printed in the early years of the 16th. At the beginning of the new epoch the Minnesang could still point to two masters able to maintain the great traditions of the 13th century, Hugo von Montfort (1357–1423) and Oswald von Wolkenstein (1367–1445); but as the lyric passed into the hands of the middle-class poets of the German towns, it was rapidly shorn of its essentially lyric qualities; die Minne gave place to moral and religious dogmatism, emphasis was laid on strict adherence to the rules of composition, and the simple forms of the older lyric were superseded by ingenious metrical distortions. Under the influence of writers like Heinrich von Meissen (“Frauenlob,” c. 1250–1318) and Heinrich von Mügeln in the 14th century, like Muskatblut and Michael Beheim (1416–c. 1480) in the 15th, the Minnesang thus passed over into the Meistergesang. In the later 15th and in the 16th centuries all the south German towns possessed flourishing Meistersinger schools in which the art of writing verse was taught and practised according to complicated rules, and it was the ambition of every gifted citizen to rise through the various grades from Schüler to Meister and to distinguish himself in the “singing contests” instituted by the schools.
Such are the decadent aspects of the once rich literature of the Middle High German period in the 14th and 15th centuries. Turning now to the more positive side of the literary movement, we have to note a revival of a popular lyric poetry—the Volkslied—which made the futility and artificiality of the Meistergesang more apparent. Never before or since has Germany been able to point to such a rich harvest of popular poetry as is to be seen in the Volkslieder of these two centuries. Every form of popular poetry is to be found here—songs of love and war, hymns and drinking-songs, songs of spring and winter, historical ballads, as well as lyrics in which the old motives of the Minnesang reappear stripped of all artificiality. More obvious ties with the literature of the preceding age are to be seen in the development of the Schwank or comic anecdote. Collections of such stories, which range from the practical jokes of Till Eulenspiegel (1515), and the coarse witticisms of the Pfaffe vom Kalenberg (end of 14th century) and Peter Leu (1550), to the religious and didactic anecdotes of J. Pauli’s Schimpf und Ernst (1522) or the more literary Rollwagenbüchlein (1555) of Jörg Wickram and the Wendunmut (1563 ff.) of H. W. Kirchhoff—these dominate in large measure the literature of the 15th and 16th centuries; they are the literary descendants of the medieval Pfaffe Amis, Markolf and Reinhart Fuchs. An important development of this type of popular literature is to be seen in the Narrenschiff of Sebastian Brant (1457–1521), where the humorous anecdote became a vehicle of the bitterest satire; Brant’s own contempt for the vulgarity of the ignorant, and the deep, unsatisfied craving of all strata of society for a wider intellectual horizon and a more humane and dignified life, to which Brant gave voice, make the Narrenschiff, which appeared in 1494, a landmark on the way that led to the Reformation. Another form—the Beast fable and Beast epic—which is but sparingly represented in earlier times, appealed with peculiar force to the new generation. At the very close of the Middle High German period, Ulrich Boner had revived the Aesopic fable in his Edelstein (1349), translations of Aesop in the following century added to the popularity of the fable (q.v.), and in the century of the Reformation it became, in the hands of Burkard Waldis (Esopus, 1548) and Erasmus Alberus (Buch von der Tugend und Weisheit, 1550), a favourite instrument of satire and polemic. A still more attractive form of the Beast fable was the epic of Reinke de Vos, which had been cultivated by Flemish poets in the 13th and 14th centuries and has come down to us in a Low Saxon translation, published at Lübeck in 1498. This, too, like Brant’s poem, is a powerful satire on human folly, and is also, like the Narrenschiff, a harbinger of the coming Reformation.
A complete innovation was the drama (q.v.), which, as we have seen, had practically no existence in Middle High German times. As in all European literatures, it emerged slowly and with difficulty from its original subservience to the church liturgy. As time went on, the vernacular was substituted for the original Latin, and with increasing demands for pageantry, the scene of the play was removed to the churchyard or the market-place; thus the opportunity arose in the 14th and 15th centuries for developing the Weihnachtsspiel, Osterspiel and Passionsspiel on secular lines. The enlargement of the scope of the religious play to include legends of the saints implied a further step in the direction of a complete separation of the drama from ecclesiastical ceremony. The most interesting example of this encroachment of the secular spirit is the Spiel von Frau Jutten—Jutta being the notorious Pope Joan—by an Alsatian, Dietrich Schernberg, in 1480. Meanwhile, in the 15th century, a beginning had been made of a drama entirely independent of the church. The mimic representations—originally allegorical in character—with which the people amused themselves at the great festivals of the year, and more especially in spring, were interspersed with dialogue, and performed on an improvised stage. This was the beginning of the Fastnachtsspiel or Shrovetide-play, the subject of which was a comic anecdote similar to those of the many collections of Schwänke. Amongst the earliest cultivators of the Fastnachtsspiel were Hans Rosenplüt (fl. c. 1460) and Hans Folz (fl. c. 1510), both of whom were associated with Nuremberg.
(b) The Age of the Reformation.—Promising as were these literary beginnings of the 15th century, the real significance of the period in Germany’s intellectual history is to be sought outside literature, namely, in two forces which immediately prepared the way for the Reformation—mysticism and humanism. The former of these had been a more or less constant factor in German religious thought throughout the middle ages, but with Meister Eckhart (? 1260–1327), the most powerful and original of all the German mystics, with Heinrich Seuse or Suso (c. 1300–1366), and Johannes Tauler (c. 1300–1361), it became a clearly defined mental attitude towards religion; it was an essentially personal interpretation of Christianity, and, as such, was naturally conducive to the individual freedom which Protestantism ultimately realized. It is thus not to be wondered at that we should owe the early translations of the Bible into German—one was printed at Strassburg in 1466—to the mystics. Johann Geiler von Kaisersberg (1445–1510), a pupil of the humanists and a friend of Sebastian Brant, may be regarded as a link between Eckhart and the earlier mysticists and Luther. Humanism was transplanted to German soil with the foundation of the university of Prague in 1348, and it made even greater strides than mysticism. Its immediate influence, however, was restricted to the educated classes; the pre-Reformation humanists despised the vernacular and wrote and thought only in Latin. Thus although neither Johann Reuchlin of Pforzheim (1455–1522), nor even the patriotic Alsatian, Jakob Wimpfeling (or Wimpheling) (1450–1528)—not to mention the great Dutch humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536)—has a place in the history of German literature, their battle for liberalism in thought and scholarship against the narrow orthodoxy of the Church cleared the way for a healthy national literature among the German-speaking peoples. The incisive wit and irony of humanistic satire—we need only instance the Epistolae obscurorum virorum (1515–1517)—prevented the German satirists of the Reformation age from sinking entirely into that coarse brutality to which they were only too prone. To the influence of the humanists we also owe many translations from the Latin and Italian dating from the 15th century. Prominent among the writers who contributed to the group of literature were Niklas von Wyl, chancellor of Württemberg, and his immediate contemporary Albrecht von Eyb (1420–1475).
Martin Luther (1483–1546), Germany’s greatest man in this age of intellectual new-birth, demands a larger share of attention in a survey of literature than his religious and ecclesiastical activity would in itself justify, if only because the literary activity of the age cannot be regarded apart from him. From the Volkslied and the popular Schwank to satire and drama, literature turned exclusively round the Reformation which had been inaugurated on the 31st of October 1517 by Luther’s publication of the Theses against Indulgences in Wittenberg. In his three tracts, An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation, De captivitate
