During her short life, which was encompassed by the Thirty Years' War, Sibylle Schwarz wrote original and innovative verses. Her poetry follows the new models propagated by Martin Opitz, especially the new metrics of French and Dutch verse. Her poetic production is multifaceted; she wrote religious, occasional, and secular poetry, including sonnets on love and friendship with personal tones that were rare in poetry of the seventeenth century. She is one of the few women of her age--perhaps the first woman in German literature--who consciously referred to the female I and attempted to bring it into the literary-scholarly tradition.

Schwarz was born on 14 February 1621 into a Protestant, upper-class family in Greifswald, a university town in Pomerania, in northern Germany on the Baltic Sea. Her father, Christian Schwarz, was a lawyer, city councilman, and mayor from 1631 until his death in 1648; he had traveled to the Netherlands and to Spain...