Het kerklied in beweging ten tijde van de Verlichting

Abstract

The idea we have of song texts written in the Enlightenment is rather biased. It is true that God, virtue and immortality are much emphasized in these texts. Studying the songs of one of the most important writers of songtexts from the period, Christian Fürchtegott Gellert, we discover, however, that he has not only written songs typical for the Enlightenment, but others as well, that could have been from an earlier period, because of the dominant position in them of orthodoxy. This fact makes it understandable that in recent studies the formulation of a definition of Enlightenment has been problematized.