Walther von der Vogelweide from the Codex Manesse (Folio 124r). At the same time there was a growing audience among the nobility for literature in the vernacular (as was already happening in France and England).

īy the middle of the 11th century, there was an increasing preference for German over Latin in writing in the courts, and Henry the Lion was just the first of the princes, in 1144, to establish his own court chancery. 1050, when there was almost no new writing in German. The result was a period of around 150 years, c. This eventually lost its urgency under the subsequent Ottonian and Salian emperors, and official promotion of the written vernacular lapsed. The vernacular literature of the Old High German period, written in abbeys and monasteries, had been encouraged by the Carolingian dynasty in order to support the work of the church in recently Christianized lands. The third literary movement of these years was a new revamping of the heroic tradition, in which the ancient Germanic oral tradition can still be discerned, but tamed and Christianized and adapted for the court. again drawing on French models such as Chrétien de Troyes, many of them relating Arthurian material. The same sixty years saw the composition of the most important courtly romances. This was the period of the blossoming of Minnesang, MHG lyric poetry, initially influenced by the French and Provençal tradition of courtly love song. In the second half of the 12th century, there was a sudden intensification of activity, leading to a 60-year 'golden age' of medieval German literature referred to as the mittelhochdeutsche Blütezeit ( c.

Middle High German literature refers to literature written in German between the middle of the 11th century and the middle of the 14th.

German medieval house