Konrad von Würzburg
Portrait of Konrad von Würzburg from
the Codex Manesse
born c. 1225, Würzburg, Würzburg
died Aug. 31, 1287, Basel, Switz.
Middle High German poet who, during
the decline of chivalry, sought to
preserve the ideals of courtly life.
Of humble origin, he served a
succession of patrons as a professional
poet and eventually settled in Basel.
His works range from love lyrics and
short didactic poems (Sprüche) to
full-scale epics, such as Partonopier
und Meliur, on the fairy-lover theme,
and Der Trojanerkrieg (The Trojan War),
an account of the Trojan War. He is at
his best in his shorter narrative poems,
the secular romances Engelhart, Dasz
Herzmaere (The Heart’s Tidings), and
Keiser Otte mit dem Barte (Kaiser Otte
with the Beard) and the religious
legends Silvester, Alexius, and
Pantaleon.
Konrad’s originality is one of form
rather than content. Taking Gottfried
von Strassburg, one of the masters of
the epic of courtly life, as his model,
he developed Gottfried’s stylized
techniques often to the point of
exaggeration. In one of his poems every
syllable rhymes. The complexity and the
explicitly didactic character of his
poetry earned for him the esteem of his
contemporaries. A century later the
rising generation of artisan-poets known
as Meistersingers named him as one of
the “12 old masters” of medieval poetry
from whom they claimed descent.
