Smaller Middle High German rhyming couplets (bîspel, speeches, verse narratives) represent significant innovations in the literature of the 13th century. Part I of this book develops a model for their typological understanding, part II covers the history of its reception which extends well into the 16th century and part III describes the poetics of an important part of the corpus, the so-called secular and spiritual "orations". Here the starting point is the Vienna Codex 2705 "Der Stricker" (c. 1260/90), which thus becomes the subject of a new literary history based on manuscripts.weiterlesen