ABSTRACT
Praetorius begins and ends his vast oeuvre as a reporter of his world. Pursuing local and global events and wonders, he writes for men and women, who like him, want and need to know. Praetorius connects the heterogeneous intellectual, moral, and social threads of his time in a tableau of words that simultaneously fascinates and overwhelms his reader with its visual and linguistic variety and wealth of information. Along the way, Praetorius's ways of telling, what in the context of some of his contemporaries' writings has been called "bloated learnedness" and polyhistorical enormity challenge the modern reader's persistence. From his rather narrow perch in Leipzig, the northeastern German city Praetorius seems never to have left, he opens before our mental eye a wide and varied panorama that’s historical, social, geographic, and mythographic details provide a reflection of seventeenth-century Germany that is surprisingly textured and alive.
