Jacob Balde

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Jacob Balde.

Johann Jacob Balde SJ (born January 3, 1604 in Ensisheim , Alsace , † August 9, 1668 in Neuburg an der Donau ) was a German Jesuit and neo-Latin poet.

Life

Balde's father was chamber secretary for the government of Upper Austria . He had the son brought up in the spirit of the Counter-Reformation , u. a. at a Jesuit college in Ensisheim. When in 1621 the Thirty Years' War , the diocese reached Strasbourg, fled Balde to Ingolstadt, where he attended the local university to study philosophy and law. He had already chosen law as a subject when, during a nightly serenade, unheard of by his celebrated and seized by the choir singing from a nearby monastery, he smashed his lute and decided to renounce the world. Other sources also give the unhappy love for a baker's daughter as a reason to join the Jesuit order in 1624.

The Wilhelminum around 1700 after Michael Wening

After two years of training, Balde went to Munich, where he taught at the Wilhelmsgymnasium and attracted the attention of those around him with his first poetic works, initially allegations of guilt. The rector of the Munich college, Jakob Keller, promoted his poetic training. When the professor of rhetoric was transferred to Innsbruck in 1628 , Balde was also successful there with lectures and dramatic works. On the orders of the order he went to Ingolstadt to study theology, witnessed the siege by Swedish troops and was ordained a priest in 1633 by the auxiliary bishop Resch von Eichstätt .

From 1634 to 1635 Balde was in Munich, but at the beginning of the 1635 semester he was sent to the University of Ingolstadt as a rhetoric professor, where he was called the "resurrected Quintilian ". In 1637 Balde had a great success with the biblical drama Jephte . At the request of Duke Albert VI. Balde went back to Munich to raise his son Albrecht Sigismund , who later became Bishop of Freising.

In 1638 Balde became court preacher to Elector Maximilian I ; after two years he had to give up the job due to illness and was instead given the task of writing down Bavarian history. He wrote an Expeditio Donawerdana about Maximilian's campaign against Donauwörth, but he gave up the historiography because the elector himself prescribed what he was allowed to write and what not. He now mainly devoted himself to his poetic work and published his Odes and Lyrical Forests from 1643 to 1645 , which established his fame as a poet.

As early as 1638 Balde had founded the Society of the Skinny (also Knights of the Drought Order ), an association that fought against obesity, an eccentric project during the Thirty Years' War. Balde himself was extremely thin and therefore a target of ridicule. He found influential allies such as Duke Albrecht VI. from Bavaria. His own poor health was the reason that Balde was transferred to Landshut in 1650.

There, as later in Amberg , he worked as a pulpit speaker, but continued to write, among other things, satires, such as the Medicinae gloria against bungling pharmacists. Confessional polemics largely take a back seat in his work. Instead, he repeatedly lamented the collapse of the empire, the atrocities of the war and - out of personal dismay - the forced emigration (numerous poems on his native Alsace). In 1654 he was transferred to Neuburg an der Donau, where he initially worked as court preacher and later as confessor of Count Palatine Philipp Wilhelm . His journey from Amberg to Neuburg was like a triumphal procession, the councilors of Nuremberg and the professors of Altdorf paid homage to the famous poet. In Neuburg, Balde wrote, among other things, the allegorical poem Urania victrix , for which Alexander VII , to whom the work was dedicated, gave him a gold medal.

Balde died in 1668 at the court of Philipp Wilhelm. He was buried in the Neuburg Court Church. Balde's neo-Latin poems made him known beyond Bavaria as the "German Horace ", a title that Sigmund von Birken bestowed on him - despite problems with the Jesuit order censorship . It was also Baldes who translated Satyra contra abusum tabaci , a pamphlet against smoking, in 1658 as Die truckene drunkenness .

Honors

A bust made by Fidelis Schönlaub was placed in the Munich Hall of Fame . In addition, Munich's Baldeplatz in Ludwigsvorstadt-Isarvorstadt is named after him. The Studienseminar Neuburg named the student residence in Munich, Theresienstraße 100, after him as Jakob-Balde-Haus . The city of Neuburg has been honoring him since March 16, 2013 by naming a square.

Balde occupies a prominent place among the neo-Latin poets both for the fertility and for the poetic content of his creations; as far as the wealth of idiosyncratic expressions and ingenious compositions is concerned, according to Herder's judgment he even asserts precedence over Horace. B. tried his hand at all kinds of poetry, but there is no doubt that he achieved the highest in poetry.

Works (selection)

Editions, translations, comments

  • Thorsten Burkard (Ed.): Jacob Balde: Dissertatio de studio poetico (1658). Introduction, edition, translation, commentary. Herbert Utz, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-8316-0327-8 (critical edition).
  • Lutz Claren et al. (Ed.): Jacob Balde SJ: Urania Victrix - The Victorious Urania. Liber I – II - First and Second Book. Introduced, edited, translated and commented on. Niemeyer, Tübingen 2003, ISBN 3-484-36585-4 (critical edition).
  • Andreas Heider (Ed.): Spolia vetustatis. The transformation of the ancient pagan tradition into Jacob Balde's Marian pilgrimages: Parthenia, Silvae II 3 (1643). Introduced, edited, translated and explained. Herbert Utz, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-89675-513-7 .
  • Katharina Kagerer: Jacob Balde and the Bavarian historiography under Elector Maximilian I. A commentary on the dream ode (Silvae 7.15) and on the Interpretatio Somnii. Herbert Utz, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-8316-4179-6 (contains critical edition of the Interpretatio Somnii with translation).
  • Eckard Lefèvre (ed.): The hunting book De venatione (Sylvae 1) by the baroque poet Jakob Balde. Introduction, text, translation, interpretation. Olms, Hildesheim 2011, ISBN 978-3-487-14664-5 .
  • Veronika Lukas (ed.): Batrachomyomachia. Homer's Frog Mouse War, blown on a Roman trumpet by Jacob Balde SJ (1637/1647) with a critical edition of the first book, translation and commentary. Herbert Utz, Munich 2001, ISBN 978-3-8316-0014-4 .
  • Veronika Lukas, Stephanie Haberer (eds.): Jakob Balde, Panegyricus Equestris (1628): Edition and translation with a historical commentary. Wißner, Augsburg 2002, ISBN 3-89639-333-2 .
  • Wilfried Stroh (Ed.): Seneca in Prague. A tragic exercise by the young Jakob Balde SJ, edited and critically explained. In: Wilfried Stroh: Baldeana. Herbert Utz, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-8316-0347-2 , pp. 59–119.
  • Philipp Weiß: Jacob Balde: Epithalamion. Edited, translated and commented by Philipp Weiß , Narr Francke Attempto, Tübingen 2015, ISBN 978-3-8233-6993-6 .
  • Ulrich Winter (Ed.): Iacobus Balde: Liber epodon. Saur, Munich / Leipzig 2002, ISBN 3-598-71246-4 (critical edition).

literature

  • Georg Westermayer :  Balde, Jacob . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 2, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1875, pp. 1-3.
  • Friedrich-Wilhelm Wentzlaff-Eggebert:  Balde, Jacob. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 1, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1953, ISBN 3-428-00182-6 , p. 549 ( digitized version ).
  • Thorsten Burkard et al. (Ed.): Jacob Balde in the cultural context of his epoch. For the 400th anniversary of his birthday . (= Jesuitica - sources and studies on the history, art and literature of the Society of Jesus in German-speaking countries; Volume 9). Schnell & Steiner, Regensburg 2006, ISBN 3-7954-1812-7 .
  • Anne Dreesbach: Jacobus (Jakob) Balde . In: Wurst, Jürgen and Langheiter, Alexander (Ed.): Monachia. Munich: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, 2005. pp. 64–65. ISBN 3-88645-156-9 .
  • Gerhard Dünnhaupt : Jacob Balde SJ (1604–1668) . In: Personal bibliographies on Baroque prints . Volume 1. Hiersemann, Stuttgart 1990, ISBN 3-7772-9013-0 , pp. 378-400 (list of works and literature).
  • Jürgen Galle: The Latin poetry of Jacob Baldes and the history of its transmissions . Munster 1973.
  • Anton Henrich: The lyrical poems Jacob Baldes. (= Sources and Research, Vol. 122). Strasbourg 1956.
  • Urs Herzog: Divina poesis. Studies on Jacob Baldes' spiritual poetry . Tuebingen 1976.
  • Friedhelm Kemp: Jacob Balde. Agathyrsus Teutsch. In: Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Hrsg.): Kindlers Literatur Lexikon . 18 vols. Metzler , Stuttgart 2009, ISBN 978-3-476-04000-8 , p. 11.
  • Wilfried Stroh : Baldeana. Investigations into the life's work of Bavaria's greatest poet . Herbert Utz, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-8316-0347-2 .
  • Georg Westermayer: Jacobus Balde, his life and his works . Amsterdam 1998.
  • Eckart Schäfer : German Horace. Conrad Celtis, Georg Fabricius, Paul Melissus, Jacob Balde. The aftermath of Horace in German neo-Latin poetry, Wiesbaden 1976, ISBN 3-515021-50-7 .
  • Philipp Weiß: Balde as a speaker: A homily fragment in Everhard Wassenberg's Ratisbona illustrata . In: New Latin Yearbook . Volume 17, 2015, pp. 333-352.
  • Philipp Weiß: Dark Years in Ingolstadt: On the biography of Jacob Baldes in the years 1632 to 1635 . In: Neuburger Kollektaneenblatt . Volume 163, 2015, pp. 132-140.

Web links

Wikisource: Jacob Balde  - Sources and full texts
Commons : Jacob Balde  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Georg Westermayer :  Balde, Jacob . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 2, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1875, pp. 1-3.
  2. ↑ a b http://www.zeno.org/Literatur/M/Balde,+Jacob/Biographie
  3. ↑ Donaukurier on the naming of Jacob-Balde-Platz Neuburg , accessed on April 1, 2020
personal data
SURNAME Balde, Jacob
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Balde, Johann Jacob (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Jesuit and neo-Latin poet
DATE OF BIRTH January 3, 1604
PLACE OF BIRTH Ensisheim , Alsace
DATE OF DEATH August 9, 1668
Place of death Neuburg on the Danube