Pseudonym of the German Romantic poet and philosopher Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801). In 1790 he entered the University of Jena, where he met Friedrich Schiller and Friedrich Schlegel, completing his studies at Wittenberg in 1793. In 1798 Novalis published a series of philosophical fragments. Novalis’ only finished collection of poems, Hymnen an die Nacht (1800), was dedicated to his first great love Sophie von Kühn, who died in 1797. Together with Fichte, Novalis represents German idealism fused with Romanticism. In Die Christenheit, oder Europa (pub. 1826) Novalis proclaims ‘magical idealism’: the limitless power of imagination, generating a ‘magical knowledge’ that combines all the elements of senses and scientific principles invented by reason.