Poems for the Consideration of Our Age

...that he was not even the author of the notorious Fama Fraternitatis original: "fama fraternitatis"; the foundational manifesto of the Rosicrucian Order, first published in 1614, which caused such a great stir at that time. I still believe today that he is the author of this Fama, and I hope one day to make this as probable through his own statements as anything of that nature can be made. That the Reformation of the World original: "Reformation der Welt"; a satirical text often published alongside the Rosicrucian manifestos appended to it was taken from Boccalini Trajano Boccalini (1556–1613), an Italian satirist whose work Ragguagli di Parnaso was highly influential was something I already knew back then, just as I was familiar with all the Rosicrucian writings cited by the anonymous author of the explanation. *) But how does Boccalini stand in our way? No author living at that time had as much influence on the style of our Andreä as he did; and the entire mytho-

*) Most of the other literary conjectures were also well known to me from Fischlin Ludwig Melchior Fischlin (1672–1729), a German theologian and biographer of Wurttemberg scholars and others.