Fewrige Freystadt: Erste Neuedition seit 1637. Text und Materialien by Andreas Gryphius, Johannes Birgfeld

Abstract

266 Reviews furthermore, students' knowledge ofMHG is declining. (Indeed, students' know ledge of any kind ofGerman isdeclining, so thateditions ofMHG textswith English translations such as that planned by Kathleen Meyer (see Kragl, pp. 799-800) are becoming evermore common.) In volume IIKragl presents his editorial principles (pp. 797-830), gives a detailed description of themanuscripts and fragments (pp. 830-96), and has also produced a thorough, critical, and lucid-in short,very useful!-overview of research on Lanzelet todate, though he consciously refrains fromofferinghis own full interpretation of the work (pp. 897-1020). Finally, he provides a useful commentary on the text (pp. IQ7 1 I280). In sum, this is an extremely useful and eminently usable contribution to Lanzelet scholarship. UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM NICOLA McLELLAND Fewrige Freystadt: Erste Neuedition seit I637. Text undMaterialien. By ANDREAS GRYPHIUS. Ed. by JOHANNES BIRGFELD. (Fundstiicke, 4) Hannover: Wehrhahn. 2006. lvi+ 194 pp. o20. ISBN 978-3-932324-38-3. On the night of 8-9 June i637 a fire,starting in a bakery, swept rapidly through the Silesian town of Freystadt (present-day Kozuch6w), leaving a trail of destruc tion. One of the first witnesses was a Lutheran pastor, Paul Gryphius, brother of the twenty-year-oldAndreas Gryphius, who had seen his firstpublished collection of poems, theLissaer Sonette, appear earlier in the year.The young poet was living nearby, at the house of his employer and patron Georg Schonborner, and itwas ap parently at the latter's insistence thathewrote a response to thedisaster, published as Fewrige Freystadt. As he relates the events of thatnight inhis opening prose account, Gryphius pauses to lament the loss of private libraries, to take in an example ofma ternal love in a swallow's vain attempt to rescue her young from the flames, and to reflecton the spiritual lessons tobe gleaned from the catastrophe. The textconcludes with an appeal forhelp to theHabsburg Emperor, and is followed by a long poem in alexandrines, going beyond amere versification of thepreceding prose. Johannes Birgfeld's critical edition draws on two copies of the I637 Lissa publica tion (bothwith marginal corrections which Birgfeld attributes toGryphius) and a fair manuscript copy of the text,again apparently inGryphius's hand. It is supplemented by a general introduction, helpful textual notes, reproductions ofmanuscript pages, and a concluding analysis. Birgfeld makes accessible one ofGryphius's longest prose works, a text which has not been reprinted since i637. The edition contextualizes such poems as the 'Grabschrift' for Gryphius's niece Marianne, whose mother went into labour as the flamesbegan todevour the town ('Gebohren inder Flucht I umbringtmit Schwerd und Brand'), and sheds interesting lighton thepoet's earlywriting career. The edition has twoweaknesses. The firstisstructural.While the long introduction allows Birgfeld toprovide very thorough background information, it involves him in a certain amount of repetition and distracts from the text itself. The second concerns the target readership. Birgfeld acknowledges that this is likely tobe specialists in the fieldof seventeenth-century German literature,but he none the less hopes to appeal to a more general reader,who may have come across 'Tranen des Vaterlandes' or 'Es ist alles eitel' in school or university anthologies. To this end, he provides an introduction toGryphius and to the troubled situation of Silesia in theThirty Years War which is too basic for the book's probable readership, and which leads him to unnecessary exaggerations, forexample his insistence thatcomparing the manuscript and printed copies gives insight into 'das fastkriminalistische und iiu3erst spannende Handwerk der Literatur', or the rather laboured linkbetween the textand Descartes's MLR, I03. I, 2oo8 267 Discours de lamethode, which was published inLeiden on the day of the fire.This edition is, in reality,unlikely to find itsway onto the shelves of the general reader whom Birgfeld courts through his hyperbolic claims, but itwill certainly be useful for thosewith an academic interest in the literatureof thisperiod. KING'S COLLEGE LONDON ANNA LINTON The Reception ofEnglish Puritan Literature in Germany. By PETER DAMRAU. (MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 66; Bithell Series ofDissertations, 29) Leeds: Maney. 2oo6. Vii+214 pp. ?35; $82. ISBN 978-I-904350-38-5. The central claim of thisLondon Ph.D. thesis is thatBritish Puritan literature had a significant impact on...