Abstract

While traditional literary scholarship has mostly focused on formal or thematic aspects in the evaluation of late medieval literature (genres, motifs, content matter, etc.), this paper identifies a major paradigm shift regarding the social perspective. Until the high Middle Ages, the dominant discourse engaged with the members of the aristocracy above all (heroic epics, courtly romances) and reflected on their concerns almost exclusively. Since the late Middle Ages (thirteenth century onwards), however, poets increasingly turned their attention also toward the peasant class, and then opened a virtual floodgate toward protagonists of all social levels, including merchants, lansquenets, students, city councilmen, farmhands, maidservants, and others. This does not mean that those people were suddenly idealized and glorified in contrast to the nobles. Instead, the poets simply turned to them as convenient figures through whom universal human concerns, shortcomings, foolishness, smartness, cunning, or intelligence could be reflected. Granted, courtly novels continued to be of major importance and they continued to be published over the next centuries, but an ever-growing body of entertaining, moralizing, and didacticizing short verse and prose narratives gained in popularity and soon began to dominate the early modern bookmarket. This reflects, of course, also a major shift in economic power and cultural concepts characteristic of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.