Virgil’s Aenead in German Verse at the Threshold of the 17th Century (Vergils Aeneis in deutschen Versen an der Wende zum 17. Jahrhundert)

Thomas Murner’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid (Strasbourg: Johann Gruninger 1515) was the first into German and remained the only one until a further translation by Johannes Spreng, the Meistersinger from Augsburg, was published posthumously in 1610. The use of rhyming couplets as the epic metre for the German Aeneid until the early 17th century was not only due to the reprints of Murner’s editio princeps, but also to Spreng’s work, the last edition of which was published in 1629. It was only about 40 years later that this formal pattern was superseded by the alexandrine, better suited to the stylistic requirements of baroque poetics.