Balde, Jakob (Ensisheim, Alsace, 1604-68, Neuburg/Danube, Bavaria), a neo-Latin poet of distinction, was educated at Molsheim near Strasburg. In the turmoil of war the school migrated to Germany, and Balde completed his education between 1622 and 1626 at Ingolstadt University and Jesuit colleges. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1624 and from 1626 to 1628 taught in a Jesuit school at Munich. In 1630 he became a professor at Innsbruck; eight years later he was appointed court preacher at Munich, and at the same time was entrusted with the education of the two Bavarian princes. Balde resigned his office in 1646 because of delicate health, but continued until 1648 as court historiographer. He was for a time at Landshut and then at Amberg, and spent the last years of his life as court preacher at Neuburg. Balde's German poetry is insignificant, but his Latin poems gained him a great reputation, and he was frequently compared with Horace, sometimes to the Roman poet's disadvantage. His work, in which nature poetry (including pastoral and hunting poems) and ecstatic odes in adoration of the Virgin Mary are especially notable, includes Batrachomyomachia (1637) (an adaptation of the Froschmeuseler, see Rollenhagen, G.), Poema de vanitate mundi (1638), Lyricorum libri IV (1643), Medicinae gloria (1651), Jephtias (tragedy, 1654), Poemata (1660), and Urania victrix (1663). His works were first collected in 1729 as Opera poetica omnia (8 vols., repr. 1992); a select edition with translation into German by M. Wehrli in 1963.

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