Under the pseudonym Menantes, Christian Friedrich Hunold was one of the most prolific writers of the so-called gallant age, between the baroque and rococo periods at the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth. With the exception of Christian Weise, no other author of the period produced works that went through as many editions or as decisively influenced the style and views of the age. Hunold's four "gallant" (erotic) novels mark the high point of that genre in Germany, and his etiquette books and guides for letter writing were among the most popular of his time. On the one hand, Hunold continued writing in the traditional baroque genres; on the other hand, the characters in his novels behave more realistically than those in the fiction of his predecessors, thus escaping the baroque tendency toward idealization. This feature, when combined with his books on etiquette...