Fastnachtspiel: Stoffe, Motive, Charaktere (German Edition)

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Watson Leiden, , Odes, Book II Oxford, G Ioan- nina, De Laude Milano, Dutch translation; original ed. Studi triestini di poesia conviviale, edd. Tedeschi Alessandria, , [first appeared in I canoni letterari. Als Fastnachtsspiele oder Fastnachtspiele bezeichnet man komische Burlesken , welche im Eine typische Abfolge eines Fastnachtsspiels: Er bedankt sich beim Wirt und fordert ab und an zum Tanz und Umtrunk auf.

Die Spiele sollten ein besonderer Beitrag zur allgemeinen Fastnachtslustbarkeit sein, mit heiter-derbem Inhalt, einfachem Bau und geringem Umfang. Als Begriff ist das Fastnachtspiel erstmals im Fastnachtsspiele entstanden in der Mitte des Die Fastnachtsspiele wurden vermutlich durch Themen aus der deutschen Volkstraditionen der vorchristlichen Zeit beeinflusst. Dort hat sich schon in der 1. Das Reihenspiel besteht aus der Aneinanderreihung von einzelnen Reden. Sie begannen und endeten mit einer neutralen Person, dem Precursor , der Ein- bzw.

Die Handlung in Reihenspielen ist dabei Nebensache, denn der Bildwitz ersetzt den spannungsgeladenen Vorgang. Parzival is overcome by his sense of guilt ; he feels dishonoured, and sets out again to seek the castle of the Gral and repair his fatal omission ; and for four long years he wanders in the Valley of the Shadow, doubting, despair- ing, seeking, fighting, but still untarnished in heart and soul, still facing life with manly courage.

Meanwhile Wolfram turns aside from his hero's adventures to re- late those of Gawan, the more worldly ideal of the Arthurian knight, who serves as a kind of foil to the guileless hero.

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In the ninth book we return again to Parzival, who, hopeless and despairing, is rebuked by an old knight for bearing arms on Good Friday. The knight induces Parzival to seek out a hermit in the forest, and to unburden to him his load of sin. His horse guides him to the place, where he finds Trevrizent, the brother of Anfortas and Herzeloyde, his own uncle. What Gurnemanz did for him in the first part of the story, Trevrizent does now ; Parzival opens his heart to the hermit, and learns from him what path he must follow if he will find again the Gral.

Two great trials of valour "titurel" and "willehalm. Then he returns once more to the castle of Monsalvatsch, and asks the question of sympathy which releases the sufferers from the spell. He is reunited with Kondwiramur, and himself becomes king of the Gral. In Parzival himself the worldly and the spiritual blend to form the perfect knight. Wolfram von Eschenbach is the author of two other poems, the so-called Tiftirel, of which the leading figures, Schionatulander and Sigune, appeared episodically in the great epic ; and Wilkhahfi, a version of the French BataiUe PAliscans.

Both were written subsequently to Parzival. The first of these poems is composed in a strophic metre similar to that of the popular epic, and shows Wolfram's art from a new side ; it is a fragmentary love-story, an idyllic episode rather than an epic romance. The gentle, unworldly Kondwiramur stands in similar contrast to Willehalm's noble and heroic wife Gyburg, the finest of all Wolfram's women.

But, like Parziva l, this poem is also domi- nated by the poet's own personality, his calm, just out- look on life and the nobility of soul which enabled him to rise superior to the strife of factions and the differ- ences of religious faith. We can also infer that Gottfried was a learned poet, that is to say, familiar with both Latin and French, and that, unlike the others, he did not belong to the nobility ; to contemporaries he is always " Meister " Gottfried, not " Herr.

The source of Tristan is, to some extent, a matter of conjecture. Chretien de Troyes wrote an epic on the subject, which is lost, and it would be natural to assume that Gottfried had found his materials here.

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He expressly mentions, however, a certain " Thomas of Brittany " as his source, and a few fragments of an old French Tristan by a "jongleur" of this name have been discovered. These fragments are, for the most part, from a part of the poem which Gottfried did not reach, his epic being unfinished, but there is sufficient correspondence to place his indebtedness beyond question. Tristan's father, Riwalin of Parmenia, fell in battle before his son was born, and his mother, Blancheflur , died in giving birth to him; he is brought up by the faithful marshal Rual , and astonishes everyone by his precocious powers.

Carried off by Norse merchants, he is landed on the coast of Cornwall, and makes his way to the castle of Tintajoel, where King Marke holds his court. Here his foster-father finds him after a search of four years, and discloses to the king and to himself who he is. Thereupon King Marke appoints him his heir, and amidst the ceremony of the mediaeval "Schwert- leite," Tristan is invested with the honours of knighthood. The young hero's first business is to avenge his father's murder in Parmenia ; he reconquers that country and hands it over to his foster-father's sons.

He then returns to Cornwall, where he undertakes to free the land from an intolerable tribute imposed upon it by the Irish king Gurmun and his brother-in-law Morold. The matter depends on single combat with Morold. In search of healing, Tristan finds his way to Ireland, where, disguised as a " Spielmann," he wins the interest of the young p rince ss Isolde for his art ; in return for the instruction he gives her, her mother heals his wound. Meanwhile the Cornish noblemen are growing jealous of Tristan's influence at his uncle's court, and in the hopes of preventing Tristan suc- ceeding him, they propose to the king that he should marry.

The young Isolde, of whom Tristan has brought back favourable reports, is chosen, and Tristan is sent as envoy to Dublin. She recognises in him the Spielmann of former days and loves him ; but her love is suddenly turned to hate, when, by means of the sword-splinter her mother has preserved, she discovers that King Marke's envoy is the murderer of her uncle.

She is about to avenge herself on him when her mother inter- venes, and after Tristan has explained his mission, Isolde's father consents to her union with Marke. On the voyage to Cornwall Isolde's hatred of her companion is by an unhappy accident turned to the fiercest passion ; they drink together, in mistake for wine, a love-potion which Isolde's mother had prepared for her and Marke, in order to ensure a happy marriage.

This passion grows in in- tensity, and the honour of vassal and bride-elect are alike forgotten. The marriage with King Marke is celebrated, and the love of Tristan and Isolde kept a secret from the king. The epic now becomes a story of love intrigue, in which the cunning deception practised by the lovers is again and again on the brink of being discovered.

At last, however, Tristan and Isolde are banished from the court, and love again is supreme in the seclusion of the " Minnegrotte," where they take refuge. Recoftciliation with the king follows, then another discovery. This time Tristan has to flee. At the court of the Duke of Arundel he hopes to forget Isolde, and meets there another Isolde, " Isolde with the white hands," to whom he transfers his affection. Again we find him united to his wife, but he has returned with a wound from a poisoned spear, and only the Isolde of Cornwall can cure him.

A messenger is dispatched to fetch her, and it is arranged that if she returns with the ship, it is to bear a white sail, if not, a black one. Tristan's wife is, however, jealous and deceives him, telling him that the sail of the approaching vessel is black. He succumbs before the ship reaches the shore, and Isolde of Cornwall dies of grief at his side. The secret of the fatal potion is revealed to King Marke, and he has the lovers buried side by side in Cornish soil ; a vine and rose, planted on their graves, intertwine.

Gottfried did not live to complete his epic, and, to find the end of the story after Tristan's marriage to the white- handed Isolde, we have to turn to his continuers, Ulrich von Tiirheim, who wrote about , and Heinrich von Freiberg ca. So true and living do Gottfried's figures stand out against the background, so wonderfully is their passion attuned to the music of the ever-present sea, that even the modern reader is not wearied by the recurrence of endless love-adventures.

No other poet of the Middle Ages understood, as Gottfried did, how to describe a great passion ; none realised, as he had done, the intense earnestness of those whose lives are in its grip. Not a touch of lightness, not a gleam of frivolity, lightens the grim pessimism, in which the old Germanic virtue of unflinching loyalty succumbs before the sinister power which holds two noble souls in its grasp. Hartmann's style may still be traced in the second half of the thirteenth century, in the epics of a poet of Salzburg known as " der Pleier.

As was to be expected, the influence of Wolfram was still less conducive to style and proportion ; indeed, the very originality of Wolfram deteriorated, in his successors, into a mannerism. His influence on the Court epic be- came more marked as the thirteenth century advanced. The chief poem of Wolfram's school is Der jimgere Titurei, a long romance, written about by a Bavarian, perhaps Albrecht von Scharfenberg by name, and built up on the fragments of Wolfram's Titurcl. Of Wolfram's understanding for the spiritual side of life there is little in his successors ; but something of the imaginative mys- ticism of Wolfram's Gral story has at least passed over into Der jiingere Titurel.

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The influence of Gottfried of Strassburg spread more rapidly. There was a more modern element in Gottfried's art which appealed with increasing force as time went on to the poets of the Court epic; and it is not surprising to find that his influence is paramount on the two chief poets of the later period, Rudolf von Ems and Konrad von Wiirzburg. The first of these was a native of Switzerland, taking his name from Ems near Chur. He has left a vast quantity of verse, which, however, partakes more of the character of chronicle than romance. Only in his early period, in poems like Der gute Geriiart and Bariaam und JosapJiat, which were written not long after , does Rudolf keep himself sufficiently free from religious asceticism and pedantic detail to appeal to his readers' interest from the purely poetic side ; even his Wiiiieim von Oriens, written between and , a romance of chivalry, is dry and tedious, and his WeltdironiJi, a history of the world down to the age of Solomon, is rather an encyclopaedia of mediseval learning than a poem.

All that such a poet could learn from Gottfried was the method of presenting his subject: Konrad has left a considerable body of narrative poetry behind him, characterised by a healthy realism and told in that effective narrative style he had learned from Gottfried ; but Konrad, compared with his master, fails, as all the minor Middle High German poets fail, in being unable to distinguish the essential from the unessential, the poetic from the prosaic.

From these he passed to more worldly romances, such as Kaiser Otto, Die Herzemdre — the story of a knight who, dying in the East, commands that his heart be taken back to his mistress, whereupon the latter's husband has it cooked and served up to her — and Konrad's paean in honour of friendship, Engelhart. In these short romances Konrad is seen at his best. The unwieldy epics of Partenopier ca.

One form in which this craving for reality showed itself, was the grow- ing tendency to substitute the truth of the chronicle for the romantic fiction of chivalry ; the other development tended to discountenance the knight in this era of social change and to deal with the lives and adventures of ordinary men and women.

To the former phase belong, besides avowed chronicle poets like Rudolf von Ems, the writers of semi-historical romances, such as Ulrich von Eschenbach and Berthold von Holle. The second tendency was productive of more important poetical results ; we owe to it a revival of the " Schwank " of the mediaeval Spielmann, an example of which is the Ffaffe Amis of the " Strieker," a Rhenish poet of the earlier thirteenth century who passed part of his life in Austria, and also the admirable peasant romance by Wernher der Gartenaere, Meier Helmbrecht, which was written before the middle of the century.

The actual conflict of the new realism and social ideals with the world of chivalry is illustrated by the two poems, Frauendienst and the Frauejibuch , written by a Styrian knight, Ulrich von Lichtenstein, who was probably born about These books, descriptions of the poet's own adventures as a knight and a lover, make a vain effort to uphold the old ideals amidst the decadence of the new age. The many lyrics which are interspersed in Ulrich's narrative give him a prominent place in the history of the Minnesang. At the beginning of the fourteenth century the Arthur- ian epic was virtually dead ; it had been a kind of mirror held up to chivalry, reflecting with extraordinary sensitive- ness the changes to which knighthood was exposed ; and as soon as the old social order passed away, its degenera- tion set in with rapidity.

The Court epic ceased to be the bearer of a great poetic ideal, and became merely a form, and an inferior one, of the entertaining literature of its day. As we have already seen in considering the beginnings of Middle High German poetry, the origin of the third great group of that poetry, the lyric or Minnesang , presents more difficult problems than either of the other two. But whether the German Alinnesang was, like the Popular Epic, indigenous in its origins or not, it at least responded with alacrity to the stimulus which came with chivalry from the west ; at a very early stage it adopted not merely the form of the French or Provencal lyric , but also its themes and even its general social ethics and conventions.

At the same time, the German singer was no artificial imitator ; he honestly sang of what he felt, even when he was expressing himself in stereotyped words, images, and forms. The Minnesinger was quick to realise where he could no longer follow his Provencal model and where his mental horizon no longer coincided with the latter's ; the German poet took over the conventions of the French lyric, but he put at an early date his own German stamp upon them.

This is particularly noticeable in the more spiritual and mystic meaning which was given to the word " Minne," as compared with the personal and concrete " amour " of the French poets. Thus, when due allowance is made for the peculiar conditions of mediaeval poetry — the existence of binding traditions affecting the whole body of chivalric literature, Romance as well as Germanic — it is possible to understand how the Minne- sang could be dependent on forms originally foreign. In the early beginnings of the Minnesang, which have already been traced, a purely German lyric, or what ap- pears to be such, may be found beside the conventional lyric of chivalry ; but at a comparatively early date the fusion of the two was complete.

The first master of the epic, Heinrich von Vel dek e, was at the same time the initiator of this new phase m the development of the lyric ; in more than fifty lyric strophes, which he has left us, he has succeeded in combining the French conventions with the natural sentiment of the light-hearted Rhine- lander. From the Rhine, too, came Friedrich von Hausen. The influence of the Provencal lyric is strong on Friedrich's poetry, but one obtains, notwith- standing, a clear idea from his songs of the personality of this manly, if somewhat melancholy, soldier - poet. More gifted and original was the Thuringian, Hein- rich von Morungen , who represents a further stage in the adaptation of the French lyric to German needs ; in his language, and especially in his lighter and gayer mood, he widened the range of expression of the German Minnesang.

Hartmann von Aue sought in his lyrics as in his narrative poetry a remedy for the spiritual dissension which he felt so keenly ; all the poems by him that have been preserved are religious in tone, and were evidently written in those years of doubt and despair, which have also left their traces on his epics.

Less easily did Wol- fram's rugged genius adapt itself to the narrow confines of the lyric ; what we possess of his is more the descrip- tion of a dramatic situation than the subjective reflex of the poet's own emotional experience. Lastly, two or three lyrics have come down to us under Gottfried's name, but it is almost certain that they are not his. The exact date of his birth and where he was born are unknown. He was of noble family — the title " Herr " implies this — but so poor that he was obliged to win his bread by his talents as a " fahrender Sanger.

Reinmar has left a large number of lyrics, but these rarely rise above the conventional forms of the Minnesang ; his theme is almost invariably unrequited love, and the tone of his poetry is monotonously elegiac. By him, however, Walther was initiated into the art of poetry, and when Reinmar died, about 1 2 10 , Walther wrote a r iobj e panegyric of him.

Walther von der Vogelweide's early lyrics are influenced by Reinmar ; but his tone is lighter, more youthful and exuberant ; he learned the art of Reinmar's poetry with- out being unduly affected by its mood. On the whole, however, Walther in this early period has not advanced much beyond the artificial conventions of his time.

He left Vienna in iiq8 and, for the next ten or twel ve years, wandered from castle to castle as a " Fahrender. In this, the second period of Walther's life, he is the unapproached master of the Minnesang , as a form of court poetry. Not all the poems he sang were based on personal feelings or experience ; at the same time, he doubtless met by the way with love-adventures of more or less seriousness which provided materials for his verse.

Thus, under the stress of circumstances, Walther became a political poet , and, as far as his art was concerned, an innovator. The history of those stormy years in Ger- man history may be followed step by step in Walther's " Spruchdichtung" ; that is to say, the gradual rise of Philip's fortunes, until at the h eigh t of his p rosper ty, in 1 , he was murdered by Otto of Wittelsbach. Walther seems only to have followed Philip with interest as long as he had adversity to fight against, and we do not know how the tragic close of the Duke's career affected the poet. In , however, Walther again entered the lists as a political sing er ; the Pope's antagonism to the new emperor, Otto IV.

It was not, however, until the young Friedrich II. A tradition tells that he passed his last days in Wiirzburg and lies buried there, but even the year of his death is unknown. Just as he had, as " Spruchdichter," passed beyond the boundaries of the conventional Minnesang, so here, too, he left its prescribed rules behind him ; the conventions of the " Minnedienst" have ceased to be any longer even a scaffolding for his art.

His personal outlook in the world was not optimistic , as it could hardly have been in one who was exposed to the buffets of so stormy an age. He l ooked backwar ds rather than forwards, and as he grew older the shadows on his life deepened. To his later years we owe the splendid poetjc melancholy of his elegy: There were poets — of whom the Swabian Hiltbold von Schwangau may be taken as rep- resentative — who clung conservatively to the older con- ventions of the courtly Minnesang, and who, despite the inevitable influence of Walther, preferred to hark back to the latter's predecessors for their models ; but the majority of Walther's imitators were content to imitate him slavishly.

Of the latter, Ulrich von Singenberg of St Gall and Leuthold von Saben were not ungifted poets, although they had little understanding for the really vital elements in Walther's poetry. In verses attuned to the season, the sprightly, sharp-tongued poet sings of the peasants on whom he looks down as upon a heavy- witted race. From one point of view, all this is a descent from the noble Minnesang of Walther and his pre- decessors ; there is a strain of coarseness in Neidhart's lyric which necessarily appealed to a lower taste.

But it was an inevitable stage through which the lyric had to pass. The great outburst of popular song in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries would not have been what it was, had poets like Neidhart von Reuental not thus directed the stream of the courtly Minnesang into popular channels. Few of the Minnesinger of the later half of the thirteenth century escaped the influence of Neidhart von Reuental.

But in their natural temperament and their outlook upon life the poets of this period were obviously more in sympathy with Neidhart than with Walther. In the verses of " Steinmar " — probably Berthold Steinmar von Kling- enau — the new lyric of " niedere Minne " has been reduced almost to a parody of the higher Minnesang.

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By the close of the thirteenth century the Minnesang had become a distant tradition, and when attempts were made to revive it, as, for example, by the Zurich citizen, Johannes Had- laub, it made the impression of being an artificial and insincere cult. As Neidhart developed the lower lyric, so Reinmar von Zweter , a poet of the Rhineland, who passed part, at least, of his life in Austria, was Walther's immedi - ate successor as a " Spruchdichter.

From now on, the "Spruch" remains a constant quantity in German poetry ; its scope was widened to admit the most outspoken satire on the one side, and on the other to include — as in the verses of poets like the " Marner," a Swabian who lived till about — the recondite learning of the time. This, rather than the pure lyric, was the form of poetry in which the later Meistersinger schools delighted to exercise their art.

The transition from purely imaginative poetry to a didactic and satiric literature was a characteristic sign of the times in the thirteenth century ; it was intimately connected with the social changes of the age, the gradual rise in importance of the burgher. The beginnings of didacticism in Middle High German poetry may, how- ever, be traced back to the best years of the century, and even — as in the case of the Tugendlehre of Wernher von Elmendorf, and the long popular Disticha Catimis — beyond it. A typical moral text -book of the early thirteenth century was Per Wifisbeke, by a Bavarian Herr von Windesbach: Thomasin destroys the poetic halo that had surrounded chivalry, and keeps before him religious and moral aims.

But he remains the aristocrat, to whom the burgher is of small importance ; he still looks up to the Arthurian epics as moral guides for the youth of the time. In religious matters he insists on the Pope's supremacy in the Holy Roman Empire, and will admit of no infringement of the letter of the catholic faith. Still more democratically didactic is a collection of epigrammatic " Spriiche " entitled Bescheide7iheit " worldly wisdom " , begun perhaps as early as Der tvelsche Gnst, but not finished until some fifteen years later. The author, who calls himself " Freidank.

Bescheidenheit is a book of the people , and for the pe opje. The existence of knighthood and the ideas of chivalry are by no means ignored, especially in the poet's discussion of love ; but they have ceased to be more than an ideal in the background. His point of view is that of the common man, whose trusting piety did not blind him to the shortcomings of the church, whose implicit faith in Rome did not bring with it the belief that the Pope should also be the head of the state and dictate to a German emperor. What Freidank gives us is not direct satire, but it is a preparation for the satire of the coming centuries.

Light is thrown on the social conditions at the close of the thirteenth century by a collection of satirical poetry written in Lower Austria and ascribed to a Spielmann, Seifried Helbling ; a dialogue of questions and answers, a form familiar in the late Latin literature of this class, is here made the vehicle of a trenchant criticism of the passing social order.

Didactic in a more learned way is another poem of this period, Der Refiner so called because it was to "run" through the world, to be a "cursor mundi " , by Hugo von Trimberg, a schoolmaster of Teuerstadt, a village on the outskirts of Bamberg. But Der Retmer has little plan or form ; its author little calling for poetry. He pleases best when he borrows most freely from his predecessor and master, Freidank. His German sermons are unfortunately lost. But from his contemporary, Berthold von Regensburg , we possess many German sermons.

Berthold lived from about to , wandered all over Germany, and was unquestionably the greates t popular preacher of the Germa n Middle A ges. His language has all the qualities of a good popular prose ; it is direct, dramatic, sincere, and often illumined by striking imagery. Indeed, it is difficult to believe that so excellent a prose style had not been preceded by a long evolution of prose literature.

Of loss literary value is the prose of the law-books of the age. Court epic exist sid e by si de with little overlapping, and such as there is, is not due to any unclearness of definition. In the same way the lyric, or Minnesang, developed on bold and simple lines, without the confusion of forms which renders a survey of any other period of German lyric poetry so difficult.

Least sharply defined is the group of literature which has been discussed in the latter part of the present chapter, satire. A bsence of continu ity is a distinguishing feature of Germany's literary as well as her political history ; she would appear to cling with less tenacity to her poetic traditions than Italy, or France, or England, and conse- quently her periods of transition are usually at the same time periods of destruction and reconstruction, of decay and rebirth. The decay , which had already set in in the fourteenth century, pro- ceeded apace in the fifteenth ; and the fabric of mediaeval literature had almost to be razed to the ground before the foundations of a modern literature could be laid.

The subversive character of this transition is partly explained by the social and political changes to which the Germa n pe ople were in a peculiar degree exposed. The dose of the crusades hastened the decay o TchbLalry. As the old aris tocr acy disappeared, the middle classe s rose in imp ortan ce ; com - merc e became a factor of greater weight than it had ever been before, and the focus of power in the state was removed from the castle to the town.

So radical a change in the social order brought about a complete shifting in the literary centre of gravity ; the polite aris- tocratic literature of the Middle Ages gave place to a crude and naive middl e -cl ass literature. The finer graces of chivalry had no counterpart in the towns, where life was honest and straightforward, but without polish or culture ; the sense of beauty and the feeling f or rhythm , which had been laboriously attained by the higher classes at the opening of the twelfth century, dis- appeared, as completely as if they had never existed. But, as time went on, the attempts to revive the old epic, such as Ulrich von Fiietrer's Buck der Abenieuer, written at the close of the latter century, showed how impossible it was to bring the Arthurian ideals into harmony with the sober life of the German burgher.

The Emperor Maximilian I. Two romances associated with his name, Der Weisskonig 15 1 2 and Teuerdank printed 15 17 , have almost all the defects of the decadent epic. Chivalrous adventure is in the latter mingled with historical fact or extravagant allegory ; the spacious idealism of the old time is ousted by irrelevant moralisings on right and wrong, or by ludic- rously trivial realism ; and the whole set forth in clumsy, unpoetic verses, which, however, were not composed by the emperor himself, but by his scribe, Melchior Pfintzing of Niirnberg.

Prose was more to the taste of the age than verse, and we find, accordingly, the stories of chivalry and the national epics told again and again in this medium ; many of them, indeed, became favourite " Volksbiicher " for generations to come. But even where verse was employed, the technique of Middle High German poetry had become a lost art, and the poets of the age recast the national epics in so-called " Knittelverse," as in the Dresdencr Helderibuch and the Lied vom hiirnen Seifried.

For a time it seemed as if the loss of chivalry might be compensated for in the poetry of this age by the poetic mysticism and allegory which filtered into European liter- ature from theological speculation ; allegories, such as that of the chess figures, were as popular in Germany as elsewhere ; and Swabia gave some promise of a revival of her old poetic prestige with an allegorical literature that might have taken its place beside the Roman de la Rose.

But neither Der Minne Lehre by Heinzlein of Constance at the close of the thirteenth century, nor Hermann von vSachsenheim's Des Spiegeis Abenteuer and Die Mohrin in the fifteenth century, were followed by the hoped-for poetic renaissance. The best poem of this class was, perhaps. Die Jagd, by Hadamar von Laber, a Bavarian nobleman of the early fourteenth century. The short, comic anecdote , however, enjoyed chie f fav our.

Figures Hlce the Pfaffe Amis, Markolf, Neidhart Fuchs, round whom the comic stories of the earlier of these centuries collected, were still essen- tially mediceval ; but in Tyl Eulenspiegel arose a more modern rogue, an incarnation of the coarse mischief, the sly practical joking, of the Reformation age.

Although the oldest collection of Eulenspiegel's adventures dates from the later fifteenth century, no earlier version is extant than that which was published at Strassburg in 15 Throughout the sixteenth century volume after volume of such merry adventures and comic anecdotes were issued from the German printing-presses. They embrace every form of " Schwank, " from the coarse popular witticisms of the Austrian Pfaffe vo7i Kaktiberg ca.

Apart from this vast anecdotal literature, we find a more legitimate descendant of the mediaeval "Spruchdichtung" in the verses of the so-called " Rgimspre cher " of the four- teenth and fifteenth centuries, who had skill in throw- ing off extempore verses in celebration of public events or in honour of noble patrons, or, as in the case of the special group known as " VVappendichter, " writing poetry descriptive of the family arms. Here may be mentioned Peter Suchenwirth, an Austrian of the later fourteenth century, and two Niirnberg poets, Hans Rosenpliit and Hans Folz, who flourished respectively about the middle of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries.

Another mediaeval form of literature appealed with re- doubled force to this new age of middle-class supremacy, the beast fable. But just as the "Schwank" literature of this age is overshadowed by the figure of Tyl Eulenspiegel, so the beast fable is overshadowed by the most famous work that the Lo w Ge rman peoples have produced, the r omanc e of Reinke de Vos. In a quite special sense this is a product and possession of the Low Germans ; the Reinaert de Vos, which a certain Willem made about the middle of the thirteenth century, was Flemish ; so, too, was another version written about ; and that of Hinrik van Alkmar, written in the fifteenth century, now unfortunately lost, was Low German.

The edition we know is a Low Saxon translation of the last- mentioned version; it was printed at Liibeck in , From a sim ple all egory in which King Lion holds his court and the rascally fox is condemned for his misdeeds but escapes punishment by his superior cunning, the story greji' into an elab orate sati re on hum an natu re, a legiti- mate pr ecurso r of the picaresque novels of the seventeenth century. Reinke the Fox is in disgrace ; every animal has some accusation to bring against him, and Brun the bear is despatched by King Lion to Malepertus, to summon Reinke before the court.

But Brun is outwitted by the Fox's cunning ; so, too, is Hintze the cat. At last, Grimbart the badger succeeds in bringing the culprit to justice. He is condemned to die, but escapes on promising to disclose to the king where he will find hidden treasure. Meanwhile Reinke proposes to make a pilgrimage to Rome to atone for his sins. Lampe the hare and Bellin the ram accompany him, but both are duped, Lampe being, indeed, served up for the supper of Reinke and his family.

This brings us to the end of the first book ; the remaining three books are much less interesting and much more obviously didactic ; they are clearly later excrescences on the original story. Didactic and satiric as Reiuke dc Vos was, the militant antipathies of the age demanded a more direct form of satire for their expression, and, four years earHer, there had appeared the mos t fam ous German satire of its day, Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff , the proto- type of Barclay's Ship of Fools.

Sebastian Brant 1 , who was born and died in Strassburg, was a humanist and a scholar ; he recognised as clearly as any of his contemporaries the depravity of the time and the abuses of the religious life. But he had little faith in any nostrums of reform ; his only hope for Germany's regen- eration was in a return to the golden age of mediaeval Catholicism. Thus his outlook was essentially negative ; he was an iconoclast rather than the builder up of a new faith, and, in spite of himself, a forerunner of the Reforma- tion.

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His Narretischijf is a collection of short, vigorous satires, written in blunt rhymed verse, and occasionally with an ostentatious show of learning. From fools of crime and arrogance to rioters and spendthrifts, from meddlers and busybodies to the fools that cling with perverse self-confidence to their own ignorance, Brant marshals before us every type of folly that the age had to show ; and all of them he assembles in a ship which is bound for the fools' paradise, " Narragonien.

The gre at m ovement of this age, the As late as the beginning of the fifteenth century there were, however, still poets bent on maintaining the old tradi- tions. Hugo von Montfort 7- 14 23 , and Oswald von Wolkenstein ca.