Louisa Bergold

Research Topic 

The figure of Lucretia in Sixteenth-Century Germany: Image and Reality

Supervisor: Professor Lyndal Roper

For my DPhil thesis, I am studying the paradoxical popularity of the iconography of the Roman heroine Lucretia in early modern Germany. She would have been considered both a sinner and a criminal in a society that condemned suicide and self-harm. However, Lucretia was revered and used as an example of feminine virtue, but also to inspire anti-tyrannical tendencies. In order to understand the many aspects of the Lucretia story and to investigate which elements of the narrative were considered most important, I have compiled a database of around 800 visual and textual versions of her in the German, Dutch and Italian-speaking world from around 1500 to 1640.
I contrast this veneration with the way in which real-life cases of female suicide were framed by courts, churches, neighbours and family members. 

I have also been working on the project 'Visualising the Destruction of Monasteries and Cloisters in the German Peasants' War'. For this we were able to identify more than 600 monasteries and nunneries that were attacked by peasant groups between 1524 and 1526. 

Finally, I have been working on the development of German national identity after the Third Reich and how the commemoration of the Holocaust has influenced German politics and culture since then.