Although chiefly remembered today as the genial shoemaker-poet and leader of Nuremberg's Meistersinger Guild in Richard Wagner's opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1862; translated as The Master-Singers of Nuremberg, 1892), Hans Sachs was, in his time, one of Germany's best-known poets. A man of unparalleled literary productivity, he wrote more than 4,000 Meisterlieder (master songs), almost 2,000 Spruchgedichte (poems), 85 Fastnachtspiele (carnival, or Shrovetide, plays), 128 other dramas, and 6 prose dialogues. A loyal champion of the Lutheran cause, he was, at the same, time, a critical and keen observer and chronicler of his times. Today only a small fraction of his enormous oeuvre is familiar to the general public. For anyone who is interested in the social history and mentality of early modern Germany, Sachs provides an inexhaustible source.

Sachs was born in Nuremberg on 5 November 1494 to the tailor Jörg Sachs, who had emigrated from Zwickau, and Christina Sachs, n...