It has been said that the barely G...

It has been said that the barely German mistress worth mentioning was Wilhelmine Encke (1752/53-1820) better known as Countes Lichtenau. (1) Indeed, her life has been narrated extensively. This article investigates these life writings, their words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] followings and changing purposes from one side of to the other the course of approximately couple centuries. How has her life been narrated, and to what degree have various texts established the mistress as their subject? Asking so questions evokes the intimate connection between biography and historiography associated with nineteenth-century historicism and well exemplified according to ...