History in Shadow Estate

Shadow Estate takes place in the University of Göttingen in the late 18th century. This is a super fun setting, because I went to university there and know all the buildings. And many of them have existed (and been university buildings) for hundreds of years!

The first building set aside for the university was the old Paulinerkirche, which is right by the canal. It used to be a monastery in medieval times, but when the university was founded in 1737, they quickly set about using the building as a campus.

At the time, only a little under a hundred and fifty students attended. There were a lot of plans to rebuild the old monastery with lecture halls for the seven classical subjects, but not all of them came to fruition. They did of course build a brewery.

One of the other first things they built were the stables. The University of Göttingen quickly became well-known for its riding school, which attracted a lot of noble students (something universities at the time needed for reasons I’ll get into in a future post).

Other things that the university added on by the time the plot of Shadow Estate begins include: a women’s hospital, an apothecary, a botanical garden for medicinal plants (which also still exists today), and an observatory. The same observatory Constanze goes to for her astronomy class, where she meets one of the historical figures who shows up under a slightly changed name. More on him next time.