Professor Joachim Whaley was guest of honour at the opening of the 6th Thüringer Landesausstellung in Weimar and Gotha on 23 April 2016. The subject of the exhibition is Die Ernestiner. Eine Dynastie prägt Europa and it traces the history of the dynasty from their emergence as a regional power in Saxony and Thuringia in the eleventh century and as Electors of the Holy Roman Empire in 1423 to the central role they occupied in the upper nobility of Europe in the nineteenth century. Both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were members of this extended family. Its members married into so many European royal houses that Bismarck referred to them as ‘Europe’s stud farm’. Joachim Whaley held two Festreden: the first in the Stadtkirche (also known as the Herderkirche) in Weimar on the subject of ‘Die Ernestiner im Alten Reich: Dynastie, Glaube und Politik’, the second in the Schlosskirche, Schloss Friedenstein Gotha on the subject of ‘Die Ernestiner als Förderer von Glaube, Kultur und Wissenschaft’. Further information about the exhibition can be found at the exhibition website.
Joachim Whaley has also been appointed a member of the Beirats zum Sammlungs- und Forschungsverbund Gotha which will oversee the development of and research into the extraordinary collections of books, art works and other artefacts assembled by the dukes of Gotha in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Long overshadowed by Weimar, the Gotha collections are in fact more extensive and more important. For subjects as diverse as the history of the Reformation, the history of education in the seventeenth-century Holy Roman Empire or eighteenth-century mineralogy, among many others, the resources of Gotha are unrivalled anywhere in Germany.
