Frühe Neuzeit

In the century of Enlightenment, the art form of satire evolved in ways never seen before. However, that satirical energy, initially fueled by a hope for change, gradually waned over the century, ultimately giving way to a defeatist attitude, as Jörg Schönert has shown. This volume takes up his studies on satire and expands on them from a comparatist perspective.

In his New Latin novel, Methodus Doctrinae Civilis (1628), Adam Contzen (1571–1635), Jesuit and confessor to Prince Maximilian I of Bavaria, presents his political theory in the form of a vita of fictive Ethiopian king Abissinus. This volume presents the first bilingual, annotated edition of Methodus. The introduction contextualizes Contzen’s novel from the perspective of intellectual and literary history.

As a hybrid between poetry and scholarship, the past and the modern era, modernity, and humanity and nature, the Early Modern didactic poem can seem like the dusty artifact of a bygone system of knowledge that did not know the difference between nature and culture. Examining its significance and topicality in the posthuman age, this volume renegotiates the genre from the perspective of the actor-network theory and philosophy of Bruno Latour.

Ist das Neue in der Literaturgeschichte tatsächlich notwendig durch die Absetzung von etablierten Gattungstraditionen zu erklären? Bilden normsprengende Neuerungen in der Literatur und die normative Struktur einer literarischen Gattung notwendig Gegensätze? Welche Rolle spielen Referenztexte sowohl in der Konstitution einer literarischen Gattung wie auch ihrer Überwindung? Der vorliegende Band, der aus der Arbeit der Forschungsgruppe 2305 ‚Diskursivierungen von Neuem‘ und einer von ihr veranstalteten Tagung hervorgegangen ist, will herkömmliche lineare Erzählungen der Literaturgeschichtsschreibung in Frage stellen und in exemplarischen Fallstudien zeigen, wie Gattungen durch komplexe Wiederaufname und Modifikation des vorgängigen Traditionsbestands transformiert wurden. Die Beträge dieses Bandes, deren zeitlicher Horizont von der Antike bis in das frühe 19. Jahrhundert reicht, dokumentieren zugleich, wie die oft absolut genommenen Zeitkategorien ‚alt‘ und ‚neu‘ in der Definition einer Gattung stets relational zu sehen sind und gerade in ihrer wechselseitigen Bezüglichkeit entscheidend zur Genese von Gattungen beitragen.

Der Bogen der Studien spannt sich von der antiken und mittelalterlichen lateinischen Epik, der spanischen ‚novela bizantina‘, den Gedichten Chaucers und der französischen Aktualitätsepik bis zu zur apokalyptischen Poesie Englands aus dem 17. Jahrhundert und der deutschen und litauischen Herder-Rezeption im frühen 19. Jahrhundert.　　

Der Band visiert als Publikum Literaturwissenschafter*innen aus dem Feld der Klassischen Philologie, der Mittellateinischen Philologie, der Neolatinistik, der Romanistik und der Anglistik an.　　

This volume brings together annotated editions and interpretations of Early Modern literature about tobacco, beer, wine, and coffee. It includes New Latin and German panegyric poems praising Tokaji wine or beer from Nordhausen, for instance, but also texts opposing the consumption of tobacco and alcohol. The collection thus offers a cultural-historical perspective on current debates surrounding the legalization of intoxicants.

German historian Johannes Sleidanus’s overview of the history of the four empires was the leading textbook on world history for university and grammar school students of the Empire from the mid-sixteenth to early eighteenth century. Alongside the source references provided by Heinrich Meibom the Elder, this edition provides revealing insights into the scope of historiographical knowledge in the Early Modern era.

This study deals with the phenomenon of Early Modern encyclopedic annotation apparatuses on Baroque tragedy and inquires into their function. The objects of study are the historical dramas Cleopatra (1661/1680), Agrippina (1665), Epicharis (1665), and Sophonisbe (1680) by Daniel Casper von Lohenstein. This volume is the first to appreciate the "Annotations" as an integral component of von Lohenstein’s dramas.

Doctor and alchemist Johann Otto von Helbig (1654–1698) combined East Indian and European knowledge in his theoretical writings and alchemical practice. He garnered attention with his own natural philosophy and cosmology, which provided him with access to the princely courts. This edition of Helbig’s letters and documents is a key resource for research into Early Modern alchemy at royal courts.

Sociable Song: this volume examines German-language love songs of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Its chapters from literary studies and musicology consider the songs’ dissemination, functions, and mediality. By asking how songs build or stabilize communities and connect (song) cultures, they provide a basis for a new assessment of this musical and literary genre.

This study investigates sexual offenses that were committed in the early modern Jesuit order against school pupils, students, confessants, and other Jesuits. It reveals patterns of sexual violence that extended to spiritual fields but were only prosecuted by the heads of the order in extreme cases. This approach allows new light to be shed on the history of the institutions of Jesuit education and pastoral care.

In early modern poetry, experiences of illness develop a historically unique presence: fever, gout, and syphilis define the manifold ailments that take shape in verse. In dialogue with the theology and the history of medicine, this book inquires into the reasons behind this interest and writes a history of human frailty on the basis of – for the most part – hitherto unanalyzed material.

This volume presents the first modern edition and German translation of De misera eruditorum (On the Misery of Scholars) by Martinus Schoockius (1614–1669), Prof. of Philosophy in Groningen and court historiographer to the Great Elector in Frankfurt/O. Schoock wrote numerous historical and philosophical treatises. This volume offers an extensive introduction to and running commentary on this difficult work.

In his early years in Wolfenbüttel, Lessing published a series of writings about philosophy and religion directed against Enlightenment theology. The Enlightenment thinker took the side of dogmatic theology to attack Socinians, Neologists, and Deists. Lessing's position in these texts remains one of the most controversial issues in Lessing research to this day: why was the well-known freethinker a bitter enemy of rational Christianity?

Lessing's opinion pieces written in favour of orthodoxy have been viewed as indecisive, tactical, and hypocritical. By reconstructing the Aristotelian tradition of the twofold philosophical manner of teaching, this study shows that Lessing, even in his theological writings, made use of both an exoteric and an esoteric art of writing, with the result that the key to understanding Lessing’s orthodoxy can be found in his vindications of Leibniz.

Lessing’s defence of orthodoxy thus proves to be merely exoteric. The Enlightenment thinker defended dogmatic Lutheranism because the rationalization of Christianity compromised philosophy’s autonomy from theology. Only a strict separation between faith and reason, he believed, would guarantee the libertatem philosophandi.

From the mid-17th century, an inner-Catholic reform movement congregated around the idea of Jansenism, updating the strict Augustinian Theology of Grace. Jansenism had detractors in the German-speaking world but also advocates and supporters. This volume uses materiality-history-based network and communication studies to focus on how the nobility and theology received Jansenism in different ways by translating and printing Jansenist literature.

This volume examines patriotic, allegorical epistolary poems written in Latin and German in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In light of certain hardships (the Ottoman wars, the Thirty Years’ War), Germania personified as a woman writes letters of lament to one or several rulers, pleading for their assistance against outside enemies and for them to restore the concord that has been troubled within her borders.

Bossy broads, lustful virgins, and pseudo-scholarly ladies can be found everywhere in early modern satiric writings. By taking up misogynist traditions/tropes, they prove to have been a significant transgeneric phenomenon of German literature and cultural history during the European querelle des sexes. By looking at how discursive structures function, this volume is the first to systematically address literary constructions of "deviant women."

This volume contains studies on how Petrarchism, i.e., poems about love in the style of the Italian Francesco Petrarca (1304–1375), was received in the Latin literature written from the fifteenth to seventeenth century. It examines texts from various European language areas (Italian, French, English, German, Dutch, Polish, Lithuanian, Swedish).

The study deepens the understanding of 17^th century literary and cultural production by reassessing the dramatic writing by Andreas Gryphius and Daniel Casper von Lohenstein as an aesthetics of evil avant la lettre. By locating evil inside its human protagonists, their plays respond to and were shaped by an anthropological shift from malus to malum in the early modern episteme, anticipating an internalization or even psychologization of evil, which until now has been claimed only for the 18^th century onward.

A number of poets took up the Latin epic in order to stage the rule of Maximilian I, aiming to portray a hero who did not just meet and exceed ancient and genre-specific ideals but also lived up to the values and challenges of his time. This study examines the strategies applied to this end and sheds light on the unique features of Maximilian heroic poetry, taking into consideration its epic predecessors.

This study examines the transformation that took place in worldly lied culture in German around 1600. Ornate poetry in the vernacular and solo lieder emerged in the sixteenth century and were predominantly developed using Italian elements. Their reception in the middle classes led to the dissemination and valorization of lied culture, and to its codification in literary and music theory.

This is the first modern critical edition and German translation of Surditatis encomium (In Praise of Deafness), written in Latin by Martinus Schoockius (1614–1669). Alongside a brief portrait of the Dutch author and polymath, an introduction and commentary locate the text within the genre tradition of ironic encomia and reveal its connections to discourses of disease in the early modern period.

This monograph – which stands out due to its use of archival documents, editions, translations, commentaries, and interpretations – introduces the school principal, Latin poet, and comital treasurer N. Rüdinger, one of the key figures of late Palatine humanism, who has thus far received too little attention. It presents his critical satires, casual poetry, and elegiac bible adaptations in the context of the ancient and early modern periods.

The themes of mysticism and magic occupy a major place in the literature of Paracelsianism, yet their conception, function, and mutual interplay have received little scholarly attention. This study, which explores Alexander von Suchten’s tractate De tribus facultatibus, shines light on the religious, philosophical, and alchemical implications of the early Paracelsian understanding of mysticism and magic.

This volume collects papers on the reception of Ariosto in the German cultural area. While Ariosto was already celebrated in 16^th century France as the modern Virgil or Homer, broader engagement with Ariosto in Germany only began in the 18^th century. The fact that it was August von Platen who first hailed Ariosto as the new Homer is an indication of the delayed arrival of this type of popular literature in post-Reformation Germany.

Distillation flasks, sugar cane mills, and the brain – the scientific revolution created a spectacular range of themes, even in a traditional genre such as didactic poetry. In this volume, internationally renowned researchers in Latin didactic poetry examine the many facets of early modern scientific poetry and offer insights on these previously neglected texts.

Venus, the goddess of beauty and love, is omnipresent in the arts as a reflexive figure and projective surface for ideas of love. Ten individual studies serve as examples of the polyvalent interpretations of the ancient goddess in the 17^th century, and for the first time, include considerations of the relationship between poetic rejection and approval and the function of various figurations (Paris, Mars, Adonis).

Historians have not adequately researched the subject of Christ as hero – imitatio Christi heroica. The studies in this volume attempt to fill this gap for the Early Modern Period. A particular focus is on specific spiritual strategies of heroization that are can be observed and on their development in various media and inter-medially with respect to the heroization of Christ and the imitatio Christi heroica.

In the early modern era, the veneration of Mary was not limited to Roman Catholicism. The essays in this volume examine images of the mother of God in Judaism and Islam, and critiques of Marian devotion in Catholic reform movements, along with a close description of the role assigned to Mary by Protestant denominations. The importance of medial transmission of each view of Mary in the arts is a central focus.

This cultural historical study focuses on intermedial popularization of the story of Herod’s murder of the children of Bethlehem in Matthew 2 (16–18). Starting from the biblical motif and its theological interpretation, the study describes the processes of interdenominational exchange and adaptation. It includes the medium of literature (Marino, Brockes) as well as painting and music.

This work explores the reception of America and the American Revolution in the German-language texts and German-American literature of the time. The book is supplemented by the digitalized anthology of some 400 commented lyrical texts dealing with America, including numerous poems from German-American newspapers, edited here for the first time.

This volume provides new perspectives on the complete works of the most celebrated German author of the literary Baroque. It offers historical, philosophical, and theological context for an oeuvre that moves between Christian transcendence and secular Zeitdiagnose, between a theological horizon and current reality.

The work of Martin Opitz (1597–1639) shows that thinking and acting in networks are not limited to modernity and that they played a significant role in literary production even before the Enlightenment. The contributions to this volume describe the trajectory of social and discursive networks that arose during the early modern era in developing a lasting concept of authorship.

The 31 German-, English- and French-language contributions in this volume address systematic, programmatic, discursive, sociological, historical aspects of societies by case, person, and work. The focus lies on the effects and interrelationships of the societies in East-Central Europe.

In its 400 fables and tales, the largest 16^th century German-language collection of fables covers a wide variety of narrative and discursive forms. Drawing on sources, genre tradition, and textual history, this study of the Esopus analyzes collection features, authorization strategies, and possible interpretations, combining microanalyses of individual fables with a macroanalysis of the work as a whole.

Johann Fischart, one of the most colorful literary figures of the 16th century, cannot be understood without considering the influence exerted by the printing and publishing house of Bernhard Jobin. This study shows that Fischart participated in varied ways in Jobin’s linguistic, literary, and cultural work, which took place under the banner of aemulatio. In so doing, it argues for a new perspective on vernacular literature before Martin Opitz.

With his allegorical interpretations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Georg Sabinus (1508–1560), known today primarily as a neo-Latin poet, created a benchmark academic work that went through frequent reprints well into the 18th century. Today it is seen as an important document of Ovid’s early modern reception as well as of the humanists’ understanding of myth.

Mumiae Wratislavienses is Gryphius’s only surviving piece of scholarly writing. This is the first new edition of the text, supplemented with a translation, a passage-by-passage commentary, and a study of Gryphius’s work that focuses on his scholarly activities. For context, the introduction offers a comprehensive discussion of early modern studies of mummies.

Johann Jakob Bodmer’s (1698–1783) poetic palimpsests are clearly marked by ironic Socratic dialogues. Written at an early point in the history of literary study and criticism, they use entertaining literary parodies and polemical personalized satire to assert Zurich’s position against Leipzig’s and Berlin’s in the network of a European debating culture that covered a broad range of genres.

The tale of Faust is catalyzed by a deal with the devil, a legacy of witch persecution. The anonymous author of the Faust Book of 1587 used such a deal as a plot device. Despite Christopher Marlowe’s masterpiece, based on that translation, the Enlightenment considered the pact with the devil a superstition. Lessing and Goethe thought it necessary to reshape the myth radically.

These studies open up perspectives on a network of highroads and byroads painstakingly drawn by Lessing the flâneur, revealing the entanglement of socio-historical, poetological, and anthropological aspects of his European-oriented panorama of theater. Lessing is portrayed as an authority whose case studies of drama left distinct marks on later discourse about theater’s tasks.

Around the middle of the 18^th century, the Swabian Anton Claus was among the most influential authors of Jesuit drama. His works, written in Latin, combine the tradition of early modern school theater with Enlightenment aesthetics. This volume presents this hitherto neglected playwright in his literary-historical context.

Written in 1696 for the education of the heir to the French throne, Fénelon’s Aventures de Télémaque quickly became the most widely read book of the 18^th century due to its intense criticism of Ludwig XIV. This study explores the interest readers took in the book, the strategies pursued by translators and publishers, and the ways the book was read by nobles, the bourgeoisie, scholars, and theologians in the Age of Enlightenment.

Jeremias Drexel’s Julianus (1608) is about the rise and fall of the Roman emperor Julian, who became known as Julian the Apostate due to his rejection of Christianity. The drama uses the figure of Julian to discuss the limits of the scientific curiosity of Christian and especially Neostoic scholars. In addition to a translation of the drama, the volume provides an introductory analysis and a commentary.

Philip Ajouri outlines the connections between legal debate and literary works, showing that in their works, authors not only represented the discourse on good polity but also took part in it. While the 16^th century was shaped by the persistence of belief in authoritarian regulation, by the end of the 18^th century, this thinking gave way to a semantics of individuality, self-regulation, and a different notion of happiness.

The volume presents key late medieval tractates on the art of memory. It is a continuation of the series Documenta Mnemonica, which provide ready access to critical sources on memory techniques from antiquity to the end of the early modern period in multilingual, commented source editions, source compilations, and research bibliographies.

The early modern picaresque novel still fascinates us, not least because of its performative violations of the economic order. Narration and economy are engaged in a complex reciprocal interplay, a feature this study systematically explores for the first time as it examines the central texts of this genre.

In 2013, the University of Osnabrück hosted the first ever international and interdisciplinary congress devoted to Sigmund von Birken, the president of the Pegnitz Flower Society and a central figure in the literary life of the second half of the 17^th century. The complete proceedings of the Osnabrück congress have been collected in this volume.

Opera was a favorite subject of dispute among Enlightenment philosophers. The most passionate instance of such argument is Francesco Algarotti’s Saggio sopra l’opera in musica, first published in 1755 and disseminated throughout Europe. This volume thoroughly analyzes and contextualizes the text for the first time.

Der Rhein und seine angrenzenden Städte und Landschaften blühten als Landschaft einer über lange Jahrhunderte verfassten lateinischen Literatur. Die im Band versammelten Aufsätze zeigen den Rhein als Kommunikations-Achse enormer Dynamik, die die Schweiz und den Niederrhein als Literaturlandschaft, Wirtschaftsraum sowie Schul- und Universitätsregion eng verband. Es werden Wandlungsprozesse aufgezeigt, denen die Topoi der Rheinbeschreibung unterworfen waren: von Topoi, die in der antiken Tradition verwurzelt waren, zu denjenigen, die von ihr Abstand nahmen, um den deutschen Charakter des Rheins auch literarisch zu dokumentieren. Als Grenze zwischen Deutschland und Frankreich diente der Rhein zugleich zum poetischen Ausdruck von Gemeinsamkeit und Verschiedenheit. Gerade die in dieser Tradition stehenden Dichtungen veranschaulichen nicht nur die Bruchlinien des zwischen Universalität und beginnenden nationalen Strömungen oszillierenden europäischen Humanismus, sondern auch die vielfältigen kulturellen Gemeinsamkeiten. Diese liegen v.a. in der Bewahrung einer lateinischen Tradition, die erst im 19. Jh. ihr Ende findet. Weitere Themen sind der Rhein als ‚Schulregion‛ und als Raum der Zirkulation von Drucken und Handschriften.

A form of poetry situated outside the world of the cultural elite flourished in the 17^th century. One of the best-documented representatives of this genre was the "Spruchsprecher" Wilhelm Weber (1602–1661). A resident of Nuremberg, he worked as a journalist and publisher, and also as a contract poet and popular elocutionist. This volume offers a detailed presentation of his life and creative work along with a critical edition of his extant works.

In der beginnenden Frühen Neuzeit zeichnet sich unter dem Einfluss der humanistischen Bildungsbewegung im Verhältnis zur antiken Literatur ein Umbruch im Vergleich zur mittelalterlichen Antikenrezeption ab: Die Schriften der Autoren des klassischen Altertums werden zum Teil wiederentdeckt, ediert und kommentiert; zahlreiche Übersetzungen werden angefertigt. In der Auseinandersetzung mit dem inhaltlichen und stilistischen Vorbild der antiken Werke ergeben sich in der Volkssprache vielfältige Veränderungen im Literatursystem, die den programmatisch an die antike Literatur anknüpfenden Neuansatz der frühneuzeitlichen Poetik durch Martin Opitz und andere vorbereiten, von diesen aber zugunsten französischer und niederländischer Vorbilder verschwiegen werden. In fünf Sektionen (Übersetzungsreflexion und Sprachbewusstsein, Institutionen und Funktionen, Intermedialität, Poetik und Rhetorik, Literaturvarianten und Gattungstransfer) wird der Beitrag der Übersetzungskultur für die Entwicklung der deutschen Sprache und Literatur der Frühen Neuzeit neu bestimmt.

Premodern narratives create a multiplicity of meaning by juxtaposing principal, paratextual, and structural dimensions. Print publishers and others involved in transmission would vary the semantic meaning of works such as "Fortunatus" and "Herzog Ernst." Using manuscripts and printed versions from the 15^th to the 19^th century, this volume seeks to interpret early modern German prose novels in accordance with the conditions of their transmission.

In recent years, intermediality has become a paradigm in literary studies, the visual arts, and musicology. This interdisciplinary volume presents a first attempt to systematically apply the forms, functions, and concepts of intermediality to the Early Modern Period. In addition to addressing forms of literature-centered intermediality, the work focuses on varieties of musical intermediality and the concept of the artistic work as a whole.

The physician Christoph von Hellwig (1663–1721) tried to present academic knowledge to the general public in his difficult-to-read specialized literary work. The study describes Hellwig’s strategies for disseminating knowledge, classifies him as a medical eclectic, deduces specialized forms of early modern technical texts, and discusses editorial issues. The work is made more accessible with an annotated bibliography.

In this volume, renowned experts examine the origins and history of the Hamburg Academic Gymnasium, Hamburg’s first college, along with the impact of its professors through the 19^th century. Groundbreaking studies on related institutions (in London, Strasbourg, Thorn, and Karlsruhe) show the importance of this type of college for understanding the history of European higher education.

For the first time, this volume systematically addresses the persistence of picaresque themes as a contoured genre extending beyond the brief history of the picaresque novel. It examines individual elements, their discursive structural forms and epistemic assumptions, and analyzes in acute historical detail their adoption and further development in various generic and discursive contexts in the 17^th and 18^th century.

In 1687, the jurist Anton Wilhelm Ertl published the Neo-Latin novel Austriana regina Arabiae. The novel is an allegorical treatment of the events surrounding the second Ottoman siege of Vienna starting in 1683, and it propagandizes for the House of Habsburg. The work marked the birth of the Neo-Latin Habsburg novel. This edition presents the text with German translation and an introduction to the Neo-Latin (Habsburg) novel.

This outline fills a gap by presenting a history of didactic poetry between the late Middle Ages and the Enlightenment. In addition to established authorities, it also considers the field of neo-Latin texts and translations of ancient and especially Italian didactic epics. It is framed as a historical reconstruction of all relevant poetological discussions from Aristotle to Goethe along with a look ahead to the 18^th and early 19^th centuries.

The romance of love and adventure about Margriete and Heinric from the Duchy of Limborch is one of the most popular Dutch works of the Middle Ages. New adaptations were created at the threshold of the Early Modern Period for the Heidelberg electoral court (c. 1480) and in Antwerp (1516). For the first time, the study combines philology, cultural studies, and book scholarship in a comparative study of the novels from a diachronic perspective.

The biblical dramas of Sixt Birck show the ways and purposes by which Biblical texts were transformed into theater after the Protestant Reformation. Birck’s dramatic works also dealt with issues of public life and the institutions in a Respublica christiana. For the first time, this study looks at an extensive selection of Sixt Birck’s dramas through the prism of political strategies.

What drew Martin Luther to the “Frankfurter” – at first sight, an undistinguished late Medieval treatise? Starting from this question, the monograph takes us back to the 14^th century. It reveals how the “Frankfurter” earned its unique philosophical and theological reputation through its involvement in transformation processes within “mystical discourse,” making it akin to Luther’s theological anthropology.

This volume aims to reconstruct the literary history of the compelling narrative model of the ring parable as a counterweight to contemporary reductionist misinterpretations, and to guide the reader through an archeology of European notions of tolerance. It traces the transformations of the parable from antiquity to Boccaccio, and then goes on to examine Lessing and modern reception.

This is the first systematic study of the specific capacity of early picaresque novels to create and present knowledge. It analyzes the narrative structure of the novels and reconstructs and contextualizes their sources to examine different modalities for their adaptation. The study describes the historical context for the unique discursive and textual features of picaresque narrative in greater detail than ever before.

Until quite recently, it was unthinkable that conflicts would arise in the Western world that recalled religious wars of the distant past. It may be questionable whether recalling the historical origins of our notion of tolerance will change today’s conflicts, yet it is important to understand the past, as potential solutions may be found in the early modern discourse on the politics of natural rights. This volume offers the necessary foundation.

The provocations for scholarly disputes during the early modern period are as diverse as their objects of contention. Yet these often-polemical exchanges reveal a common feature: they are characterized by great awareness of form. Defensive maneuvers can often be read as a form of attack. Individual studies examine apologetic writings in the specific contexts of different disciplines.

In the 16^th century, the multi-volume chivalry romance Amadis conquered the still nascent book market and became a regular bestseller. Despite its early popularity, German research has tended to pay little attention to this romance. This new narratological study undertakes an overall interpretation of the work. Applying the model of series research, it shows that Amadis may be the very first serial romance.

The studies collected in this volume examine previously undervalued and undiscovered aspects of Rist's multi-facetted oeuvre. In a series of essays, renowned authors from the fields of literary and music history, church history, and the history of science and hymnology assess Rist's role as a communicator while revealing the heterogeneity of his creative work and the wide range of his influence.

In this volume, correspondence between two physicians is analyzed in terms of its relevance to medical and scientific history. A special focus is placed on how Wagner enabled networking between academics in the early modern era. He was an example of an academic who was not an outstanding scholar or organizer in his own right, but who instead “undergirded” the ties between scholars.

The Municipal Latin School in Magdeburg was one of the most renowned academies in the Protestant world. The sources analyzed for the first time in this volume testify to the unbroken continuity of humanistic teaching through the post-Reformation period. Ancient texts and the works of Erasmus taught students humanistic principles such as the ideal of virtue, a non-aggressive approach to conflict, and the quest for a peaceful world.

Johann Gottfried Herder’s paraphrase of the Apocalypse Maran Atha (1779) and Johann Caspar Lavater’s “Messiah” epics (1780/1783–1786) provide evidence that the tradition of Christian verse did not end, by any means, with the completion of Klopstock’s “Messiah,” as has been assumed by literary historians. Based on Herder's and Lavater’s works, this study is the first detailed examination of the importance of German Christian verse after Klopstock.

This interdisciplinary cultural historical study is devoted to the intellectual biography of the journalist and poet, Georg Greflinger (ca. 1617–1677), a fascinating and in many respects exemplary author of 17^th century German literature and musical history. The focus is on Greflinger’s song lyrics – the area in which the author achieved the greatest recognition during his own epoch and beyond.

The essays in this volume explore the full scope of Maximilian’s Ruhmeswerk, which adaptively incorporated different literary and aesthetic genres. They examine the Emperor’s quest to become an “uomo universale”, or Renaissance man, in the context of the idea of “self-fashioning” at the focus of recent Renaissance research. In addition, the studies consider the impact of changing media conditions as a result of the invention of the printed book.

This study systematically explores the interconnections between medicine and politics in the early modern era. With the medicalization of governance, the figure of the doctor came into focus, and the doctor's diagnostic, prognostic, and therapeutic procedures became a model for governmental action, one that helped shape the discourse of political crises, uprisings, and epidemics.

This study tries to situate Andreas Gryphius’s political tragedies in the context of contemporary theories of law and government. In his dramatic engagement with the raison d’état and natural law, Gryphius expressed his personal views about issues of sovereignty and the right of resistance, which differed from the ideas of his contemporaries and led to a uniquely Gryphian form of political theology.

Published between 1718 and 1740, Fassmann’s journal exerted a long-underestimated impact on European literature. This monograph examines the Dialogues in the Realm of the Dead to show how they linked political commentary to historical education and engaged with contentious issues of the times. The study also explores “exotic” figures to reveal how contemporary news relied on tension between the familiar and the foreign.

This study examines constructions of the “Jew” in Baroque literature and investigates the historical development of modes of reference to Jewishness. Although by and large, the texts draw on anti-Semitic stereotypes, periodically a shift in attitude is visible when old narratives are deconstructed and new space opens up for neutral or even positive portrayals of Jewish figures.

Caspar Brülow (1585–1627) ranks among the most important dramatists working at the influential school stage of the Strasbourg Academy. This first-ever monograph about Brülow examines his life and work, paying particular attention to its historical motivation and content, intertextual connections, and Brülow’s discursive engagement with his environment. Included is a comprehensive bibliography of Brülow’s works.

This set contains all three volumes from the edition On the Contentiousness of Images, providing reliable insights into a German-speaking, theologically founded media debate carried out in the sixteenth century and encompassing ninety-nine texts by authors ranging from Bullinger to Zwingli. As a tool for image studies research, this collection is an indispensable resource and includes an extensive commentary and comprehensive index.

A standard work of sixteenth-century German image theory, that never existed in this richness: The Contentiousness of Images. The third volume in the document collection adds thirty-nine texts to the sixty texts on the iconological controversy – by writers like Amling, Blarer, Eberlin, Isaak, Leucht, Palladius, Pezel, and Wallser.

This volume provides the most comprehensive documentation of German controversies about pictorial images in the 16th century. It includes texts by 47 authors from different religious denominations along with commentary, an afterword, and detailed name and subject indexes. The two-volume work provides insight into this original debate on media in the German-speaking world, furnishing an unprecedented level of detail and information.

This study is the first monograph devoted to an exploration of Lessing’s Rettungen (Redemptions). It focuses on these largely neglected works, generally relegated to the realm of academic literary polemics, and attempts to do justice to their importance by situating them in intellectual history and genre studies. The intellectual modes underlying the Rettungen is highly characteristic of Lessing, and offer a new window into his oeuvre.

The Corpus Hermeticum was a significant driver of the pluralization of forms of religion and knowledge that occurred in the Early Modern Period. Drawing on source documents penned by the critics of the Corpus Hermeticum, this study represents the first analysis of the work's ambivalent role at the intersection between hidden knowledge and the democratization of the knowledge of salvation.

Lessing’s Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766) represents a turning point in 18th c. aesthetics. This volume offers detailed presentations about the productive openness of this “irregular collectanea.” Lessing does not intend to propose a systematic aesthetics, but rather to present a “fermenta cognitionis” that, in its totality, offers a panoramic view of the problematics of aesthetics and art history in his time.

In 1638, the Jesuit, poet, preacher, and historian from Upper Swabia, Johannes Bisselius (1601–1682) published the first volume of his seasonal poem Deliciae Veris. These “Pleasures of Spring” are a subtly composed, stylistically unique cycle inspired by multiple motivations. The poem cycle is presented here for the first time in a modern edition with a German translation and insightful commentary, including an introduction to each poem.

Apollonius of Tyre was one of the most popular stories of the German Middle Ages. In a critical Latin and German parallel edition, this volume presents the previously unedited version of Apollonius produced by the humanist Heinrich Steinhöwel, along with information about the text's transmission and genesis. The research section situates the author and the work in its socio-historical context, focusing on cultural and economic interconnections.

This volume is devoted to the abundance of poetics from the Early Modern period that, from the 15th century onward, drew on ancient traditions, and were primarily published in Latin. The authors analyze normative poetics, major tractates about poetology, and common schoolbooks, yet also examine indirect poetological reflections contained in poems. The volume provides a multifaceted view of the dynamic interplay between these two forms of poetics.

This book is a supplement to the eighteen-volume edition of the Complete Works of Philip von Zesen (1619-1689). For the first time, it presents the diverse oeuvre of the Baroque "poeta doctus" in monograph form, and explores its historical and literary contexts. The works considered include von Zesen's lyric poetry, poetics, novels, historical works, astronomy, philological research on myths, translations, devotional works, and writings on toleration.

The “novel in letters” is regarded as the epitome of sentimentality, yet its forms of expression are actually more nuanced than the typical verdict of literary historians would suggest. Based upon a consideration of the epistemological and media-historical contexts of the epistolary novel, this volume presents illustrative interpretations that reveal the multifaceted richness of this genre. The contours of the history of the epistolary novel are thus traced, allowing us to reassess the relationship between individual texts and the genre as a whole.

The Asiatische Banise (“The Asian Banise”) (1689), written by Heinrich Anshelm von Zigler und Kliphausen (1663-1697), was the most successful German baroque novel before Goethe’s Werther. Its popularity throughout Europe is further evidenced by the publication of a sequel novel; several operatic versions, stage plays, and poems; as well as translations into Swedish, Russian, Dutch, and French. This interdisciplinary collection documents and analyzes for the first time the singular history of the reception of the Asiatische Banise.

Founded in 1576, the University of Helmstedt was a brilliant center of late German humanism, a period that has been largely neglected in academic research. For the first time, this volume presents the lyrical works of Heinrich Meibom the Elder (1555-1625), who held the Helmstedt professorship of poetry for over 40 years. If offers a representative selection of his work, including texts in all the formats of neo-Latin poetry that he employed (including parodies of Horace, Virgilian centos, occasional poems, and spiritual poetry). An appendix including poetic self-references and biographical documentation provides insights into the author’s working world.

For the first time, these proceedings from an interdisciplinary and international symposium use a broad foundation of sources to examine the first period (1620–1790) in the history of the major European impact of Jakob Böhme, a history that extended well into the 20th century. The contributors reveal the conflicted and contrasting patterns and modalities of reception along with the different positions taken in response to Böhme in the works of important cultural figures. These studies show the existence of a conflict zone in intellectual history and also in the history of language and literature that extended beyond the German-speaking world.

Constructed in Bad Teinach, in Germany’s Schwarzwald, Antonia von Württemberg (1613–1679)’s "teaching painting" is an original and compelling synthesis of Jewish Kabbala, Christian mystagogy, and Lutheran theology. This collection of studies and documents draws upon extant documentation on the creation of this artwork, mostly in manuscript form, along with contemporary literary descriptions, situating them in their cultural context.

A behavioral ideal of French origin, gallantry is a vital concept for scholars researching the critical period around 1700. As an aesthetically determined ethic practiced by a court-influenced elite, gallant conduct was defined by the arts – and particularly by literature. That connection is the focus of this collection of cutting-edge articles. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, they investigate the tradition of gallantry beginning in the Middle Ages, its migration from France to Germany, and the continuity of its influence in the century of the Enlightenment.

In keeping with the first two volumes in this series, this third volume of the Corpus Paracelsisticum aims to make an innovative contribution to the cultural history of early modernity through its social, scientific, and literary historical content. Edited with commentary and offering a Latin translation, this volume includes 75 texts written between 1569 and 1613.

Barely acknowledged by literary scholarship or the history of knowledge, miscellaneous anthologies were an enormously successful product of Early Modern Era “knowledge literature” and “knowledge culture.” This book presents for the first time a thoroughly interdisciplinary treatment of the subject. Miscellaneous anthologies served a wider public’s polyhistoric desire for knowledge beyond the ordering discourse of strictly academic encyclopedias. Combining old and new media, these fascinating texts dynamically interwove convergent forms of knowledge.

Paul Fleming (1609–1640) was one of the most important poets of the early modern period, and his contemporaries ranked him alongside Martin Opitz. This anthology is from an international symposium held on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of Fleming’s birth. It assembles a series of papers that help provide a historical perspective for Fleming’s work in relation to literary traditions and cultural contexts (especially political, religious, and medical discourses).

This work presents the first comprehensive monograph on the gallant poet Christian Hunold alias Menantes (1680-1721). On the basis of the conjuncture of the gallant interaction and communication model between 1680 and 1730, central elements of this model for German literary history are examined based on the example of Hunold’s text production. Special attention is afforded its transitory function on the threshold of cultural differentiation of modern societies.

Johann Georg Jacobi (1740-1814) is a significant representative of the German Enlightenment in its various spheres of experience, and range of aesthetic, political and religious options. This bibliography presents for the first time Jacobi’s work and extensive literary estate. A register of more than 2000 letters brings to light not only Jacobi’s numerous acquaintances and intense exchange of letters, but also the international network of the Enlightenment in Germany’s southwest.

Since Late Antiquity the biblical epic has been one of the most lively literary genres. It was practised not only in scholarly but also popular languages. This study deals with biblical epic in the Early Modern Age, a subject that has been neglected to date. Chronologically it follows on from the fundamental works of Herzog and Kartschoke. It looks not just at theoretical aspects of the genre, but also at questions of the forms and functions of European biblical epic and the reception of biblical content. A repertory of the genre is arranged according to systematic aspects.

Menasseh ben Israel (1604-1657) was one of the most important Rabbis of the Early Modern Age in Europe. He became known primarily through his leading role in negotiating the readmission of the Jews to England. The England negotiations, however, were only the final chapter of a life-long program, which is fully examined in detail for the first time in this work. Menasseh is introduced as a Jewish scholar, who – despite all the success he achieved in the Christian world – also failed because his path between mediation and self-realization was understood only by a very few.

Because of the scandals surrounding his writings Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1676) has largely been interpreted either as a crypto-Jew or as an early atheist. The present study investigates him and his work not only in terms of theological history but, for the first time, within the context of the social practices of the European Republic of Letters. La Peyrère’s criticism of the bible and his striking interest in the Jews can now be newly interpreted in relation to spiritual reading of St Paul and La Peyrière’s relationship to his patron, Prince Condé.

Between 1514 and 1663 the genre known as Heroides, coined by Ovid, was maintained almost entirely by modern Latin poets. This book considers the period, which has up to now remained almost unheeded in the history of the genre. It looks at the collections of epistles by relevant authors (Eobanus Hessus, Andreas Alenus, Jacob Bidermann, Baudouin Cabiliau, Jean Vincart, Jacob Balde) in their context within the history of literature, considers their intertextual relationships and functional directions and renders them accessible with individual analyses of example poems.

This study on the Jesuit historian Famiano Strada represents a major contribution to Neo-Latin philological research and the history of historical writing. In his works, Strada reflects on the problems voiced by numerous scholars around 1600 regarding the study of history and its written presentation. Strada's Latin historical work De Bello Belgico was the object of intense debate among his contemporaries.

This book deals with the connection of humanism and the military based on the cultures in the Netherlands (Low Countries) and France in the late 16th and the 17th century. The cultural transferral processes of ancient military theory in the context of late humanistic culture of scholarship are disclosed in the reacquisition of ancient tactical and strategic teaching traditions. Generally emphasis is placed on Justus Lipsius – in this case an abundance of further theorists and texts are included: such as Claude Saumaise, Gabriel Naudé, Henri de Rohan and Richelieu.

This work applies a revisionist structure by correcting the foreshortenings of the Oestreich school with regard to the embedding of the military reform of the House of Orange in the political neo-stoicism and the thesis of social disciplining, as well as the interpretation of the military revolution.

The conflict about the fragments of "Apologia or Defense for the Rational Reverers of God" by the Hamburg scholar Hermann Samuel Reimarus and the Counter-propositions by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing caused an uproar in the Lutheran theological world of the 18th century. Would this form of Christianity, rooted in the tradition of the Lutheran Reformation, be superseded by the Enlightenment if literary, historical and religious-philosophical criticism of the Bible were now allowed? Lessing presents his solution of the problem in Axioms, which this book places in the context of his overall thought.

Georg Philipp Harsdörffer ‑ lawyer, scholar and mathematician, patrician, diplomat and judge ‑ has in recent decades become one of the most studied Baroque authors. His work had a distinct international orientation and encompassed nearly all areas of 17th century knowledge. It thus became the fulcrum for the European literary relationships and discourse of his age. The book documents this from the humanistic prerequisites to the ‛last things’ of religion.

This book enters and surveys new territory. It describes the “oratio historica” as a specific form of expression used in the political rhetoric of the early modern period. The speeches talk about events in the Spanish-Dutch war and occupy a position between classical tradition and modern academia. The speeches and speakers are presented as a part of the educated culture of the day and in terms of their contribution to the self-assurance of the newly-created Netherlands.

With more than 22,000 verses, the Esopus of the former monk and protestant pastor Burkard Waldis is the most comprehensive collection of German fables of the 16th century. The first volume contains the 400 animal fables of Aesop, jokes and anecdotes edited in accordance with the first edition from 1548. The second volume provides an introduction and extensive annotations as well as the reprint of the numerous Latin versions. Extensive indices make this narrative treasury from the Reformation era accessible.

With this critical edition of the Miller-Voß correspondence, one of the most important documents for the history of the ‘Göttinger Hain’ is published here in its entirety for the first time. The circle of young poets associated with the Sturm und Drang movement endeavored to undertake a renewal of poetry. The letters, written between 1774 and 1810, reflect the differences between two correspondents and their work and reveal their diverse contacts to famous contemporaries in times of historic upheaval. The text is accompanied by an in-depth commentary.

This study investigates the function of ‘culture’ in the political rivalries of the nobility around 1600 and explores the significance of ‘competition’ and ‘competitive zeal’ in the culture of the nobility in the Early Modern Age. Entire chapters are dedicated to the rhetoric competitions which were held, the rivalry in formulating obituaries and death notices or the aesthetic staging of tournaments as demonstration of the competitive zeal of the nobles. Landgrave Moritz the Learned (1572‑1632) of Hesse-Kassel is often used as example in the book.

This study explores how the philosophy of Kant became the prevailing school of thought in Germany during the first years after the Critique of Pure Reason appeared (1781). The book shows that the acceptance of this new philosophy was a complicated process which did not proceed without intense controversies. From the rhetorical point of view, the focus is mainly on the collective metaphors which characterize the debate. All in all, a vivid picture is created of the intellectual arena in Germany in the late 18th century.

This book explores the changes of style and knowledge about music around 1700 in eleven essays from musicology, literary studies, philosophy and legal history. The key to the change is a new understanding of the rules for composing, making music and listening. Music is no longer steered by fundamental natural musical laws, but rather orients itself, even normatively, toward trends, taste and situational circumstances.

Chryseidos Libri III, the Latin didactic poem on alchemy by the Strasbourg physician, alchemist and pharmacist Johannes Nicolaus Furichius (1602‑1633) is published in an annotated edition and translation. In a fantastic travelogue which contains retold myths from antiquity, this book describes the transformation of metals. The poet’s accompanying notes place this work in relation to Italian and French poetry of the Renaissance. Furthermore, the poet comments on the ongoing discussions of his time about natural history.

The philosophy of Christian Wolff is regarded to represent one of the most important schools of thought of the 18th century Enlightenment. The influence of this philosophy was based on a network of followers and disciples who propagated Wolff’s work in the scholarly community and defended it against critics. This book, for the first time, explores the role of Ernst Christoph von Manteuffel. As imperial count, minister in the Cabinet of Poland Saxony and an agent of the Court of Vienna, he was the decisive figure who initiated this network and led it for more than one and a half decades until his death in 1749.

This collective volume documents the German reception of the last novella of Boccaccio's Decameron. It is about Griselda, a poor daughter of a peasant, whom the Marquis Gualtieri marries and subsequently repudiates and humiliates in an inhumane way. Finally, after being subjected to numerous trials which she endures patiently, she is reinstated as wife and marchioness. The book explores the German reception of the Griselda figuration as gender paradigm from the Middle Ages up to the Modern Age in a European context.

This study is the first comprehensive analysis of the literary and literature-theoretical work of Johann Jakob Bodmer (1698-1783). It draws a new profile of the proponent of the Zurich Enlightenment, revising the negative judgments of literary history. In biblical epics, political dramas and children's plays Bodmer created models of society that were based on ideals such as friendship and human kindness. He was much more radical in his pronouncements than his writing contemporaries, and he declared these models to be the political basis of every society.

The cultural history of a city between the Late Middle Ages and the Thirty Years War
This book contains 19 essays on the cultural history of Augsburg in the 15th and 16th centuries. During this period Augsburg was one of the cities in Germany in which humanism and the art of the Renaissance found their earliest and most intensive reception. In line with new approaches to cultural history and the concept of humanism, the book illuminates the reception of the two paradigms as phenomena which were evident in the entire culture of the city. Taken together, the findings of this study present for the first time a complete panorama of Augsburg culture in the 15th and 16th centuries.

This study investigates the knowledge used in the interpretation of dream processes and in interpreting, classifying and writing down dreams. Moreover, it deals with the state of knowledge regarding the dream in science during the Old Empire. In the context of the cultural history of sciences this includes religious and medical interpretations and rhetorical practices. Using the dream as example, the book explores how key cultural and scientific traits could be linked to questions of identity.

The Christian dogma of the undividable unity of the soul is being questioned in Baroque anthropology by manifold evidence of psychic plurality. Whereas this leads to logical contradictions in philosophical terminology, contemporary metaphorics is able to depict the psychic as "manifold unity". In the concepts of the soul in Baroque poetry the study investigates the variants and particular conditions of this psychic "unity and diversity". The main focus is on poems in which the conception of the soul is delineated as space or clear spatial formation.

Miklos Zrínyi the Elder (died 1566) and his great-grandson and namesake (died 1664), the general, politician, poet and educated man of the world, are the topics of this work, not only as great names in Hungarian history but also as European figures of inestimable charisma. Numerous texts from the culture of the Old Reich bear witness to this ‑ reports, poems, flyers, sermons, stories, novels - and also dramas such as Theodor Körner’s tragedy. These proceedings of an international conference document the exact state of research and provide a wide-reaching reconstruction of the foundations, forms, stages and perspectives of this reputation, concentrating on accessing known and unknown works from German literature.