Martin Zeiler (also Zeiller, born 17 April 1589 in Ranten, died 6 October 1661 in Ulm) was a Baroque era German author.
Zeiler's father was an exile from Upper Styria, forced to emigrate due to his protestant confession. Zeiler was schooled in Ulm, moving to Wittenberg in 1608 to study jurisprudence and history. He worked several jobs as private teacher and notary. He lived in Ulm from 1629, working as teacher and inspector at local schools.
Zeiler was very productive as an author, meeting the template of the Baroque polyhistor. The Ulm city library lists 90 works authored by Zeiler. His productivity was recognized by his contemporaries; Georg Philipp Harsdörffer mentions Herrn Zeillers proverbial industriousness in one of his poems. Zeiler is best known for his contribution to Matthäus Merian's Topographia Germaniae (16 vol., 1642–1654).
Conrad Celtes was a German Renaissance humanist scholar and poet of the German Renaissance born in Franconia. He led the theatrical performances at the Viennese court and reformed the syllabi. In 1500, he published Tacitus' "Germania" and his rediscovered works and wrote the "Quatuor libri amorum" in 1500, after the model of Ovid.
Matthäus Merian der Ältere was a Swiss-born engraver who worked in Frankfurt for most of his career, where he also ran a publishing house. He was a member of the patrician Basel Merian family.
Unterwalden is the old name of a forest-canton of the Old Swiss Confederacy in central Switzerland, south of Lake Lucerne, consisting of two valleys or Talschaften, now two separate Swiss cantons, Obwalden and Nidwalden.
Helvetia is the female national personification of Switzerland, officially Confoederatio Helvetica, the Swiss Confederation.
Andreas Gryphius was a German poet and playwright. With his eloquent sonnets, which contains "The Suffering, Frailty of Life and the World", he is considered one of the most important poets of the German baroque. He was one of the first improvers of German language and poetry.
Justus Georg Schottelius was a leading figure of the German Baroque, best known for his publications on German grammar, language theory and poetics.
Cambrésis is a former pagus, county and prince-bishopric of the medieval Holy Roman Empire that was annexed to the Kingdom of France in 1679. It is now regarded as one of the "natural regions" of France, and roughly equivalent to the Arrondissement of Cambrai in department Nord. The capital of Cambrésis was Cambrai. Originally ruled by a dynasty of counts, Cambrésis became a prince-bishopric in 1007, comparable to the Prince-Bishopric of Liège and the Prince-Bishopric of Utrecht. It encompassed the territory in which the bishop of Cambrai had secular authority.
Christoph Rothmann was a German mathematician and one of the few well-known astronomers of his time. His research contributed substantially to the fact that Kassel became a European center of the astronomy in the 16th century.
Johann Daniel Major was a German professor of theoretical medicine, naturalist, collector and the founder of museology.
Georg Thym was a German teacher, poet and writer.
The Merian map of Paris was created in 1615 and presents a "bird's eye view" looking east with a scale of about 1 to 7,000. It originally consisted of two engraved plates with the left and right halves of the map and was printed with 2 columns of portraits on the left and right sides of the respective map halves. The entire assembly was 50 x 101.5 cm.
Christman Genipperteinga was a German serial killer and bandit of the 16th century. He reportedly murdered 964 individuals starting in his youth over a 13-year period, from 1568 until his capture in 1581. The story of Christman Genipperteinga is contained in a contemporary pamphlet from 1581. As early as in 1587, just six years after its publication, at least one chronicler included the story as factual.
Topographia Germaniae is a multi-volume series of books created by engraver Matthäus Merian and writer Martin Zeiler, and published in Frankfurt in 38 parts. Engravers Wenceslaus Hollar, Caspar Merian, and Matthäus Merian Jr. also contributed illustrations. In the 1960s Bärenreiter-Verlag reproduced the work.
Topographia Galliae (1655–1661) is a German-language series of illustrated books created by engraver Matthäus Merian and writer Martin Zeiler, and published in Frankfurt. It describes cities and towns in 17th-century France. Wenceslaus Hollar also contributed engravings.
Johann Matthäus Meyfart, also Johann Matthaeus Meyfahrt, Mayfart was a German Lutheran theologist, educator, academic teacher, hymn writer and minister. He was an opponent fighter of witch trials.
Caspar Ziegler, also Kaspar Ziegler, was a German jurist, poet, hymnwriter and composer. He was the Rektor of the University of Wittenberg.
Nicolaus Reusner was a German jurist and publisher. He was born into a family of wealthy German landowners in Löwenberg, Silesia, who had recently moved there from Transylvania. Several members of his family became famous in the fields of law and medicine in the 16th century, including his brothers Bartholomäus von Reusner, Elias Reusner and Jeremias von Reusner (law). Reusner studied in Wittenberg and Leipzig, under Modestinus Pistoris, and Leonhard Badehorn. In Leipzig, imperial personal physician Georg Wirth (1524–1613) persuaded him to abandon medicine and study law.
Gerhard Storz was the son of a Lutheran pastor from Württemberg who at various stages distinguished himself in theatre productions, as a scholar, an educationalist, a politician and an author-journalist, sometimes pursuing one career at a time and sometimes several in combination. Throughout his adult life he liked to see himself as a "language therapist". "Human speech seems to have been encoded, sealed into formulaic structures, and pressed into service for mechanistic operations", he once wrote.
Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Wander was a German pedagogue and Germanist. He published the largest existing collection of German-language proverbs.
Walther Killy was a German literary scholar who specialised in poetry, especially that of Friedrich Hölderlin and Georg Trakl. He taught at the Free University of Berlin, the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, as founding rector of the University of Bremen, as visiting scholar at the University of California and Harvard University, and at the University of Bern. He became known as editor of literary encyclopedias, the Killy Literaturlexikon and the Deutsche Biographische Enzyklopädie.
