Triviale Minne? Konventionalität und Trivialisierung in spätmittelalterlichen Minnereden. Edited by Ludger Lieb and Otto Neudeck. Quellen und Forschungen zur Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte 40 (274). Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2006. Pp. VIII + 270; 24 figures. $145.

Triviale Minne? Konventionalität und Trivialisierung in spätmittelalterlichen Minnereden is a collection of eleven essays presented originally at a conference held June 3–6, 2004, at Schloss Eckberg in Dresden. the Minnereden are relatively brief texts—between 50 and 600 verses—in which a first-person author, usually anonymous, characterizes and discusses the problems, conditions, and rules of Minne, frequently employing conventional content and language. Although Lieb and Neudeck identify a number of common features among the Minnereden in the opening paragraphs of their introduction, they note that according to modern criteria it is difficult to identify the texts as a distinct genre. the more than 500 extant Minnereden constitute the largest group of secular German texts of the late Middle Ages; nonetheless, they have garnered neither high regard nor extensive attention from scholars, circumstances that perhaps invite the designation "trivial." The editors examine in detail the present-day multivalence of this term and its applicability to late medieval texts. The strongest evidence of the "trivial" nature of the Minnereden may be the lack of original content and frequent thematic and linguistic repetition. Other modern nuances of the term seem less relevant, e.g., the identification of Trivialliteratur with "low" literature, since a dichotomy between "high" and "low" literature is barely discernible in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Although critics today view Trivialliteratur as works from the lower class, anonymous, mass-produced, and inexpensive, the image is one to which the Minnereden hardly conform, especially given that they were transmitted almost exclusively in manuscript form. Concluding their semantic discussion, the editors recall the Latin root of "trivial" and its relationship to the trivium, emphasizing the pivotal role of rhetoric, one of the artes triviales, in the late medieval texts. Unlike the poetry of the High Middle Ages, shaped by a social elite personally engaged in the courtly love experience, the texts of the later generations were written by aficionados of the courtly love tradition, educated individuals acquainted with the art of Minne as well as those interested in learning about it, who edited and modified familiar material to reflect a novel understanding of it. The Minnereden were texts intended to be read, not songs to be sung, and were composed from the perspective of a waning courtly culture.