Anna Ovena Hoyers was one of the few German women in the early seventeenth century whose writings appeared in print. Because of her religious fervor and her association with Anabaptists, she has gone down in literary history as a "Schwärmerin" (religious zealot). Yet even a superficial examination of Hoyers's Geistliche und Weltliche Poemata (Religious and Secular Poetry, 1650), a collection of her most representative poetry, shows the one-sidedness of such a judgment: Hoyers's verses reflect her deep religiosity, her love for her children, and her independence and self-determination in religious and secular matters, as well as her contempt for bookish learning and for the hypocrisy of the Lutheran orthodoxy. Her poetry attests to her unorthodox thinking and lifestyle.

Anna Owens was born in 1584 (the exact date is unknown) in Koldenbüttel in the Eiderstedt region, on the west coast of what was then the duchy of...