Jacob Balde occupied a key but paradoxical position in Germany's literary life during the seventeenth century. He was the most gifted of the many Neo-Latin poets in the baroque age and on this account achieved international fame. He was a political commentator in verse who had a close relationship with a major participant in the Thirty Years' War, Maximilian of Bavaria, and he was the most trenchant poetic voice of the Catholic forces in that conflict. As late as the nineteenth century he was celebrated as a Bavarian bard, a role to which several translations of his odes and other poems attest. With the decline of classical studies, however, the virtuoso Latinity for which he was celebrated in his day served to push him more and more to the sidelines of popular and literary interest, and today he is frequently referred to but seldom read. It is true...