Minnesinger, the collective name given to the lyric poets of Germany who flourished during a period marked approximately by the years 1170 and 1250. For the most part the singers were of knightly birth and belonged to the inferior nobility, though men of the very highest rank, reigning princes and even emperors, wrote these lyric effusions, and a few were of burgher birth. They get their name from the principal theme that inspired them, minne = 'love,' the love of fair women. Thus they were so far akin to the troubadours of Provence and France. The movement, however, though it certainly received suggestions from the singers beyond the Rhine, was essentially of native origin. The difference between the two schools is most clearly seen in the spirit of their work. The German singers wrote of love in a more refined and delicate spirit, and with a greater reverence for woman, than the troubadours. The best of them treated of the inner life of the soul, the feelings and emotions of the heart, rather than of the gallantries and adventures of a sensual love; they move in the world of imagination and idealism, shunning the real world and its gross pleasures; the shy, speechless, reverent attitude of ingenuous youth that characterised them was closely akin to the reverent homage paid to the purest and holiest of women, the Virgin Mother of Christ. Yet they did not altogether lose touch of the world. They loved to sing the praises of nature, especially of spring, the perennial inspirer of poets' hearts and tongues. Often, too, there is a decided strain of sadness and melancholy, always touches of true naïveté, and frequently of arch humour, and on occasion the sterner note of moral indignation and contempt of the follies and vices of the time. Thus, the best of the minnesinger, like Walther von der Vogelweide, the most illustrious of them all, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried von Strasburg, Heinrich von Veldeke (the earliest), and others, were distinguished on the one hand from the poets of the monasteries, who celebrated the deeds of martyr and saint, and on the other hand from the wandering gleemen, whose subjects were suited to the coarse and ignorant peasantry who formed their usual audiences. But it is not in subject only, and their spirit of treating it, that the minnesinger differ from all their contemporaries; they also paid great attention to poetical form, striving after melodious and sonorous language, regularity of verse-structure, and smoothness and correctness of versification, in all which they attained a high degree of skill. Their art was, however, wider than the poet's at the present day: they not only wrote the text but composed the air to which the text was to be sung, for all their lyrics were written with the express purpose of being sung to the accompaniment of viol or harp. One class alone was exempted from musical accompaniment—viz. short didactic or sententious poems called sprüche = 'sayings,' which were recited. As it was incumbent upon a 'singer' to invent his own combination of text and melody, and was considered dishonourable for him to appropriate those of his predecessors or contemporaries, their poems are remarkable for a great variety of forms, poetic and musical. This in course of time, when the fresh inspiration of the movement began to wane, was the fruitful cause of much artificial writing, and eventually of the decay of the art. But there were still deeper causes of decay inherent in it. The less refined of the 'singers' were unable to keep the levels of exalted sentiment of their superiors, and degenerated into false sentimentality, lifeless conventionality, and above all a gross and vulgar sensualism. The minnesinger wrote principally in the Swabian dialect of Middle High German. Their use of this language was due to the great encouragement they received from the Hohenstaufen emperors. Next to these rulers their chief patrons were the dukes of Austria, and especially Hermann of Thuringia, at whose court of Eisenach the semi-mythical Wartburgkrieg occurred (c. 1207). This was a poetical contest between the chief minnesinger as to the merits of the patrons of the art: Heinrich of Offerdingen was outsung by Walther von der Vogelweide, and Heinrich's ally, the magician Klingsor of Hungary, by Wolfram von Eschenbach.
When men of knightly birth began to neglect the writing of lyric poetry, and the minnesinger were no longer held in honour in the halls of the great, the art took refuge with the burghers and craftsmen of the cities. But with the exception of Hans Sachs of Nuremberg, those meistersinger or meistersänger, as they called themselves, possessed little real poetic feeling. They formed themselves into guilds and wrote poems as they plied their trade, by purely mechanical rules, and bound themselves by a multitude of puerile restrictions and pedantic regulations. Their subjects were painfully commonplace, and their treatment destitute of all artistic feeling. Yet these singers' guilds flourished from the 13th to the 16th century; the last was not dissolved until 1839, at Ulm. Wagner's opera, Die Meistersinger zu Nürnberg, perpetuates their memory.
The lyrics of the 160 Minnesinger, of whom alone specimens survive, were published by Von der Hagen in 1838 (4 vols.). Modern versions have been made by Tieck (1803), Simrock (1857), and others. See A. Schultz, Das höfische Leben zur Zeit des Minnesangs (2 vols. 2d ed. 1889); Uhland in Schriften zur Geschichte der Dichtung und Sage (vol. v. 1870); and Lyon, Minne- und Meister-sang (1882).