For a long time Christian Weise was dismissed as a dry and tedious, essentially second-rate writer--a schoolmaster turned author and therefore inevitably deficient in those qualities of insight and imagination that readers expect of a true creative writer. That he was born and died in the same provincial German backwater reinforced the view that he was a man of limited horizons. But Weise's importance is slowly being recognized. The reassessment of his achievement that has been taking place since the 1970s, prompted in large measure by the still-incomplete edition of his works that started to appear in 1971, has challenged the accepted view of his place in the history of German literature. He is now seen, more often than not, as the dominant German literary figure of the last third of the seventeenth century and the first decade of the eighteenth, the period that followed the deaths of Andreas...