Nearly 300 year old German book found... can anyone read it?

aaron7

Sr. Member
Aug 24, 2005
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Townsend, MA
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Garrett Ace 250
Picked this old book up yesterday!

All I know is the copyright says 1725. I'm lost otherwise!

Looks like religious imagery inside (and some scary ones at that!) so I'm guessing it's a Christian text of some kind.

I know this forum isn't for books but being so old I had to share!

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The cover says the following (and this is tough because its very old German- and also translating only what I see in the above pic and I will try to make it read more like modern German than word-for-word):

"Devout and virtuous Christians, these pretty objects, which joy your souls are in love with, fall to Jesus and stand up to the bad temptation, morning and evening, in the churches, in the halls, at confession and at Eucharist, on feast days, embarrassed and sorry".
 

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What ever the subject matter it is worth saving....
 

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It is written in gothic. The language is middle German. Words are written in another way so you must know these words and understand the context.
It is possible to translate but that is a lot of work. It takes about 90 minutes for a page to translate to English.
 

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Many books written on "virtues". I'm with Matt and Stefen. The "font" used is like the Old English and letters look different. For instance, when I do genealogy, many census records were hand written. S's and A's looked very different during different eras than what we are used to seeing. This is an incredible find, regardless! It was copyrighted a couple hundred years after the first printed books, which originated in Germany. However, it appears to be "penned" by hand. Although the pictures you showed looked like printed lithographs. Congratulations on your find!
 

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