Anna Ovena Hoyer

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Anna Ovena Hoyer

Anna Ovena Hoyer , also Owena a. Hoijer (* 1584 in Koldenbüttel / North Friesland; † November 27, 1655 at Gut Sittwick near Stockholm / Sweden ) was a North German poet of the Baroque period .

Life

Tönninger Castle, the official residence of the stallion, on an engraving from 1598

As the orphaned only daughter of the wealthy landowner Johann (or Hans) Ovens (1560–1584) and his wife Webbecke (1567–1587), Anna Hanß grew up with her educated uncle, the large landowner and chronicler Mewes Ovens in Witzwort . A distant maternal cousin was the chronicler Peter Sax . She received a good education: she mastered Latin and possibly also Greek and Hebrew, in addition to learning various instruments. In addition to her uncle, the Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorf , Johann Adolf since 1590 , was her guardian. Anna had a good relationship with Johann Adolf's wife Augusta of Denmark , who was only a little older than herself, until her death in 1639.

At the age of 15, her guardian married her to Hermann Hoyer, who had succeeded his father Caspar Hoyer as stable man in the Eiderstedt countryside at the age of 23 . Her dowry of 100,000 Lübeck thalers served as a kind of compensation for the high fine that Hermann Hoyer had to pay due to his deceased father's charge of bribery. In his office as stable man, Hermann Hoyer took several actions against Mennonites and members of other denominations who were considered sectarians. Like Jan Clausen Coott, they had mostly been recruited as dike builders from the Netherlands in order to realize the lord's lofty plans. In 1620 Duke Friedrich III allowed them to to settle in the newly founded Friedrichstadt .

In 23 years of marriage, Anna Ovena probably gave birth to nine children, the last, son Friedrich Hermann, in 1621, of which at least six reached adulthood. She was already composing during her marriage. She translated the novella Euryalus and Lucretia , translated from Italian by Niklas von Wyle, under the title Sweet Bitter Joy; / or / A true history of two loving people in verse. No copy of this work, published in 1617, has survived.

After the death of her husband in 1622, they brought inheritance disputes with their son-in-law and the Hoyer relatives, as well as tax claims from Duke Friedrich III. for most of their wealth. She now turned increasingly to religious literature. The Lutheran orthodoxy it was offset by critical. The mystical, ascetic Christianity of the writings of Caspar Schwenckfeld , David Joris and Valentin Weigel was closer to her. Her manor in Hoyersworth and her house in Husum became a refuge for religiously persecuted people such as the doctor Nikolaus Teting, who was expelled from Flensburg in 1622 .

She defended herself against attacks by the clergy with satirical poems, e.g. T. also in Low German . Again and again she criticized the immoral life of the pastors, who had made their studies not pious but conceited, especially acutely in the Low German poem De denische D Körper-Pape published in 1630 .

Thanks to her high status, she herself did not suffer directly from the persecution and was also under the protection of the Duchess Augusta, Johann Adolf's widow, who resided in the castle in front of Husum . However, their debts forced them to sell this Hoyersworth in 1632 after they had already lost their Husum houses. In 1634 she and two of her children survived the Burchardi flood in the attic of the flooded Tönningen Castle . Her poems about the flood show no sympathy for the victims, but rather satisfaction that they were saved as the chosen ones, while numerous representatives of the official church perished at the same time.

Sometime between 1632 and 1642 - there are no reliable sources for the years in between - she settled in Sweden with five of her children, some of whom were grown up, through the mediation of the Duchess Augusta. Jacob Hoyer (1579–1642), a cousin of her late husband, fled the Thirty Years' War to Sweden as early as 1627 and was appointed German council president in Gothenburg by King Gustav Adolf . However, Anna Ovena received no support from him, so that she spent the first few years in Sweden in great poverty. It was not until 1648, when Gustav Adolf's widow Maria Eleonora returned to Sweden from Brandenburg , that she gave her the Sittwick estate near Stockholm, which belonged to her Wittum .

She had dedicated the first of several writings to the Swedish Queen as early as 1634, shortly after Gustav Adolf's death. She also wrote a few songs about Queen Christina and her successor Karl X. Gustav and his wife Hedwig Eleonora from Schleswig-Holstein , in which she praised the country that she had received so hospitably. From her exile, she intervened in German religious controversy with sharp attacks for decades. After she died in 1655, her sons collected her songs. The manuscript is now in Copenhagen. Anna Ovena's descendants still live in Sweden.

Works

  • Conversation of a child with his mother. 1628
  • De denische Dorp-Pape. 1630
  • The book of Ruth, put in German rhymes. Stockholm 1634 (for Queen Maria Eleanor)
  • A letter about sea sent to the congregation in Engeland. 1649 (against the execution of the English King Charles I )
  • Annae Ovenae Hoijers Spiritual and Secular Poemata. Amsterdam 1650

Anna Ovena Hoyer's songs are kept in a simple folk song tone, disregarding the aesthetic principles of their contemporary Martin Opitz . Their works she drew against the former naming convention with Anna Ovena Hoyer after Latinized patronymic of their father, with the acrostic J ohann O vens T ochter A nna or with different anagrams .

Her conversation between a child and his mother , written for her children and published in 1628, was re-edited by Spener in 1698 - without naming the actual author. Another new edition under the title The path of true godliness in the following spiritual conversation between a child and his mother: Introduced by a Christian Matron appeared in 1720. Her ecclesiastical and secular poemata , which were printed in Amsterdam in 1650 , were banned the following year. Some of her unprinted poems, especially songs, are now kept in Stockholm. For her songs she composed partly with her own melodies, partly she composed them on well-known secular songs for the common house music with her children.

literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Hoyer, Anna Ovena
BRIEF DESCRIPTION North German poet of the baroque period
DATE OF BIRTH 1584
PLACE OF BIRTH Koldenbüttel , North Frisia
DATE OF DEATH November 27, 1655
Place of death at Sittwick Estate near Stockholm , Sweden