A paper victory column (1664/1675): Female authorship, devotional memory, and religious community

This essay examines Catharina von Greiffenberg's epic Sieges-Seule der Buße und Glaubens and the book in which it appears as an aesthetic-religious response to the fourth Austro-Turkish War and the enduring threat of Ottoman invasion. Operating with the trope of the victory column, realized both figuratively and materially by the poem, two accompanying religious works, and the book itself, Greiffenberg, in a stridently female voice, creates a religious commemorative object that occasions and locates intimate religious devotion through reading. Modeling weeping, praying, repenting, and believing as transformative acts that can be performed outside of the state and statecraft, she offers a female-coded alternative to taking up arms.