ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses most of the authentic townscapes are to be found in the order of their foundation dates: Regensburg, Vienna, Nuremberg, Metz, Geneva, Constantinople, Budapest, Strasbourg and so forth. Eighteen manuscript copies of the “typological Bible” alone have survived: a popular, vernacular pairing of texts, in which stories from the Old Testament are supported and enriched by tales from apocryphal and secular history, omitting the prophetical books. The vernacular prose romance of the fifteenth century in German is inconceivable without the translated output, or rather the stimulus to translate, provided by two ladies of the German-Austrian higher nobility: Elisabeth of Nassau-Saarbrucken and Eleonore of the Tyrol. The favourite prose for German readers was not drawn from the fictional literature alone, but from instructional matter in the form of fables and early textbooks. Herbals, medical guides and encyclopaedias reached out to a new public in the towns.
