Bøger i Bibliotheca Latinitatis Novae serien

First critical edition of Burmeister's newly discovered Aulularia. Joannes Burmeister of Lüneburg (1576-1638) was among the greatest Neo-Latin poets of the German Baroque. His masterpieces, now mostly lost, are Christian 'inversions' of the Classical Roman comedies of Plautus. With only minimal changes in language and none in meter, each transforms Plautus's pagan plays into comedies based on biblical themes. Fascinating in their own right, they also bring back to attention forgotten genres of Renaissance literature. This volume offers the first critical edition of the newly discovered Aulularia (1629), which exists in a sole copy, and the fragments of Mater-Virgo (1621), which adapts Plautus's Amphitryo to show the Nativity of Jesus. The introduction offers reconstructions of Susanna (based on Casina) and Asinaria (1625), Burmeister's two lost or unpublished inversions of Plautus. Fontaine also provides the only biography of Burmeister based on archival sources, along with discussions of his inimitable Latinity and the perilous context of war and witch-burning in which Burmeister wrote. Burmeister's inversions bear witness to the special talent of his age for the creative reworking of Classical literature, such as Monteverdi's Poppea or Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, as well as to his tumultuous times, with his views on military abuses in the Thirty Years' War prefiguring those of Grimmelshausen's Simplicius Simplicissimus.

The Annals of the War in the Low Countries is one of Hugo Grotius' lesser-known works. Grotius expresses a contrarian view of the early revolt, which he presents not as a united battle for the true faith and the ancient liberties of the land but as a protracted and painful struggle, not only with the great power of Spain, but also with discord, selfishness and religious fanaticism among the Dutch. To convey this complex and controversial vision of the foundational years of the Dutch Republic, Grotius chose the worldview and the prose style of the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus as his model. His commissioners, however - the States of Holland - did not publish the work when it was finished in 1612; it appeared in print posthumously in 1657.This is the first edition of Grotius' then-influential and well-known Annals of the Dutch Revolt since its initial publication. It presents a critical edition of the Latin text, a fresh modern English translation, and an introduction which covers all aspects of the work, from its conception to its modern reception, underlining the importance of reason of state for Grotius' thought in general.Jan Waszink is a senior researcher at the Historical Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences.