The annals of medieval German literature include virtually no woman writer who composed secular works--although there were many religious women writers, such as Mechthild von Magdeburg and Gertrud the Great. This situation changed in the fifteenth century, when several noblewomen translated courtly romances and similar texts from French into German. These works are not, however, simple translations but adaptations, contributions to German literature in their own right. Both Eleonore of Austria and Elisabeth von Nassau-Saarbrücken had enough literary sensitivity to imbue the translated works with new values, ideas, and styles. These texts found wide appeal and were soon printed and sold on the book markets as chapbooks, or, more precisely, early prose novels.

Elisabeth von Nassau-Saarbrücken was the most important representative of her sex in fifteenth-century German literature, and her novels contributed to the transformation of the late Middle Ages into the early Modern...