In the majority of German towns, access to learned culture was provided not through universities, academies or princely courts, but through Latin schools, the German equivalent to English grammar schools. This book is the first in-depth study of a footsoldier of the seventeenth-century German Republic of Letters. Its subject, the polymath and schoolteacher Christian Daum established himself as a scholar by focusing on how he convinced others that he was one. He did so through his dress, the way he conducted his married life and the ideal of scholarship to which he ascribed. Schools in the German culture, were focal points of Lutheran learning outside of universities and courts, as places not just of education but of intense scholarship. The most influential paradigm concerning German education remains Gerald Strauss' concept of an 'indoctrination of the young', where he argued that reformers had been able to restructure Lutheran schooling to suit their doctrinal purposes. In the seventeenth century, the Lutheran territories of the Holy Roman Empire saw a flood of publications on pedagogical method and matters of education in general. The book examines the changes that the Zwickau curriculum underwent in the seventeenth century. Anthony La Vopa's seminal study on poor students and clerical careers in eighteenth-century Germany raised important questions on social mobility through education. Christian Daum's network of correspondents was an instrument for maintaining and expanding his position within the Respublica litteraria. Teacher-scholars like Daum expressed a sense of mission towards the cause of humanist education and scholarship.