Book Reviews 253 original go missing; and I guess we will never know where lines 653-722 of text nr 3 ("the Peasant Who Was [Falsely] Accused") have disappeared to. Finally, whereas Classen seems determined to persuade the reader that his work is superior to that of an unpublished MA thesis (Cynthia Lynn Simmons [University of texas, 1985]), he inexplicably fails to engage with the (published) Kaufringer-translations, in both English and German, of established scholars such as Derek brewer

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... eval Comic Tales [first published 1973!]) or Klaus Grubmüller (Novellistik des Mittelalters [1996]) that are far (far) more authoritative and reliable. by translating all of the texts that are generally attributed to Kaufringer, rather than just a small selection, Classen should have been doing medieval German studies a useful service; but in fact this book has been so very carelessly put together that it does the exact opposite. All in all, it is difficult to avoid the impression that this text, being little more than a first (and incomplete?) draft, was rushed into publication by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. there is no question that translating medieval verse-narrative can be extremely tricky, and there are few scholars indeed who have never made a mistake (as this reviewer knows full well). but far too often the English translation is awkward or simply wrong. It is no exaggeration to say that at times the reader needs Kaufringer's original medieval German text in order to make sense of Classen's version, which makes the latter pretty much redundant.