1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Vulpius, Christian August

Vulpius, Christian August (1762–1827), German author, was born at Weimar on the 23rd of January 1762, and was educated at Jena and Erlangen. In 1790 he returned to Weimar, where Goethe, who had entered into relations with Vulpius’s sister Christine (1765–1816), whom he afterwards married, obtained employment for him. Here Vulpius began, in imitation of Christian Heinrich Spiess, to write a scries of romantic narratives. Of these (about sixty in number) his Rinaldo Rinaldini (1797), the scene of which is laid in Italy during the middle ages, is the best. In 1797 Vulpius was given an appointment on the Weimar library, of which he became chief librarian in 1806. He died at Weimar on the 25th of June 1827.