Late-Medieval German Women's Poetry

Secular and Religious Songs

Although there were a number of outstanding women writers of the late middle ages, it was not thought that women composed lyric poetry. Albrecht Classen's careful investigation of archival material, however, proves this to be a misconception, and in this volume he presents a selection of secular love songs and religious hymns composed by fifteenth- and sixteenth-century German women poets, here translated for the first time, based on his two-volume edition in the original language. Many women seem to have left their works anonymously, or hid their names in their texts using acrostics; in these and other cases, applying appropriate research tools, Classen has identified a considerable corpus of women's poetry which now promises to fill the gap previously supposed to exist in the history of medieval and early-modern German women's poetry.