Originally published September 23, 2026.

Update: For the original scans, new coverage, and forthcoming Latin text and English translation, visit the Joannes Burmeister’s Asinaria project page.

A mysterious email, a biblical absurdity, and the improbable survival of a single book through four centuries of Central European catastrophe.

On Labor Day—yes, this is a true story—my phone lit up with the kind of email every scholar dreams of getting, and I blinked to be sure it was real:

From: Tymoteusz Mikołajczak
Date: September 7, 2026
Subject: Burmeister’s Asinaria

Dear Professor Fontaine,

I am a senior librarian at the Department of Rare Books of the National Library of Poland, writing to kindly draw your attention to what may occur to be the only extant copy of Joannes Burmeister’s Asinaria, long thought to be lost. While working on the retroconversion of index cards of our 17th-century rare books collection’s catalogue, earlier today I came across an older cursory index card that served as a basis for a new bibliographical record in the online catalogue.

The shelfmark: SD XVII.2.6229

I put my drink down.

He was talking about a little Latin book printed in the north German city of Lüneburg in 1625. Its author, one Joannes Burmeister (1576–1638), was a man I’d written an obsessive book of my own about back in 2015. Burmeister was a German Lutheran pastor, poet laureate, and determined Christianizer of Roman comedy. And I knew exactly what this book was.

In English, its title—M. A. Plauti renati sive sacri asinaria comœdia secunda ex fabula ethnica ad biblicam regum Israeliticorum historiam, inversa / Joan. Burmeistero Lunæburg. p. l. cæs. recensente—amounts to “Plautus’s Asinaria, ‘inverted’ to a tale from the biblical Books of Samuel.”

I’d been looking for it since 2011, and in 2015 I even tried to reconstruct the play. By the time I was done, I’d made thirty-three separate predictions about the contents of a play I’d never seen, some of them down to particular words and verses.

It didn’t feel reckless. I had no reason to think a copy would ever turn up and expose me.

Oops.

I thought I was on safe ground because no scholar had seen the book for centuries, though they’d certainly looked. Until that email arrived I’d written it off as gone forever or, just possibly, sitting on a library shelf somewhere in Russia.

I was wrong. It’s sitting in Warsaw, which is just the first of countless ironies in the story that follows. And as I started piecing together where it had been these past four hundred years, the text itself soon became almost the least remarkable part of the story.

A Lutheran Who Converted Plautus

Joannes Burmeister was born in 1576 in Lüneburg, a city which still boasts a number of impressive half-timbered houses of his time. After graduating from the University of Rostock, he settled down to life as a parish pastor in a nearby village called Gülzow, out in the middle of nowhere. There, in his abundant spare time, he hit on one of the strangest literary projects in the long afterlife of Roman comedy: he would take the bawdy comedies of Plautus, preserve as much of their characters, jokes, dramatic machinery, and even language as possible—down to the syllable—and make them tell stories from the Bible. He called his procedure inversio, inversion, flipping something over and inside out and standing it on its head.

There’s something very meta about doing this, because Plautus himself spent his career adapting old Greek comedies for Roman audiences. Now, eighteen centuries later, Burmeister was adapting the adaptor, only this time for Lutheran Germany.

Far and away the strangest part of this process was what he did on the level of language. In a typical song parody, you match the rhythm and perhaps echo some of the original words. Burmeister attempted something much more extreme: to keep every syllable of Plautus that he possibly could, altering only what the new biblical story absolutely required. He subjected the text to punning on an industrial scale. The point was not merely to make a new play resemble Plautus, but to make Plautus’s own Latin somehow say something else.

Almost as strange, though, are the character relationships and analogies produced by Burmeister’s florid imagination. In 1621, for example, he published Mater-Virgo (The Virgin Mother), an inversion of Plautus’s Amphitryo. The original comedy told how Jupiter, king of the gods, came to earth disguised as a woman’s husband in order to dupe and have sex with her, producing Hercules, a hero who strangled snakes in his cradle, fought wars and monsters all over the Mediterranean world, fathered children by numerous women, suffered, died, and finally rose to Olympus to become a god beside his father.

The pious pastor turned this sex farce into a comedy about the birth of Jesus.

(Missing since World War II, when the last known copy was looted from the Berlin Library, all we have today are fragments, which I edited and translated and published in 2015. All signs suggest that missing copy is currently sitting in Russia, but—see above—I’ve been wrong about that before, and anyway, even if it is, the Russians aren’t saying.)

He planned others and, in time, wrote them. Then, in 1625, Burmeister published an inversion of the Asinaria.

To appreciate just how odd that is, you have to know something about Plautus’s play. The Asinaria (“The Jackass Affair”) is his raunchiest surviving comedy; twenty years ago, when the memory was still fresh, I called it the world’s oldest episode of Married…with Children.

The play is so irredeemably perverse that A. S. Gratwick suspected the Greek original from which it was adapted was already “a reductive spoof on various Menandrian themes”—the work, one might imagine, of a tired veteran craftsman so sick of making the same thing over and over that he finally started making fun of the factory.

It begins, like so many Greek and Roman comedies, with a young man in love with a prostitute. From there, though, things degenerate rapidly. The prostitute’s mother, who is also her procuress, agrees to sell him exclusive access to her daughter for a year if he can produce twenty minas. The young man’s father—that’s Al Bundy in my analogy—helps him raise the money by conspiring with two slaves to cheat his imperious but wealthy wife of it, only to demand, once the scheme succeeds, the right to sleep with the girl first. Along the way, those slaves swindle a gullible foreigner, and one even rides his master around the stage like a horse. (Or donkey?) The play ends in drinking, attempted father-son cuckoldry, sexual humiliation, and the sudden arrival of the furious wife, who drags the old lecher home in disgrace.

Sitting out there in his lonely village in the 1620s, the good pastor of Gülzow somehow looked at all this and thought of the Bible.

More precisely, he thought of David’s courtship of Michal, daughter of King Saul.

That story is strange enough on its own. Saul agrees to give David his daughter in marriage on one extraordinary condition: a bride price of one hundred Philistine foreskins.

Always an overachiever, David sallies forth and returns with two hundred.

The first time I came across this story, I was certain it had to be some medieval or modern antisemitic blood libel. Nah, come on, I thought. No way. Give me a break.

Not so. That is indeed the word of God, in 1 Samuel 18:25–27. Apparently, we’re meant to understand Saul’s gruesome demand as something like the ancient equivalent of taking scalps as bodily proof of enemy dead, except that in this case the scalp is taken from a different head.

In Burmeister’s own day, three vivid engravings of the episode circulated widely in North-German Lutheran circles. None are to be missed:

Amazingly, this is the biblical story Burmeister chose to graft onto Plautus’s sex comedy. How did he do it?

In my 2015 book I guessed that he connected the twenty-minas-for-a-year arrangement with the prostitute in Plautus’s play with the two-hundred-Philistine-foreskin bride price in the Bible.

When I look at this next illustration—which is the next in the series after the one immediately above—I’m pretty sure that must be right, especially since it was first published around the time Burmeister was a university student in Rostock, so the odds are excellent that he saw it himself. For all we know it may have inspired his adaptation in the first place.

But it’s still only a guess, and for at least the last three centuries, nobody knew. The scans from Warsaw arrived this morning. I haven’t opened them yet.

In the meantime, the first thing to say is that Asinaria was not the private oddity one might expect. That much we can tell already from the new card catalogue entry, which reveals that Burmeister dedicated it to two prominent churchmen of the Ratzeburg cathedral chapter, Hartwig von Parkentin and Hartwig von Bülow. Furthermore, it was printed by the established Lüneburg firm of Johann and Heinrich Stern; and, like his later Aulularia, it came packaged with a German argumentum (plot summary) and a spiritual song. What that song actually says is one of the first things I want to know when the scans get here.

In other words, this was not some private vanity project, printed in a handful of copies to be inflicted on friends and relatives. It was a bona fide piece of Lutheran school culture, meant to be read and probably performed by local students, as the later Aulularia apparently was. (That one seems to have been aimed at students of the Hamburg Johanneum, a school that is, amazingly, still going strong.)

Yet of whatever number of copies were originally printed—300-500 is a reasonable guess, if only that—the newly rediscovered Warsaw copy is the only one known to reach us. And, it turns out, it’s the very same sole copy anyone has ever mentioned at any point in the historical record.

And that brings us to another story: how this one remarkable little book survived at all. As the Labor Day email made clear, Asinaria is a survivor! Between 1738 and 2026, that little octavo endured everything the bloodlands of central Europe could throw at it. Again and again, it beat the odds and made it through into our own times.

The Lost Comedy

How did a book printed in Lüneburg in 1625 end up 500 miles away in Warsaw four centuries later, in 2026? And how did it manage to make it unscathed?

As I’d worked out in that 2015 book of mine, the trail goes cold remarkably early. The first we ever hear of the book is a bibliographical notice by the great Hamburg classical scholar Johann Albert Fabricius (1688–1736), who owned a copy himself.

After his death, Fabricius’s books were dispersed at auction in Hamburg in 1738. Asinaria passed into the hands of his son-in-law and fellow professor at the Akademisches Gymnasium, Joachim Dietrich Evers (1695–1741), although whether it was by purchase at the sale or by some private family transfer, we cannot say. What we do know is that Evers had the book that year, because he inscribed it nunc Ioach. Diet. Eversii 1738 (now the property of I.D.E.).

Evers died just three years later, in 1741. Not long afterward, the book passed—presumably by purchase—into the hands of Józef Andrzej Załuski (1702–1774).

That name will mean nothing to most American readers. In Poland, it’s another matter. Załuski was one of the great bibliophiles of the eighteenth century and, with his brother, the founder of the Załuski Library, the ancestor of today’s Polish National Library.

The Załuski Library

Until a couple weeks ago I had never heard of the Załuski Library. Now I know that in its beginnings, it was one of the great libraries of Enlightenment Europe. It began as the private project of two bibliophile brothers and bishops, Józef and Andrzej Załuski. By the end of the eighteenth century its holdings approached four hundred thousand volumes. It embodied the cosmopolitan Enlightenment ideal of collecting knowledge, preserving it, organizing it, and making it available. Opened to the public in 1747, it eventually took on the functions of a national library. It was an extraordinary achievement.

Until the bad times came.

When they did, the Załuski library suffered through three great upheavals, two involving Russia and one the Nazis. At each stage, it passed through a narrower sieve. And even as more and more of its books were lost, missing, or destroyed, somehow our little Asinaria, which had entered the collections early on, kept making the cut.

Russian Occupation and the First Uprising

When you or I hear “the Warsaw Uprising,” we probably think of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. In Poland, by contrast, two other Warsaw uprisings loom large or larger.

The first came in 1794 and is known as the Kościuszko Uprising. Warsaw briefly drove out its Russian garrison, but the revolt collapsed later that year. After Russian forces retook the city, they confiscated the Załuski Library as war booty and bundled its nearly four hundred thousand volumes, including some 11,000 manuscripts and 24,000 prints, to St. Petersburg. Among them went Asinaria.

The forcible transfer eastward was chaotic and destructive. Hurried packing, winter transport, theft, losses, and dispersal cost the library part of its holdings before the confiscated books even reached Russia. When the survivors arrived at last, they became a foundational collection of the new Imperial Public Library, there to enlighten Russia’s subjects.

Repatriation

Then history reversed itself.

After the First World War Poland returned to the map, and promptly found itself having to fight Soviet Russia for its survival. That war was ended by the 1921 Treaty of Riga. (Note that for the people of Poland, this war was in effect simply an extension of World War I, long after the other powers had left the stage.)

The treaty provided for the return of cultural property removed from Polish territory, and so portions of the old Załuski collections began coming back—I know this sounds crazy—from Soviet Russia.

Not all the books—there was another cull of the collections at this juncture, since Russia kept many—but enough. And at some point, like a foundling child in an ancient comedy, among those returning exiles came Asinaria.

German Occupation and the Second Uprising

But then came 1939, and with it, the Nazis.

During the Nazi occupation, Warsaw’s great library collections were professionally consolidated and reorganized by German librarians along German lines. Beginning in 1941, the manuscripts, incunabula, sixteenth-century books, and later Polish early printed books were concentrated in the Krasiński Library building at 9 Okólnik Street. Among them were some 50,000 early printed books from the National Library, including much of the repatriated Załuski material that had returned from Russia only a few years earlier. Foreign books of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however—as opposed to the Polonica—were sent elsewhere: some 32,000 volumes went to the University of Warsaw Library.

Under a regime obsessed with classification, that bureaucratic distinction could determine whether a book lived or died.

Then came the second Warsaw Uprising, a massive violent resistance to Nazi rule. It began on August 1, 1944, and lasted sixty-three days. The Krasiński building was badly damaged during the fighting, when it was also being used by the resistance, but the great collections stored in its cellars survived.

What happened next was different.

When the uprising collapsed in October 1944, German forces emptied Warsaw in reprisal and systematically destroyed pretty much all that remained. And although the capitulation agreement specifically provided for the evacuation of cultural treasures, after the fighting had ended a Wehrmacht Brandkommando—a “fire brigade” in the Ray Bradbury sense, rather than the way most of us use that term—entered the Krasiński Library with flamethrowers and deliberately set the surviving collections on fire. The books carbonized in place, much like the papyrus scrolls at Herculaneum; and of more than seven thousand Krasiński manuscripts, only seventy-eight survived.

The National Library still preserves an urn containing ashes from the books and manuscripts burned there.

But… Asinaria was a foreign seventeenth-century book. And so—

—under a regime that had made bureaucratic classification a matter of life and death for human beings, could a classification in a card catalogue have saved a book?

A few days ago I wrote to Aleksander Rudziński of Poland’s National Library to ask that question. He wrote back cautioning that the answer can’t be established with absolute certainty. But the likeliest explanation is that Asinaria never went to Okólnik at all, since the collections concentrated there consisted primarily of Polonica. Burmeister’s play, by contrast, had been printed in Lüneburg in 1625. That made it foreign—and may have saved its life. Whew!

And now comes one final twist.

Warsaw, 2011

Jump back fifteen years.

Fresh through the tenure gauntlet and out on sleepless paternity leave, I decided to start hunting for Burmeister’s Mater-Virgo, that first comedy he’d “inverted” from Jupiter’s sexcapades to the story of the Nativity. Library catalogues worldwide were gradually coming online, OCR sort of worked, and Google Books was much more generous back then.

I searched and searched. I didn’t find it, but, like Columbus, I did find something else that nobody knew about.

In 1629, Burmeister had published an even later “inversion” of Plautus’s Aulularia (The Pot of Gold). He turned Plautus’s famous comedy of a miser and his stolen pot of gold into the biblical story of Achan, who steals forbidden treasure after the conquest of Jericho. A sole copy had survived in the Royal Library in Copenhagen, where apparently no one had ever read or discussed it.

In May 2011 I flew to Copenhagen to examine it. Holding the actual little octavo in my hands alongside a copy of Plautus’s text, I could see how Burmeister’s experiment worked line by line: where he kept Plautus, where he changed him, where a Roman joke had been forced into a biblical setting, where seventeenth-century Germany intruded on both.

From Copenhagen I went on to Lüneburg and then to Gülzow, where I met Burmeister’s successor as pastor, toured the church, and even saw the poet’s name cast into the bronze bell still hanging in the belfry.

Then I went on again, this time to Warsaw for Mousa Paizei, a conference on ancient comedy and its reception held in the University of Warsaw Library—the great glass-and-steel building on Dobra Street with a garden on the roof. My paper, which I gave in a flush of excitement, announced the existence of Burmeister’s Aulularia: an almost vanished seventeenth-century attempt to make Plautus tell a story from Joshua.

And here comes the irony:

As I stood there in the University of Warsaw Library trumpeting the rediscovery of one nearly lost Burmeister comedy, another was sitting in the National Library of Poland, not three miles away.

If only we’d known, I could have been there in five minutes by taxi and read it during the lunch break.

***

As I say, the scans arrived this morning. The moment I open them, they’ll settle those thirty-three jackass bets I made with a text I thought could never answer back.

My thanks to Tymoteusz Mikołajczak, not only for rediscovering Burmeister’s Asinaria and telling me about it, but for permission to reproduce his fateful email here.