Petition letter of Anna Wodianskin to the Electress of Saxony

The petition letter of Anna Wodianskin preserves the migration narrative of a Bohemian woman living in Saxony at the end of the Thirty Years’ War. According to Wodianskin, she was a “poor deserted exile,” who was turned out of her house in Prague in 1628 by her husband for refusing to convert to Catholicism and made her way to the Saxonian capital of Dresden, where she supported herself as a food-seller. She appealed to the Electress of Saxony for an intervention with the municipality, as she encountered opposition to her business activities from the local market women who were her competitors. As was typical of the time, the letter derived from an oral communication between Anna, as the petitioner, and an unknown professional letter-writer, who would have composed it based on her first-person narrative.