In the 1960s and 1970s the work of Andreas Gryphius (1616–64) was included in anthologies such as Lowry Nelson Jr.'s Baroque Lyric Poetry (1961) and Frank J. Warnke's Versions of Baroque (1972) as a matter of course. Like much period talk, the Baroque with which he was associated at the time is seldom mentioned these days, even in Germany, where its use to celebrate the uptick of vernacular literature during Germany's more or less delayed Renaissance reached its high point during the golden age of Baroque studies during the 1920s and 1930s and continued up through the 1990s. In the present volume, the term Baroque does not occur as a major category of analysis. The shift is significant.

Based on a conference in Munich in the Gryphius jubilee year of 2016, this German-language volume contains an introduction and twenty-six essays that approach Gryphius's work “polyperspectivally” (10), locating their principal in a broad network of political, ideological, legal, confessional, textual, and literary historical contexts. For example, Klaus Garber digs deeply into the vexed confessional context of Gryphius's home turf, the Thirty Years’ War and postwar Silesia, where the Habsburg Empire re-Catholicized some of the smaller cities and principalities that were traditionally Lutheran in a ruthless manner. The Lutheran Gryphius was intimately involved in the strife as a leading politician in the Silesian city of Glogau. Nicola Kaminski's close reading of his text about an inferno that consumed the Silesian city Freystadt in 1637 shows how these conflicts played out both on the ground and in the text. Johann Anselm Steiger also sees Gryphius's spiritual poetry in this “specifically Silesian” context as substituting Christ for Mary as the “serpent destroyer” in a way that obliquely resists the imposition of the Catholic cult (113). Readings by Wilhelm Kühlmann of Gryphius's odes together with Luther's Psalms; Dirk Niefanger of Gryphius's play, Leo Arminius, in conversation with the Strasburg Lutheran theologian Conrad Dannhauer's Christian hermeneutics; Friedrich Vollhardt of the impact of the Lutheran theologian Johann Arndt's work on Gryphius's religious lyric; and, from another perspective, Barbara Mahlmann-Bauer on the impact of the Jesuits in Silesia, likewise use meticulous close readings of the texts to embed questions of Gryphius's personal beliefs in the vexed conditions of the partisan theological debates of the times.

Other essays, while equally as detailed in their description of the theological and philosophical legal theories (Gideon Stiening) and gender codes (Mirosława Czarnecka and Oliver Bach, in a much more nuanced fashion) of the early modern period, zoom out, offering what Stiening calls a “critical history of ideas” (244). Gudrun Bamberg links Gryphius's work to and displays his knowledge of traditions from Cicero and Saint Augustine to Lipsius, Bodin, and Hobbes. Gryphius studied in Leiden and traveled to France and Italy, and thus knew the larger European political and literary landscape well; his play about the execution of Charles I in England in 1649, the subject of Constanze Baum's essay, is a case in point. Jörg Robert, Astrid Dröse, Marie-Therèse Mourny, and Achim Aurnhammer in turn demonstrate the implication of Gryphius's work in contemporary French and Italian discourses and genres via his active work as a translator (of Corneille, among others) as well as by intertextual reference in his generically diverse oeuvre. Dirk Werle's essay on Gryphius's carmen heroicum nevertheless makes it clear that there was an emerging local lineage of German-language textuality within which Gryphius was trying to position himself, which Thomas Borgstedt confirms. Gryphius thus emerges less as an author of a broadly defined Baroque period than as a poet-politician with his feet planted firmly on eastern Central European—Silesian—ground, who also moved about in a diverse textual world with great ease.

It is worth noting that almost all of the authors in this volume continue to debate, both in the essays themselves and in extremely lengthy footnotes, with a specifically German critical tradition about Gryphius dating back to the early twentieth century, when, as noted above, Baroque studies was in its heyday there. In these notes, readers are thus in effect introduced to a disciplinary history of the field in Germany over the past one hundred years. The continuing obligation to engage this tradition may explain why there are virtually no references to recent English-language work on Gryphius or on the seventeenth-century German tradition in the notes by James Parente, Bethany Wiggin, and Christopher Wild, among others, or by other established and rising scholars in Germany who have written on related issues (Daniel Weidner and Isabel von Holt). Baroque studies, at least as practiced by Warnke and Nelson back in the day, worked differently. Moreover, figures such as Carl Schmitt and Michel Foucault, whose ideas have been influential for studying the Renaissance and early modern period in other traditions, are mentioned here only very occasionally. The deeply informed conversation taking place in Bach's and Dröse's volume will thus be valuable primarily for those working in Germany in what clearly continues to be a robust field.