While the phenomenon of courtly love poetry first emerged in southern France in the early twelfth century (

), it found successors at southern German courts only by the late twelfth century. We call them

, i.e., singers addressing courtly love, or

. These

then gained tremendously in popularity over the next centuries, but the first major written record was not produced until the early fourteenth century when scribes created the famous

on behalf of members of the Zürich family Manesse, which was also beautifully though not realistically illustrated. The corpus of

consists of numerous genres. Although we can mostly identify individual texts with a name, we know hardly anything about those composers in biographical terms.

1139 words

Citation: Classen, Albrecht. "Albrecht von Johansdorf". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 02 July 2025 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=15458, accessed 08 July 2025.]