The monograph describes the opposition to scholarly erudition and the critique of hidebound academicism in the period from the Renaissance to the late Enlightenment. The ,overthrow' of the humanist, rhetorical tradition of scholarship and literature born of the spirit of mathematics and the natural sciences is paralleled by a reorganization of social structure taking the academic scholar out of his splendid isolation and integrating him into the concerns and demands of the State. Satires on academicism and ivory-tower erudition in the early Age of the Enlightenment form the transition to a discussion of the way in which opposition to other-wordly scholarship, the critique of academicism and the reform movement affected the development of literature in German - a process culminating in the Volkspoesie program (Bürger, Herder). The description of this process is based entirely on primary sources and thus closes a gap existing hitherto in recent literary historiography on the period between 1600 and 1780.