The South Tirolean poet Oswald von Wolkenstein produced one of the most sophisticated and exciting bodies of lyric poetry in the Middle Ages. His songs, somewhat influenced by early modern thought, seem to have much more in common with twentieth-century postmodern lyrical poems than with anything else written during the medieval period. Nevertheless, Oswald was in full command of the lyrical traditions of the Middle Ages. He freely used genres and themes from a wide range of literary sources, although he transformed them considerably. He composed his works for his own enjoyment, ignoring public expectations. Many of his songs are autobiographical. Never in the history of German literature had a poet detailed his life as meticulously as Oswald, not even the so-called Archpoet or Walther von der Vogelweide in the High Middle Ages. In this respect he has been compared to his French contemporaries François Villon...