Claudia Felicitas of Austria through the Lens of Christoph Traut's Funeral Sermon of 1676

The present study deals with the content analysis of the funeral oration delivered by the court preacher Christoph Traut at the funeral of the late empress Claudia Felicitas, second wife of Leopold I, in the Augustinian Church in Vienna on 19 May 1676. The sermon itself was subsequently printed in Latin and German by the court printer Johann Christoph Cosmerovius. Through his comprehensive verbal narrative, the learned clergyman, originally from Bavaria, sought to honour the memory of the deceased, to shape and spread her generally positive posthumous image, to preserve it for future generations and to place the late empress in the context of the carefully crafted history of the Habsburg dynasty. The author’s contribution therefore focuses on the socio-historical role of the surviving sermon, in particular on a detailed analysis of the communication schemes and topoi used in relation to the posthumous (re)presentation and mediatization of Claudia Felicitas of Austria.