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The Manuscripts of Birgitte Thott's On the Happy Life and their provenance:
The impact on the Danish learned society of the noblewoman Birgitte
Thott (1610-1662), renowned as translator of Seneca's prose works
(1658), still remains to be fully investigated. The present paper examines
two manuscript copies in the Karen Brahe Library in Odense (Denmark)
of her principal work, the unpublished moral treatise On the Happy
Life (1659). The lost original, and the dating and provenance of the two
extant copies are discussed. It is argued that one of the copies was dictated
by Birgitte herself to her young niece Sophie Thott (1645-), while the other
has been written by three unidentified hands.
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