The study deepens the understanding of 17th century literary and cultural production by reassessing the dramatic writing by Andreas Gryphius and Daniel Casper von Lohenstein as an aesthetics of evil avant la lettre. By locating evil inside its human protagonists, their plays respond to and were shaped by an anthropological shift from malus to malum in the early modern episteme, anticipating an internalization or even psychologization of evil, which until now has been claimed only for the 18th century onward.
Isabel von Holt, Northwestern University, Evanston, USA.
