This is a critical edition, with translation and commentary, of part of the cycle of elegies entitled AUrania VictrixA (1663), the important late poetic work of Jacob Baldes, Germany's most internationally renowned Jesuit poet. The work is not only a challenging example of edificatory literature faithfully reflecting the conflicts of the age, but also a compendium of Baroque knowledge culture, in which the five senses of the human body each enlarge upon their own experience of the modern world.

The studies assembled here provide a comprehensive survey of German poetry in the early modern age. Penned by an outstanding authority on neo-Latin and German literature, they supply interpretations of little-known poetic works of the period and cast a new light on more familiar works in the literary canon. The immensely detailed knowledge informing the different articles adds up to a literary image of the epoch as a whole. The individual poems discussed provide the basis for these micro-studies in literary history. Together with a constant concern for their aesthetic form, the approach achieves an appropriate understanding of these complex texts. At one and the same time, the volume is an introduction to the salient issues posed by the epoch in question and a guide to the present state of research on the poetry of the early modern age. The rich source material examined and analyzed in the process both enhances and reshapes our knowledge of the subject.