The nineteenth-century literary critic and historian Karl Goedeke called Georg (also known as Jörg) Wickram the founder of the German novel. This claim has often been challenged, but Wickram's position as one of the more important authors of sixteenth-century popular, as opposed to learned, literature is no longer questioned. Wickram's works were rarely mentioned for more than two hundred years after his death, but in 1806 Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué published Historie vom edlen Ritter Galmy und einer schönen Herzogin aus Bretagne (Story of the Noble Knight Galmy and a Beautiful Duchess from Brittany), a novel based on Wickram's Ritter Galmy uß Schottland (The Knight Galmy from Scotland, 1539); in 1808 Jakob Grimm expressed interest in Wickram in a letter to G. F. Bencke; and in 1809 Wickram's Der Goldtfaden (1557; translated as The Golden Thread, 1991) was republished by Clemens Brentano. Despite the interest the Romantics...