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. 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 fills the gap previously supposed to exist in the history of medieval and early-modern
German women's poetry.
