CONRAD OF WURZBURG (d. 1287), the chief German poet of the second half of the 13th century. By birth probably a native of Wiirzburg, he seems to have spent part of his life in Strasbourg and his later years in Basle, where he died on Aug. 31, 1287. Like his master, Gottfried of Strasbourg, Conrad did not belong to the nobility. His style is dignified in tone ; his metre is clearly influenced by Gottfried's tendency to relieve the monot ony of the epic-metre with ingenious variations, but it is always correct ; his narratives—if we except Die hal be Birn, of which the authorship is doubtful—are free from coarseness, and, although mysticism and allegory bulk largely in his works, they were not allowed to usurp the place of poetry. Conrad's powers are to be seen to best advantage in his shorter verse romances, such as Engelhart and Engeltrut, Kaiser Otto and Das Herzemaere; the last mentioned is one of the best poems of its kind in Middle High German literature.
is no uniform edition of Conrad's works. Bibliography.-There is no uniform edition of Conrad's works. Der trojanische Krieg was edited by A. von Keller for the Stuttgart Literarische Verein (1858) ; Partenopier and Meliur, by K. Bartsch 0871); Die goldene Schmiede and Silvester, by W. Grimm (184o and 1841) ; Alexius, by H. F. Massmann (1843) and R. Henczynski (1898) ; Der Welt Lohn, by F. Roth (1843) ; Engelhart and Engeltrut, by M. Haupt (1844, 2nd ed., 189o) ; Klage der Kunst, by E. Joseph (1885) . The shorter poems, Otto and Herzemaere, will be found most conveniently in Erzahlungen and Schwanke des Mittelalters, edited by H. Lambel (2nd ed., 1883). Modern German translations of Conrad's most popular poems have been published by K. Pannier and H. Kruger in Reclam's Universalbibliothek (1879-91) . On Conrad see F. Pfeiffer in Germania, iii. (1867), and W. Golther in the Allgemeine deutsche Biographie, vol. xliv. (1898), s.v. "Wurzburg, Konrad von." Paul Genke has edited Die Legenden (Halle, 1925-27).
