Johann Fischart

Johann Baptist Fischart ( – 1591) was a German satirist and publicist.

Biography Fischart was born, probably, at Strasbourg (but according to some accounts at Mainz), in or about the year 1545, and was educated at Worms in the house of Kaspar Scheid, whom in the preface to his Eulenspiegel he mentions as his cousin and preceptor. He appears to have travelled in Italy, the Netherlands, France, and England, and on his return to have taken the degree of doctor juris at Basel.

Most of his works were written from 1575 to 1581. During this period, he lived with, and probably was associated in the business of, his sister's husband, Bernhard Jobin, a printer at Strasbourg who published many of Fischart's books. In 1581, Fischart was attached as advocate to the Reichskammergericht (imperial court of appeal) at Speyer. In 1583, he married and was appointed Amtmann (magistrate) at Forbach near Saarbrücken. He died there in the winter of 1590–1591.

Influence Thirty years after Fischart's death, his writings, once so popular, were almost entirely forgotten. Recalled to public attention by Johann Jakob Bodmer and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, it was only around the end of the 1800s that his works came to be a subject of academic investigation and his position in German literature to be fully understood. Neue künstliche Figuren biblischer Historien (1576) Anmahnung zur christlichen Kinderzucht (1576) Das glückhafft Schiff von Zürich (The Lucky Ship of Zürich), a poem commemorating the adventure of a company of Zürich arquebusiers, who sailed from their native town to Strasbourg in one day, and brought, as a proof of this feat, a kettleful of Hirsebrei (millet gruel), which had been cooked in Zürich, still warm, into Strasbourg, and intended to illustrate the proverb "perseverance overcomes all difficulties" (1576, republished 1828, with an introduction by the poet Ludwig Uhland) Podagrammisch Trostbüchlein (1577, Scheible ed. 1848) in which he coins the term "gänswein", goose wine Philosophisch Ehzuchtbüchlein (1578, Scheible ed. 1848) Bienenkorb des heiligen römischen Immenschwarms, &c., a modification of the Dutch De roomsche Byen-Korf, by Philipp Marnix of St. Aldegonde (1579, reprinted 1847) Der heilig Brotkorb, after Calvin's Traité des reliques (1580) Das vierhörnige Jesuiterhütlein, a rhymed satire against the Jesuits (1580)

He also wrote a number of shorter poems. To Fischart also have been attributed some Psalmen und geistliche Lieder which appeared in a Strasbourg hymn-book of 1576.