Until the 1960s Relatively Little Work had been devoted to the study of German prose written before the eighteenth century, with the exception of Simplicissimus Teutsch (1669), the picaresque novel by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, which will be discussed below. The prevailing opinion was that the Agathon (1766) of Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813) was the first German novel of aesthetic quality deserving the attribute of originality and worthy of broad attention. However, with the advent of the sociohistorical school of research, which was driven in part by an inquiry into the origins of modernity, researchers began to show interest in earlier contexts and mentalities previously ignored. Since the 1970s a surge of critical text editions, reprints, series, and monographs have introduced many important writers from the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries: Elisabeth von Nassau-Saarbrücken, Hermann Bote von Braunschweig, Jörg Wickram, Johann Michael Moscherosch, Christian Weise, Duke Anton Ulrich, Johann Riemer, and Johann Beer, to name only a few.

A German literary prose began to emerge in the late Middle Ages. Whether anecdotes, short tales, or novelistic forms, late medieval prose narratives bore witness to the continued vitality of German vernacular traditions into the early modern period. The literary impulses coming from Renaissance Italy, transmitted almost exclusively in Latin, also had an impact on German prose narrative. With the spread of mechanical printing throughout Europe in the second half of the fifteenth century, however, things changed dramatically, if slowly over a considerable period of time. Not only form and content, including new textual and intertextual combinations, but the modes of production and dissemination experienced profound transformation. Together, they demonstrate that the early modern intertextual relationships comprised a Europe-wide web of regional and national literatures.

The slow pace with which this profound transformation took place makes it difficult to determine a precise terminus a quo for the emergence of early modern German prose. Some scholars take the anonymously authored Volksbuch (folkbook or chapbook) Fortunatus (1509) as the authentic starting point; others, Wickram’s novels from the 1550s.