Gryphius was Germany’s greatest Baroque poet and dramatist, giving a powerful voice to the suffering and misery of the Thirty Years’ War that ravaged the country between 1618 and 1648 as a result of the bitter split between Catholics and Protestants since Martin Luther’s Reformation started in 1517. Gryphius was also a proponent of modern sciences and the humanities.

Gryphius was born on 2 October 1616, the same year Shakespeare died and two years before the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War, to the fifty-six-year old Lutheran archdeacon of Glogau in Silesia, Paul Gryphius (Greif), and his third wife Anna, thirty-two years his junior. Glogau, though in the reign of the Catholic Emperor, was a center of Luthe

This article in full comprises 2423 words but only the first 150 or so words are available to non-members.

All our articles have been written recently by experts in their field, more than 95% of them university professors. To read about membership, please click here.

First published 27 September 2007

Citation: Classen, Albrecht. "Andreas Gryphius". The Literary Encyclopedia. 27 September 2007.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5448, accessed 20 November 2009.]