This handsome volume is a reissue of Friedrich Hermann Schubert's authoritative 1952 dissertation, a biography of the impetuous and influential chancellor of the Rhenish Palatinate, Ludwig Camerarius, one of the forces who propelled the duchy into its disastrous involvement in international politics in the early seventeenth century. Schubert's work, completed under the direction of the noted German historian Franz Schnabel, was the first book to be published following the relaunch of the distinguished series Münchener Historische Studien after World War II. When it appeared in 1955, the book's subject matter was not yet fashionable, but it eventually inspired a number of similar studies of the effects of political Calvinism, most notably Ernst Walter Zeeden's trailblazing work on confession building, Die Entstehung der Konfessionen (Munich, 1965).

This second edition of Ludwig Camerarius contains a chapter by Andreas Kappelmayer that outlines the book's other influences in Germany and Sweden, as well as a reprint of a 1954 article by Schubert that originally appeared in the Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Oberrheins. The latter treats the fate of the Palatine regime during its exile at the Hague after the disastrous “Winter Kingship” of the Palatine Elector Frederick V that precipitated the Thirty Years War. Contributions by Frieder Hepp, Gerhard Menk, and Markus Gerstmeier examine, respectively, the “Bohemian Adventure's” exploitation in broadsides, images, and medals; the legacy of Friedrich Hermann Schubert as the heir presumptive to the conservative nationalist historian Gerhard Ritter (1888–1967); and the career of Schubert's father, Otto, a prominent Dresden professor of architecture and an architectural historian. The book reproduces a complete bibliography of Schubert's publications as well as a generous portion of color and black-and-white illustrations relevant to the seventeenth-century Palatinate and to Friedrich Schubert's life and career.

Unlike many biographers, Schubert did not universally admire his subject, but he treated Camerarius in full, warts and all. It would have been hard, after all, to deny the flaws in this humanist statesman's character. Ludwig Camerarius was the son of the Nuremberg physician and humanist scholar, Joachim Camerarius the Younger (1534–1598), and the grandson of the irenic humanist, Joachim Camerarius the Elder (1500–1574), who had labored much of his life to reconcile differences between Protestants and Catholics. Ludwig did not share these tolerant impulses. Raised a Lutheran and trained in the same quiet scholarly pursuits as his father and grandfather, the youngest Camerarius embarked on an altogether more bumptious and fateful public career. By 1611, he had become privy councillor in the Palatinate, a position from which he advocated a hardline political Calvinism, and from which he helped engineer Frederick V's disastrous election as King of Bohemia.

His enormous overestimation of the Palatinate's strength as an international player soon became obvious following the failed “Winter” Monarchy, but Camerarius continued to defend his hard-line policies from his exile in the Netherlands in the 1620s. Like many hawks, he was personally squeamish about war and bloodshed. He failed to demonstrate any grace under pressure when dealing with the consequences of his recklessness in the aftermath of the 1620 Battle of White Mountain. On the contrary, Camerarius shrilly defended his actions time and again in print, even when it was clear that they had been ill-advised. By the latter part of the 1620s, his influence as the chief official of the Palatine government in exile was waning. Camerarius left the Netherlands in 1626, offering himself as a diplomat in service to the Swedes. Even then, he was sometimes observed treating the royals with whom he dealt in an abrupt, high-handed manner. In 1640, he left Swedish diplomatic service and returned to the Netherlands, living there for a little more than a decade. In the few months before his death, he was finally able to take up residence again in Heidelberg.

Despite the addition to this volume of essays about Schubert's era, life, and work, this edition has tantalizingly little to say about Schubert's own political troubles in the wake of 1968. To 1960s radicals, Schubert seemed to advance ideas that were a bit too Western and prosaically liberal. In the years of the student revolt, he became embroiled in controversies with some members of Frankfurt's neo-Marxist student faction. Feeling increasingly under fire, Schubert sought positions at other universities, but when these failed to materialize, he took his own life on June 30, 1973. It is precisely this story that fascinates, and it is one about which this volume might have said more.