The earliest mention of a village of Goding or Gutingi occurs in documents of about 950 A.D. The place received municipal rights from the German king Otto IV. about 1210, and from 1286 to 1463 it was the seat of the princely house of Brunswick-Göttingen. During the 14th century it held a high place among the towns of the Hanseatic League. In 1531 it joined the Reformation movement, and in the following century it suffered considerably in the Thirty Years' War, being taken by Tilly in 1626, after a siege of 25 days, and recaptured by the Saxons in 1632. After a century of decay, it was anew brought into importance by the establishment of its university; and a marked increase in its industrial and commercial prosperity has again taken place in recent years. Towards the end of the 18th century Göttingen was the centre of a society of young poets of the _Sturm und Drang_ period of German literature, known as the _Göttingen Dichterbund_ or _Hainbund_ (see GERMANY: _Literature_).
See Freusdorff, _Göttingen in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart_ (Göttingen, 1887); the _Urkundenbuch der Stadt Göttingen_, edited by G. Schmidt, A. Hasselblatt and G. Kästner; Unger, _Göttingen und die Georgia Augusta_ (1861); and _Göttinger Professoren_ (Gotha, 1872); and O. Mejer, _Kulturgeschichtliche Bilder aus Göttingen_ (1889).
GÖTTLING, CARL WILHELM (1793-1869), German classical scholar, was born at Jena on the 19th of January 1793. He studied at the universities of Jena and Berlin, took part in the war against France in 1814, and finally settled down in 1822 as professor at the university of his native town, where he continued to reside till his death on the 20th of January 1869. In his early years Göttling devoted himself to German literature, and published two works on the Nibelungen: _Über das Geschichtliche im Nibelungenliede_ (1814) and _Nibelungen und Gibelinen_ (1817). The greater part of his life, however, was devoted to the study of classical literature, especially the elucidation of Greek authors. The contents of his _Gesammelte Abhandlungen aus dem klassischen Altertum_ (1851-1863) and _Opuscula Academica_ (published in 1869 after his death) sufficiently indicate the varied nature of his studies. He edited the [Greek: Technê] (grammatical manual) of Theodosius of Alexandria (1822), Aristotle's _Politics_ (1824), and _Economics_ (1830) and Hesiod (1831; 3rd ed. by J. Flach, 1878). Mention may also be made of his _Allgemeine Lehre vom Accent der griechischen Sprache_ (1835), enlarged from a smaller work, which was translated into English (1831) as the _Elements of Greek Accentuation_; and of his _Correspondence with Goethe_ (published 1880).