One of the most highly praised and subsequently most fervently damned authors of the seventeenth century, Daniel Casper von Lohenstein has now emerged as one of German baroque literature's most widely recognized creative intellects. In the six dramas he composed for the Protestant school stage, Lohenstein moved an inherently conservative genre into new and more daring subject matters. No longer sustained by a reassuring context of Christian salvation, his characters struggle and suffer in an apparently secular universe subject only to the overriding demands of Verhängnis (fate). His dramatic subjects react not with the martyr's passivity that characterizes Andreas Gryphius's protagonists but with the total resources of their wit, cunning, sexuality, and political power. Their conflicts in and of this world engender a dramatic immediacy rare in Lohenstein's age. Similarly, his encyclopedic novel Großmüthiger Feldherr Arminius oder Herrmann (The Magnanimous General Arminius...