The varied phases of Gottfried Wilhelm Sacer's life as a preceptor and later as a lawyer in the service of the duchy of Brunswick, Lüneburg, and Wolfenbüttel were accompanied by many-sided literary ambitions. His religious poetry found its way into Protestant hymnbooks; his pamphlets and dedicatory texts, reprints of his poems in works of other authors, and the funeral orations he composed attest to his many close personal relationships. He acquired fame with his poetic satire Reime dich, oder ich fresse dich (Rhyme or I Will Eat You, 1673). Apart from abridged modern reprints, his works are only available in seventeenth-century printings. Copies of translations attributed to him have yet to be traced.

Born on 11 July 1635 in Naumburg, Sacer came from a respectable Saxon-Thuringian family of lawyers. His father, Andreas Sacer, had been council chamberlain and later mayor of the former diocesan town; his mother...