A Period of Flux?

A popular if uninformed manner of speaking refers to the medieval period as “the dark ages.” If there is a dark age in the literary history of Germany, however, it is the one that follows: the fourteenth and early fifteenth century, the time between the Middle High German Blütezeit and the full blossoming of the Renaissance. It may be called a dark age, not because literary production waned in these decades, but because nineteenth-century aesthetics and twentieth-century university curricula allowed the achievements of that time to fade into obscurity. If we compare the high medieval writings of Walther von der Vogelweide or Wolfram von Eschenbach with the Reformation writings of Martin Luther or Ulrich von Hutten, the cultural gulf that opens up before us seems enormous, leaving the impression that the intervening years were ones of rapid transition. But when we acknowledge that a full three centuries lie between these two familiar landmarks, we realize that the rate of change was doubtless no faster than in any other literary epoch. If the period from the mid-thirteenth century to the end of the fifteenth may be called a transition, it is because the early thirteenth and early sixteenth centuries are established coordinates in the discipline of literary history. There are good reasons for this: the Blütezeit produced Middle High German poetics of particular genius, the Reformation intellectual exchanges of an extremely high caliber. If we define the former as medieval and the latter as early modern, it can be useful to see the gradual dawning of modernism as the years “between.” But it is important to recognize that all such constructs are arbitrary.

What characterizes the literature of the transition? In the late medieval period the forms and aspirations of literary endeavor stood in clear continuity with those of the High Middle Ages; but they were also rapidly expanding in scope, with many innovations that would become important for the Renaissance and the Reformation. The bulk of chirographic production continued to be written in Latin, but the German language was quickly gaining ground. The student approaching the period for the first time will be struck by obvious linguistic developments.