Sebastian Coxon, ed. and trans. Medieval German Tales: An Anthology. Berlin: Schwabe Verlag, 2023, 128 pp.

This recent compilation of medieval German short narratives, primarily from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, offers a glimpse of a literary tradition influenced by Latin clerical literature and Old French tales. Coxon includes religious miracle tales, secular comic tales, moral-didactic, and courtly tales. Similar anthologies include Albrecht Classen’s Erotic Tales (2007/2009), which also focuses on comic tales. The cover of the book, printed by Schwabe Verlag, is an homage to the printed cover of the original text, the Deutsche Versnovellistik (DVN), from which highly entertaining exemplary tales have been thoughtfully selected.