Joannes Burmeister of L?neburg (1576-1638) was among the greatest Neo-Latin poets of the German Baroque. His masterpieces, now mostly lost, are Christian ?inversions? of the classical Roman comedies of Plautus. With only minimal changes in language and none in meter, each transforms Plautus? pagan plays into comedies based on biblical themes. Singular Renaissance curiosities in their day, they have since been entirely forgotten. This volume offers the first critical edition of the newly discovered Aulularia (1629), which exists in a sole copy, and the fragments of Mater-Virgo (1621), which adapts Plautus? Amphitryo to show the Nativity of Jesus. The introduction offers reconstructions of Susanna (based on Casina) and Asinaria (1625), his two lost or unpublished inversions of Plautus. It also provides the only biography of Burmeister based on archival sources, along with discussions of his inimitable Latinity and the perilous context of war and witch burning in which he wrote. Scholars of early modern literature will take special interest in the poetic German plot summaries (also translated), while students of the Thirty Years War or the Holy Roman Empire will want to add Burmeister's contemporary view of military abuses to those later expressed in Grimmelshausen's Simplicius Simplicissimus.