Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, one of the most prolific and influential poets, theoreticians, and translators in seventeenth-century Germany, was the founder and leader of the so-called Nuremberg Poet's Circle, known for its playful and onomatopoeic early mannerist style. A polymath, he used many fiction and nonfiction genres to write about every topic that would be of interest to a general educated audience of that century: poetics, literature, the arts, religion, mathematics, natural sciences, manners, everyday culture, and civilization. He was well read in all major European literatures--Neo-Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and English--and used an enormous amount of material from these literatures, both in his own poetic works and in his translations and adaptations, thus becoming one of the most important transmitters of Romance literatures in Germany.

The Harsdörffer family is known to have resided in Nuremberg since the late fourteenth century; it became eligible...