One of the most characteristic, though not edifying, "human documents" is the collection of contemporary poetry by a female author, Klara Hatzlerin, who was, according to her editor, Karl Haltaus, undoubtedly a nun from Augsburg, and who filled her leisure hours as was customary in the nunneries of her time in copying songs and poems. Evidently, though a cultured woman, she was not a pietist. This is apparent from the erotic and obscene matter found in her work, which even recalls Roswitha of Gandersheim's plays written more than five hundred years earlier. The work is undoubtedly genuine. It is signed: "_A. 0.1471. Augsburg. Clara Hatzlerin._" The manuscript contains two hundred and nineteen poems, besides ditties and sententious sayings. It marks the transition from the Middle Ages to modern times, and is therefore of very great cultural value. The poems do not yet bear the scholastic, not to say pedantic, character of the best mastersingers; their type is, on the contrary, strictly popular, and frequently vulgar. The subjects of Klara Hatzlerin's collection of lyric poetry coincide with those of the minne: there are night songs and watch songs, songs of the love of the fair one, songs describing her virtues and her beauty, songs telling of fears of the light and the spies, rhythmical entreaties for slight favors of love, a glance, an embrace to appease the lover's sorrow or to give him strength to be constant. Very characteristic of the time, especially as selections by a nun, betraying her interests and occupations, are the rustic caricatures and exaggerations of the coarseness of the peasant classes. It must not be forgotten that as to material wealth the burghers and the peasant classes were never better off in Germany than during the two centuries preceding the Thirty Years' War, while the nobility had sunk into poverty, ruffianism, brigandage. What shall be said of a time when a prince of the highest rank, Duke Ernst of Bavaria, A. D. 1436, brutally murdered fair Agnes Bernauerin, the lawful wife of his son. To this very day the martyred woman is sung in German romance and poetry. She was the daughter of a barber and surgeon of Augsburg, where prince Albert, son of Duke Ernst, learned to know and to love her because of her almost unearthly beauty and charm. He made her in due form his lawful wife; but the old duke would not recognize the marriage. In the absence of her husband, Agnes was seized in the castle of Straubing, dragged upon the bridge of the Danube, and hurled into the stream. She drifted toward the bank, where one of the hangmen seized her with his hooked pole by her gold-colored hair, plunged her into deep water, and held her beneath its surface until she was drowned.