oes and
tinkling bells on their garments." The pictures of the time and the
attempts of cities and princes to regulate these monstrosities prove to
us that the portraits of the satirists and the preachers are not
overdrawn.

In order to illuminate a cultural epoch in the history of any nation it
is, however, always safest to recur to the sources themselves, for they
spring, knowingly or unknowingly, from the social soil upon which they
thrive.

One of the most characteristic, though not edifying, "human documents"
is the collection of contemporary poetry by a female author, Klara
Hatzlerin, who was, according to her editor, Karl Haltaus, undoubtedly a
nun from Augsburg, and who filled her leisure hours as was customary in
the nunneries of her time in copying songs and poems. Evidently, though
a cultured woman, she was not a pietist. This is apparent from the
erotic and obscene matter found in her work, which even recalls Roswitha
of Gandersheim's plays written more than five hundred years earlier. The
work is undoubtedly genuine. It is signed: "_A. 0.1471. Augsburg. Clara
Hatzlerin._" The manuscript contains two hundred and nineteen poems,
besides ditties and sententious sayings. It marks the transition from
the Middle Ages to modern times, and is therefore of very great cultural
value. The poems do not yet bear the scholastic, not to say pedantic,
character of the best mastersingers; their type is, on the contrary,
strictly popular, and frequently vulgar. The subjects of Klara
Hatzlerin's collection of lyric poetry coincide with those of the minne:
there are night songs and watch songs, songs of the love of the fair
one, songs describing her virtues and her beauty, songs telling of fears
of the light and the spies, rhythmical entreaties for slight favors of
love, a glance, an embrace to appease the lover's sorrow or to give him
strength to be constant.

Very characteristic of the time, especially as selections by a nun,
betraying her interests and occupations, are the rustic caricatures and
exaggerations of the coarseness of the peasant classes.

It must not be forgotten that as to material wealth the burghers and the
peasant classes were never better off in Germany than during the two
centuries preceding the Thirty Years' War, while the nobility had sunk
into poverty, ruffianism, brigandage. What shall be said of a time when
a prince of the highest rank, Duke Ernst of Bavaria, A. D. 1436,
brutally murdered fair A