Abteilung A: Autorenlexikon

Almost one hundred authors from the fields of poetry, drama, novels as well music, medicine, pharmacy, astronomy, geography, jurisprudence and theology are introduced in this book. They represent the complete spectrum of German literature from the late Middle Ages up to the Thirty Years’ War and show clearly the extent to which this literature was integrated into European culture at that time. In addition to the Early Modern High German version of the Spanish ›Amadis‹, one of the most popular chivalric novels in world literature, there are also representatives of Lutheran orthodoxy such as Nikolaus von Amsdorff, the Bishop of Naumburg or Jakob Andreae, the Chancellor of the University of Tübingen. Andreae‘s grandson, the utopian and Rosicrucian Johann Valentin Andreae, overcame the inflexibility of orthodoxy and paved the way for Pietism in the 17th and 18th centuries with his comprehensive works which are presented in an extensive bibliography with due regard to the occasional literature and the manuscript transmissions. Worth mentioning from the field of the natural sciences is Peter Apian, whose works on cosmography, astronomy and organology in connection with European foreign policy in the 16th and 17th century have special significance.