The Enterprise of Writing a literary history of this period under the inclusive nomenclature of “early modern” has only one precedent: Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly’s fifty-four-page chapter “The Early Modern Period (1450–1720)” in The Cambridge History of German Literature (1997). Volume 4 of the Camden House History of German Literature, however, is the first attempt to give a book-length account of the entire period, from its earliest manifestations in the late Middle Ages to its yielding to the modern aesthetics of individual expression in the Age of Sentimentality. Early modernists disagree somewhat over beginning and end dates. This volume establishes an earliest-possible terminus a quo of 1350; the terminus ad quem of 1700 allows for a seamless connection to Volume 5 of the series, though 1750 would be closer to the actual transition to modernity. Still, even a volume as ample as this one can make no claim to comprehensiveness. Indeed, the possibility of such a claim expired with the fading, after the First World War, of the nineteenth century’s illusions of a single “grand narrative” born among Italian Renaissance princes and bequeathed to a German spiritual prince by the name of Luther, Protestant, whose genius, allegedly, set the great wheel of modernity in motion. The “account” promised here has a rather more modest goal: to represent as thoroughly as possible the current state of scholarship in the field, and to do so across the long duration between 1350 and 1700-plus in order better to observe the essential transitions in mentality, contours in culture, and multiplicities in convention.

To provide some conceptual control over the subjects in this volume, the twenty-six chapters have been arranged in five parts: 1) Transitions: this part includes discussions of the late-medieval-to-early-modern transition itself as well as related studies on the structure of the period and the state of philologicaleditorial research. 2) Formations: these represent some of the more massive literary-intellectual developments of the period, such as education, which were fundamental to all other aspects. 3) Forms: these include the three classical genres plus the sensational new mixed form of the emblem. 4) Representations: some of these subjects, like the formations, had broad significance, but are placed under this rubric because of their particular nature to reflect, or represent, other interests (for example, literature at or concerning the court).