage, family and relatives, carefully noting the different
positions of the women in the households.40 The investigation cannot rely on self

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testimony documents alone.
The family of Charlotte Louise was not only her father’s but also that of her aunt,
Janne Margriete von Arnhem, in whose household she had grown up and benefited from
an education preparing her for life as an influential aristocrat in Gelderland.41 The fact
that Charlotte Louise was a member of the landed nobility in Niederrhein means that
many of her remarks about life at court can be identified as belonging to a discourse that
was becoming significant among the nobility of Europe in the second half of the
seventeenth century.42 The ways of life of court nobility and landed nobility were seen as
different, indeed as completely opposite. Research on the English aristocracy has shown
that the landed nobility were seen as soft, and opposed to the way of life practised at
court.43 Girls were educated according to different principles, either to live quietly as a
country lady, or to be a more worldly lady at court.44 Charlotte Louise did not fit in with
either of these patterns, but was always a critical observer of the different mores of the
various courts, and wrote full accounts of similarities and differences. The issues she
writes about arose out of her daily life: which bed she slept in, when she stayed with her
parents-in-law; who was at such-and-such a ball, and for how long; she describes fashion,
education, religion, rituals and religious observance, health and illness, love, grief and
loss. She compares different habits, ascribing them to particular religious or social groups,
or expressing indignation or surprise that certain things are not normal, or are unusual;
on other occasions she writes of other things, such as the use of a bedroom for things that
we would now consider to be public, as being entirely self-evident.45

II

It is the subjects of ego-documents, and their narrative techniques, that provide

fascinating material for gender studies. They give us insights into norms and normative
social practices, especially, to use Judith Butler’s concept, in relation to gender
regulations. A combination of biographical and autobiographical research can yield a

40 See Michaela Hohkamp, ‘Sisters, Aunts and Cousins : Familial Architectures and the Political Field in Early Modern
Europe’, in Jon Mathieu, Simon Teuscher and David Sabean (eds), Kinship in Europe: Approaches to Long-Term
Developments (1300–1900) (New York, 2007), pp. 128–45.
41 Johan Carel Bierens de Haan, Rosendael, Groen Hemeltjen op Aerd. Kasteel, tuinen en bewoners sedert 1579
(Zutphen, 1994). After Louise Charlotte, against her aunt’s will, agreed to the marriage with Friedrich Wilhelm von
Schwerin, Lubbert Adolf Torck—also brought up by the aunt—became the heir of Rosendael in 1721.
42 Gudrun Gersmann, ‘Landadel’, in Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit (Stuttgart, 2008), vol. 7, pp. 455–58.
43 J. Broad, Transfoming English Rural Society: The Verneys and the Claydons, 1600–1820 (Cambridge, 2004). Jan van
Arnhem, in whose household Louise Charlotte had grown up, was educated and artistic, wrote and published both
sacred and secular verse, possessed a well-stocked library and designed Baroque gardens: Bierens de Haan,
Rosendael.
44 Anke Hufschmidt, Adlige Frauen im Weserraum zwischen 1570 und 1700 Status—Rollen—Lebenspraxis
(Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission für Westfalen, 15, Münster, 2001), p. 116.
45 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, 199), Ch. 5.
 Person and Gender: The Memoirs of the Countess of Schwerin   303

reconstruction of concrete situations that reveal the tangle of norms within which the
person evolved.46
Charlotte Louise’s youth, spent with her aunt Janne Margriete in Rosendael castle
near Arnhem; her life at the courts of Berlin and Vienna and on the estates in

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Brandenburg and East Prussia; the legal dealings concerning various inheritance
matters; the petition to the pope; all these elements can only be brought together as
referring to a single person because of the clues in the autobiographical account
about the principal movements in her life and her complex family relationships. This
is to some extent a two-way process: in order to decode information from the
autobiography, the reader needs to tune into which events the writer chooses to
write about and which to leave out, even though some of the latter would seem to the
modern reader to be of great interest. Any assessment of such issues depends on the
quality of the material available, and in the case of women writers this is not often
good. No original manuscript of the memoirs of the Countess of Schwerin has yet
been found. They have survived in a copy, and we know only very little about how it
came to be made. The hand suggests a professional scribe (male or female), but one
who made many mistakes. Some of these give the impression that the scribe simply
copied and made occasional errors, or made corrections without truly understanding
the material. An example of this is the description of a stay Charlotte Louise made
at the court of Hanover. The author, who is often very precise in indicating timing,
writes that she went with her husband to Berlin at the beginning of February 1705,
about eight weeks after their marriage. They travelled via W,47 where the body of the
very recently deceased king still lay in state. There is no doubt that this in fact refers
to Hanover, and that the body lying in state is that of Queen Sophie Charlotte, whose
death, funeral procession and burial at the beginning of the year 1705 was the
subject of much public attention.48 This confusion cannot be laid at the door of the
writer, since she subsequently lived at the Prussian court and followed the funeral
ceremonial from Berlin. There is no reason that she should mask the name here, as
she has done elsewhere, so we must conclude that the text was copied by someone
who was not interested in it and changed it in error. In other places it seems that the
scribe checked facts, or completed information from his or her own knowledge. To
the remark that ‘my father lost my mother when I was a little over a year’ was added
a note that the mother had been a Calvinist.49 In another place, where the writer is
talking of her husband, there is a note, presumably added by the scribe, that Friedrich
Wilhelm remarried, and had by the time of writing died.50 We cannot know whether
the scribe omitted some passages.
And finally, there is also scope for uncertainty when the reader takes into account the
self of the writer and is on the lookout for discontinuities and contradictions. When was

46 Cf. Butler’s reflection that ‘the “I” that I am finds itself at once constituted by norms and dependent on them but
also endeavors to live in ways that maintain a critical and transformative relation to them’: ‘Introduction: Acting in
Concert’ in Butler, Undoing Gender (New York, 2004), pp. 2–26, here p.3.
47 She uses ‘W’ as an abbreviation of Wesel, where her father lived.
48 On the funeral, see Iselin Gundermann, Sophie Charlottes letzte Reise. Tod und Bestattung der Königin von Preußen
(Karwe, 2005).
49 Histoire, vol. 1, fol. 3.
50 Histoire, vol. 2, fol. 344.
304    Claudia Ulbrich

the text copied, and in what precise circumstances? Charlotte Louise may have started to
write the text in Ermland (in the Warmie region), where she was receiving support and
mentoring as a new convert,51 or she may have written it in Cologne, where she was busy
with family affairs and where she was in contact with the Jesuits.52 Both these facts could

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have influenced the circumstances and manner in which the text was written. There
could be various ways of understanding the reasons the author gives in her introduction53
for writing the text. She begins with a reference to her life, saying that it has been so
remarkable that she wants to write it down. This appears initially to suggest that she has
no other object in view other than to put together for her own benefit an overview of the
events of her life. She then emphasizes that she is writing in order to give advice to her
children. They are to learn from her example, her experiences and her openness to self-
examination about the possible consequences of striving for a glittering career. Finally,
she turns to Jesus Christ, who has brought her onto the right path, and stresses that she is
now able to judge the fatal consequences of her own behaviour, and that she is an
example to anyone who has given to the world that which belongs only to God.54
The author’s difficult situation in 1721 was a consequence of the public knowledge of
her conversion, and this strongly suggests that in spite of the different reasons offered,
the text is in fact an account of her conversion. The form and the structure she adopts
are quite different from the printed account of her conversion, which was published in
Cologne in 1727 and appears to follow a pattern widely adopted for such accounts,55 but
there are possible links. The writer refers several times to someone who asked her to write
the account, and explains on several occasions that she is writing her autobiography as
an act of obedience. Several passages where the writer turns to God are in startling
contrast to very concrete information about her dowry or her wedding gifts. The
impression is given that she is bringing together here different facts about her life that
were significant in the fluctuating legal debates about her inheritance and her possessions.
She also inserts passages that she may have thought might serve to persuade others to
convert, or that might ensure support for her from the Vatican. From the start the story
of St Augustine serves as a leitmotiv, but this is not to be read as a sign of conversion
to Catholicism. All Christian denominations referred to Augustine when discussing
conversion to faith. His intense self-examination was a model for puritan ‘conversion
stories’.56 In the published conversion account, the conflict between the ways in

51 Henryk Zocowski, ‘Die Seelsorge im Ermland unter Bischof Christoph Andreas Johann Szembek (1724–1740)’,
Zeitschrift für die Geschichte und Altertumskunde des Ermlands (Beiheft 11, 1993; transl. of a thesis in Polish, publ.
1966).
52 I.HA, Rep. 8, Nr. 170 c (1587–1711) Pk. Nr. 2530.
53 Histoire, vol. 1, fol. 2.
54 It was not unusual to write one’s life as a moral lesson to one’s children, expecially when there was little else to leave
them as an inheritance for whatever reason, such as difficulties on religious grounds. Examples of this are the writ-
ings of Augustin Güntzer Konrad Pellikan, Reinhard Scheffer d. Ä., and those of the Countess of Lynar. See Gabriele
Jancke, ‘Selbstzeugnisse im deutschsprachigen Raum. Autobiographien, Tagebücher und andere autobiogra-
phische Schriften, 1400–1620. Eine Quellenkunde’, www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/e/quellenkunde/).
55 Peper, Konversionen, p. 185ff.
56 There is a comprehensive study of the ways in which Augustine inspired such discussions in Peper, Konversionen,
p. 186. Cf. also Rodger M. Payne, The Self and the Sacred: Conversion and Autobiography in Early American
Protestantism (Knoxville, 1998).
 Person and Gender: The Memoirs of the Countess of Schwerin   305

which Calvinism was received by the Augustinians and by the Catholics is accorded
centre stage.
It could be that the text was put together, and then expanded and edited, over a number
of years. This complicates the task of seeking clear answers to questions about the self or

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the person of the author. The text is far better adapted to approaching the research from
the other end: Charlotte Louise’s text gives clues that lead us into contexts we might not
have considered when approaching the text with presuppositions about the significance
of the person, their gender or their religion. It is by reviewing such clues and detecting
discourses that appear in the memoirs, and then measuring the intensity and refraction
of these against other discourses, that we can identify particular practices and submit
them to historical analysis so that—according to Michel Foucault—we can give shape to
our understanding of the subject.57 The contextualization of the different elements—
narration, semantics, normativity discourse, political and social conditions—can provide
an insight into the assumptions that linked Enlightenment thought to the concept of the
person. Instead of projecting back Enlightenment concepts of individuality and freedom
and assuming that these will open a window to the authentic experiences ‘beyond the
text’,58 we should, as Andreas Bähr suggests, address the question ‘of the differing historic
and cultural ways and means of describing oneself as a sentient, acting person.’59 Such a
context-related analysis of discursive self-images also opens up the norms that were
significant for the person. The following example illuminates this issue.

III

Following the introduction, in which Charlotte Louise gives the various reasons that moved
her to write her live story, she begins with a short section about her mother. She writes:
My father lost my mother when I was little more than a year old. She was apparently a very worthy and
dutiful woman, a woman of the world, and she was widely quoted as an example to follow. She was very
religious, and gave equal share to caring for her household and doing her duty to the church, and love for
God and charity were the whole purpose of her life. She wept much over her children, in the hope that
her tears would bestow God’s blessing on them, and her dearest wish, which she confessed to close friends,
was that she should be blessed like St Monica, and that her children would follow in the footsteps of
St Augustine.60

57 Michel Foucault, ‘Vom klassischen Selbst zum modernen Subjekt’, in Hubert L. Dreyfus, Paul Rabinow and Michel
Foucault, Jenseits von Strukturalismus und Hermeneutik (2nd edn, Frankfurt/Main, 1994), pp. 281–92, here p. 289.
Cf. with this, and especially with the heterosexual matrix used to analyse gender relationships, Isabell Lorey, ‘Der
Körper als Text und das aktuelle Selbst: Butler und Foucault’, Feministische Studien, 2 (1993), pp. 10–21, here p. 19:
‘Machteffekte produzieren die eigene Körperwahrnehmung, die Praktiken des eigenen Selbst als Mann oder Frau.
Sie bringen den Blick auf die Welt und das Selbstverständnis beständig hervor, was nicht mit einer unentrinnbaren
Determination verwechselt werden darf.’
58 Kaspar von Greyerz argues that in fact there really is an area ‘beyond the text’, and interestingly he cites the auto-
biographical text of Anna Vetter as an example of (painful) experiences beyond the restrictions of discourse and
speech: Kaspar von Greyerz, ‘Erfahrung und Konstruktion. Selbstrepräsentation in autobiographischen Texten
des 16. Und 17. Jahrhunderts’, in Susanna Burghartz, Maike Christadler and Dorothea Nolde, Berichten, Erzählen,
Beherrschen. Wahrnehmung und Repräsentationen in der frühen Kolonialgeschichte Europas (Frankfurt/Main,
2003), pp. 220–39.
59 Andreas Bähr, ‘Furcht, Divinatorischer Traum und autobiographisches Schreiben in der Frühen Neuzeit’, Zeitschrift
für Historische Forschung, 34, 1 (2007), pp. 1–32, here p. 4.
60 Histoire, Vol. 1, fol. 3.
306    Claudia Ulbrich

This passage seems to hold a key to understanding the text. It seems at first glance to
be evidence for the centrality of the conversion experience in her memoirs. Whether
this was a nascent faith, or a conversion from a different denomination, can only be
determined when looking at the story from its conclusion, her conversion to Catholicism.

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By indicating that her mother had hoped her children would convert, Charlotte Louise
averts any suspicions that her conversion was either spontaneous or a selfish decision.
She presents herself as a rational woman, carrying out the dearest wish of her mother.
But why would the mother have wished that her children should change their religious
allegiance, and who can have passed on her mother’s secret to the writer? It would
appear that the scribe was already aware of the apparent contradiction here, since a
footnote was added to the effect that the mother was Calvinist, as were her husband and
children.61 Has the author’s mother, who plays no further significant part in the story,
been mentioned only to create a narrative opportunity to bring in St Monica and establish
a link to St Augustine? This possibility cannot be excluded, especially as Charlotte Louise
often mentions that her reading of the Confessions of St Augustine meant much to her.62
Monica was one of the saints much revered in the seventeenth century as a model for
women.63 Charlotte Louise may have read educational treatises of this kind, even though
she does not remark on this in her memoirs. Such publications often gave normative
guidelines, conveyed through the life-stories of men and women who had led exemplary
lives worthy of their station in life.64 The Jesuit Jean Crasset, whose writings were much
read around the year 1700, described in this way the lives of a model couple, Madame
and Monsieur Hélyot.65 Jean Crasset was convinced that certain signs (marques) gave clear
indications as to a person’s beliefs and religious devotion,66 and these views may well
have influenced Charlotte Louise. There are more than a hundred occurrences of the
word marque in her text, and the albeit less frequent references to experience and to retreat
may well also be significant here.67
If the memoirs of the Countess of Schwerin are viewed in the context of such
educational treatises, then it no longer appears that the intention is to report a conversion,
but rather to write a discourse on virtue, as evidenced in many places in the text. The text
engages, as the quotation above shows, with the issue Maurice Daumas discusses of
apportioning love for God and for the world.68

61 It is, however, not impossible that she is simply expressing a wish that the children should grow up devout; in other
words, that in this story the change is to devout religious practice rather than from one religious form of devotion to
another.
62 Histoire, vol. 1, fol. 617, 622, 640 and others.
63 This is pointed out by Daumas, Le Mariage amoureux, pp. 220–21, where he draws a parallel between Monica and
Jean Crasset’s La vie de Madame Hélyot (Paris, 1683).
64 Xenia von Tippelskirch, ‘Standespflicht und religiöse Überzeugung. Der Jesuit Jean Crasset und die Förmlichkeit
seiner Schreibpraxis’, in Philippe Büttgen and Christian Jouhaud (eds), ‘Lire Michel de Certeau—La formalité des
pratiques—Michel de Certeau lesen. Die Förmlichkeit der Praktiken’, Zeitsprünge, Studies in Early Modern History,
Culture and Science/Forschungen zur Frühen Neuzeit, 12, 1/2(2008), pp. 128–45.
65 Crasset, Madame Helyot. Claude Hélyot, Les œuvres spirituelles de Monsieur Helyot, Conseiller de Roy en la Cour
des Aydes de Paris. Avec un abrégé de sa vie [d’après le père Crasset] (Paris, 1710).
66 Tippelskirch, ‘Standespflicht und religiöse Überzeugung’, pp. 130–31.
67 The words marque or marques appear 55 times in all, and including all cognate words, appears altogether 119
times. Expérience appears 12 times and retraite 7 times.
68 Daumas, Le mariage amoureux.
 Person and Gender: The Memoirs of the Countess of Schwerin   307

Is it really her mother that Louise Charlotte has in mind here? The quotation is clearly
in tension with the views she expressed in the preamble when describing herself as a
woman who, until a conversion experience put her on the path of virtue, had made
many mistakes, but could it not be that this quotation is an expression of her own views?

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Maybe she wishes to convey to her own children, to whom among others she has
addressed her text, that she herself is much saddened and weeps a lot? As a convert, she
should not be experiencing such feelings. Might she be projecting them back onto her
mother? If it is she who weeps and hopes that her children will convert, this would be
more understandable than that her mother should have done so. Gudrun Wedel observed
of women’s autobiographical writings in the nineteenth century that ideas that were of
little value, or taboo, were presented as being set in the past of the story. Writers of
autobiography who wished to present themselves as teachers would, for example, write
of housework in relation to their parents’ household rather than their own. She
introduced the concept of retro-projection to describe this feature.69 Research would
need to establish whether this technique was already known at the time that Charlotte
Louise was writing her memoirs, but there is much that seems to suggest so. There was
evidently much that Charlotte Louise could not write about, so the question arises as to
how an aristocratic woman whose life was very regulated, and who lived in the public
eye, could write about her present. She no doubt used whatever literary forms were
available to women in her time. There are many signs indicating that the writer was
aware that she could not simply write what she wished to write. Although the text
was intended among others for her children, she changed names and used abbreviations.
She sometimes used idiosyncratic forms of indirect speech, as if she were too modest to
speak of herself. In the passage quoted above, she states that her father lost her mother—
where was she in that sentence? Was this the kind of indirect speech that was used in the
courtly world, where dissimulation was required? She returns often to this requirement,
and her difficulties in observing it. She often authenticates her observations through
another kind of indirect speech, in that she puts her own thoughts into the mouths of her
husband, her father or her brother. This form of writing could be described as a kind of
self-empowerment strategy, as she was able through attributing her words to others to
express her own thoughts openly and give greater weight to her own point of view.
Our analysis of a single sentence shows how many nuances of meaning can emerge
from a comprehensive examination of the context. This makes it difficult, if not
impossible, to maintain the self as the object of the investigation. What does become
possible, however, is access to the norms and normativity discourses that can be attributed
to specific social milieus and practices, and that acquire meaning through specific
situations. This is especially clear in many passages about life at court. Louise Charlotte
repeatedly insists that she has behaved badly or in a gauche manner. Against the
background of her writing on the life of the nobility these can be read as conscious
criticism of court life rather than an expression of her own inadequacy.
In the world in which Charlotte Louise von Schwerin lived, people learned, read and
listened to others reading, books were bought and discussions were held, and a woman

69 Gudrun Wedel, Lehren zwischen Arbeit und Beruf. Einblicke in das Leben von Autobiographinnen im 19. Jahrhundert
(L’homme Schriften, 4, Vienna, 2000), p. 22.
308    Claudia Ulbrich

did not need to apologize for her learning. She did not need to justify the fact that she
wrote, nor did she need to explain her interest in education. In this it seems that for
her, the normative gender framework was different from that of a bourgeois woman.70
Modesty and obedience were seen as important virtues, but they may not have been as

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tied to gender as has been commonly assumed. An examination of the manners expected
in relationships of patronage suggests that such virtues were seen as very important by
men.71 Charlotte Louise’s repeated assurances that she was obedient should not allow
the reader to forget the pressures that her husband faced when her conversion became
publicly known. He owed the King absolute obedience. Friedrich Wilhelm was left with
only two options: either give up all that he had, or separate from his wife and forbid her
any access to their children. Even if he had had another option, the memoirs of the
Countess of Schwerin reveal power relations, including those between her and her
husband and the king, which an analysis of the discourses and social practices displaying
manliness often fail to disclose.
In reading the memoirs of the Countess of Schwerin we learn to distinguish between
different images of womanhood and the different milieus in which the aristocracy lived;
between the aristocracy of the provinces (in Niederrhein, Brandenburg, East Prussia)
and the court aristocracy (in Berlin, Vienna, Hanover); and how important the subtle
differences were. We gain insights into the networks of women at court; into the
hierarchies and the opportunities to break through them; into the ways in which they
were bound into relationships of patronage; into friendships and enmities; into the
roles of mothers, stepmothers, mothers-in-law, aunts, servants and friends; we can see
the variety of positions of power that a woman could occupy. In order to assess this
information within the conflicting forces of normative pressures and an individual’s
room for manoeuvre, we need to start from a context-related concept of the person,
taking into account both agency and social relationships. Such an approach cannot lead
to generalized statements that are true for a whole society or period, but they can lead to
insights into both the social context under scrutiny and the social differentiation and
positioning that existed beyond the implicit assumptions on which research into ego-
documents tends to rely. This can be very difficult, particularly in the case of the stories
of women (and of less well-known men), because of the patchy nature of the material
available, but in the case of the aristocracy there is a much greater chance of success.
It is therefore arguably most desirable to mine the self testimony of aristocratic women,
exploring the ‘selection, ordering, association, comparing, valuing and significance of
details’ in order to gain insights into the way the author conceptualized her perception of
the world and her activity within it.72

70 Much that is said in feminist studies about the destiny of the female sex is not relevant to Charlotte Louise. There is
much research still to be done on aristocratic women who were not part of the court elite.
71 Gabriele Jancke, ‘Autobiography as Social Practice in Early Modern German-Speaking Areas: Historical,
Methodological, and Theoretical Perspectives’, in Olcay Akyildiz, Halim Kara and Börte Sagaster (eds),
Autobiographical Themes in Turkish Literature: Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives (Istanbuler Texte und
Studien, 6 , Würzburg, 2007), pp. 65–80. Jancke, Autobiographie als soziale Praxis. Beziehungskonzepte in deutsch­
sprachigen Selbstzeugnissen des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, 10, Cologne, 2002).
72 Jancke, Autobiographische Texte, p. 76.
 Person and Gender: The Memoirs of the Countess of Schwerin   309

Abstract

The memoirs of the Countess von Schwerin have survived in a copy dating from 1731. Over 1400 pages the
writer describes her life at various European courts, her conversion to Catholicism, her subsequent separa-
tion from her husband and children, and her expulsion from Prussia. The present article starts from this

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source to present new research in the field of self testimony and the contextualization and historicization of
the categories used. It proposes that instead of exploring the idea of the self and the extent of individualiza-
tion, investigations should focus on the concept of the person. This concept is caught in the tension
between normative forces and the individual’s room for manoeuvre, and it is constructed with reference to
social categories such as the person’s status, gender and religion. Investigating the concept of the person
yields insights into the society around the person examined, and into the social differentiation and position-
ing, glimpsed through the subject’s implicit assumptions, that self testimony research is constantly seeking
to capture. To assess how self-representation is achieved, it might be that authentic experience and allegedly
universal categories of individuality are not the best measure, but rather the concrete, indeed biographical
contexts in which the text was created. If these are used as a starting-point for any investigation, then the
many complex layers of gender relationships begin to emerge. Because of the high quality of the surviving
biographical and autobiographical material, it appears that self testimony written by noblewomen is partic-
ularly well suited to the exploration of the concept of the person.

Keywords: self, conversion, noblewomen, biography, autobiography, concept of the person

Freie Universität, Berlin
ulbrich@zedat.fu-berlin.de
Translated by Sarah Patey