Exercitia artis et pietatis

Focussing on the early autograph manuscripts of the religious songs of Anton Ulrich, the essay first discusses the influence of his teachers Sigmund von Birken and Justus Georg Schottel, as well as that of Georg Philipp Harsdörffer who was closely associated with them and with the Wolfenbüttel court. The receptiveness of the young duke to the contributions made by these authors to the theory of poetry, which strongly influenced the development of baroque literature after Opitz, is evident. However, the purpose of his poems was not only to study a new approach to art, but rather his teachers’ understanding of poetry corresponded closely to the spiritual contents of the poems, revealing their close affinity to the prayer and edification literature characteristic of the seventeenth century. This is shown not only in the subject matter of the songs, by the intensive use of the language of the Bible, and by the inclusion of a number of the songs into prayer books, but in particular by the fact that many of the songs are found to be paraphrases of spiritual texts by Leonhard Hutter, Martin Moller, Johann Arndt and Johann Michael Dilherr.