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Related: 1600s
Literature: La Puttana Errante (c.1650-1660) - The Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun (1669)
Births: Daniel Defoe (1660 - 1731) - Mary Delarivier Manley (1663 - 1724) - Giambattista Vico (1668 - 1744) - Jonathan Swift (1667 - 1745)
Deaths: Rembrandt (1606 or 1607– 1669)
Kleinodien-Schrank (1666) - Johann Georg Hainz
Pastoral Landscape with a Flight into Egypt (1663) - Claude Lorrain
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Simplicissimus (1668) - Johann Grimmelshausen [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
unidentified frontispiece to Simplicissimus, in the grotesque style
Simplicissimus (1668) - Johann Grimmelshausen
Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (1622? - August 11, 1676), German author, was born at Gelnhausen in or about 1622.
At the age of ten he was kidnapped by Hessian soldiery, and in their midst tasted the adventures of military life in the Thirty Years' War. At its close, Grimmelshausen entered the service of Franz Egon von Fürstenberg, bishop in Strasbourg and in 1665 was made Schultheiss (magistrate) at Renchen in Baden.
On obtaining this appointment, he devoted himself to literary pursuits, and in 1668 published Der Abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch, d.h. die Beschreibung des Lebens eines seltsamen Vaganten, genannt Melchior Sternfels von Fuchsheim, the greatest German novel of the 17th century. For this work he took as his model the picaresque romances of Spain, already to some extent known in Germany. Simplicissimus is in great measure its author's autobiography; he begins with the childhood of his hero, and describes the latter's adventures amid the stirring scenes of the Thirty Years' War. The rustic detail with which these pictures are presented makes the book one of the most valuable documents of its time. In the later parts Grimmelshausen, however, over-indulges in allegory, and finally loses himself in a Robinson Crusoe story. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Jakob_Christoffel_von_Grimmelshausen [Jan 2006]
War novel
As the prose fiction novel rose to prominence in the seventeenth century, the war novel began to develop its modern form, although most novels featuring war were picaresque satires in which the soldier was rakish rather than than realistic figure. An example of one such work is Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus, a semi-autobiographical account of the Thirty Years War. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_novel#Origins [Jan 2006]
See also: 1600s literature - 1600s - war in fiction - picaresque novel