On this website you will find direct access to course catalogues from the University of Göttingen between the years 1736 to 2006 in Latin and German. The course catalogues appear in Latin between the years 1736 and 1896, and are also available in German between 1771 and 2006. For the years 1748 to 1770 there are German translations for Latin course catalogues only as dependant publications in the ‘Göttingen Gelehrten Anzeigen’ (‘Göttingische Zeitungen von gelehrten Sachen’ (1739-1752) and ‘Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen’ (1753-1801)). These catalogues are likewise integrated into the database.
Although the Georg-August-Universität had its first ceremonial opening on 17 September 1737, there were teaching operations that began three years earlier. On 14 October 1734 physicist and philosopher Samuel Christian Hollman who was appointed professor for logics and metaphysics held the first lecture at Georgia Augusta.
Because of the provisional lecture operations for the first and second year of the University you will not find any printed course catalogues for these years. The first official index was released in 1736 titled ‘Catalogus praelectionum publice et privatim in Academia Georgia Augusta’ and includes the lecture announcements for the summer semester, all in Latin. Under this title the course catalogues for the summer and winter semester are published up to 1837, and catalogues from 1838 to 1895 appear under the title ‘Index scholarum publice et privatim’.
In addition to the Latin directories, the announcements are also present in German from the middle of the 18th century onwards. Beginning with the summer semester of 1748, the ‘Göttingische Zeitungen von gelehrten Sachen’ (from 1753 onwards under ‘Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen’ and from 1802 onwards under ‘Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen’) contains the lecture announcements for the summer and winter semesters.
From the summer semester of 1771 the German directories were published as independent publications, at first under ‘Verzeichnis der Vorlesungen’, since the summer semester of 1935 as ‘Amtliches Namensverzeichnis, Verzeichnis der Vorlesungen’, then from 1950 onwards under the title ‘Personal und Vorlesungsverzeichnis’, and then between 1969 to 2006 titled very briefly as ‘Vorlesungsverzeichnis’.
Since 2007 the ‘Vorlesungsverzeichnisse’ can be found and are available as a database on the University of Göttingen’s website. There you will also find the course catalogue for the current semester.
To search for a specific course catalogue, provide the year of publication in the search field (e. g. 1801). You will be provided links for both the summer and winter semesters for the corresponding year as a result, of which will take you directly to the digital catalogue. Provided that there are catalogues in both Latin and German, the summer and winter semesters should show both languages. If you would like to search through catalogues within a given decade, you can also enter just the digits for the century and decade (e. g. 178 for the 1780s). You will then receive all links for German and Latin semesters from 1780 to 1789. If you obtain more than 20 results, you can either select above the table to show more on the current page or use the page selection option below the table to switch between pages of entries.
Special thanks to the colleagues at the Landesbibliothek Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin - Preußischer Kulturbesitz and the university libraries in Leipzig, Marburg, and Tübingen for the provision of digitised copies of the German course catalogues that were not available here at the SUB Göttingen. Existing Latin course catalogues for the time period between 1841 and 1875 are included thanks to the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München.
