Anna Ovena Hoyers
[This page by Madeleine Brook]
Anna Ovena Hoyers (1584-1655)
Hoyers represents an example of non-orthodox religious writing: after the death of her husband she began writing – under her own name, an unusual act for a woman writer in this period – taking a clear stance against the religious intolerance of Lutheran orthodoxy and demonstrating her sympathies for the Anabaptist movement in particular. Her poetry and songs are often satirical and didactic and show her to be interested in a more inward and fervent religious faith. A collection of her poetry, Geistlichen und Weltlichen Poemata (Spiritual and Worldly Poems), was published in 1650 in Amsterdam and was banned the following year by the Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorp for being ‘heretical’.
Her poems include:
Annae Ovenae Hoyers Rath; Anna Ovena Hoyer's Advice
Further Reading
Brigitte Edith Archibald, ‘Anna Owena Hoyers: A View of Practical Living’, in Katharina M. Wilson (ed.), Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), pp. 304-26
Barbara Becker-Cantarino, ‘Anna Ovena Hoyers’, in James Hardin (ed.), German Baroque Writers, 1580-1660 (Detroit, MI: Gale, 1996), pp. 181-84
Barbara Becker-Cantarino, ‘Low German as a Literary Language in Schleswig-Holstein in the Seventeenth Century: A Poem by Anna Owena Hoyers’, in Mohammad Ali Jazayery and Werner Winter (eds.), Languages & Cultures: Studies in Honour of Edgar C. Polomé (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988), pp. 63-72
Barbara Becker-Cantarino, ‘”Outsiders”: Women in German Literary Culture of Absolutism’, Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik 16 (1984), 147-57
Albrecht Classen, ‘Die “Querelle des femmes” im 16. Jahrhundert im Kontext des theologischen Gelehrtenstreits: Die literarischen Beiträge von Argula von Grumbach und Anna Ovena Hoyers’, Wirkendes Wort 50 (2000), 189-213
Cornelia Niekus Moore, ‘Anna Hoyer’s Posaunenschall: Hymns of an Empire at War and a Kingdom Come’, Daphnis 13 (1984), 343-62
