Freidank

Freidank (Vrîdanc) was a Middle High German didactic poet of the early 13th century. He is the author of Bescheidenheit ("practical wisdom, correct judgement, discretion"), a collection of rhyming aphorisms in 53 thematic divisions, extending to some 4,700 verses. The work was extremely popular in the German Middle Ages and is transmitted in numerous manuscripts, as well as in a Latin translation (Fridangi Discretio).

Nothing about Freidank's life is known with certainty, such hypotheses as there are based on the language and content of his work Bescheidenheit. He would have been born in the later 12th century, and was likely of Swabian origin.

Freidank (Vrîdanc, Vrîgedanc) literally translates to "free thought"; passages in Freidank's poetry allude to the freedom of thought, and the name may be an assumed epithet, although Freidank (Fridanc, Fridangus) is also recorded as a German family name in the later medieval period; one Bernhard Freidank is mentioned in Helbling's Lucidarius (but it has been argued that this may in fact be a reference to the poet himself.). Wilhelm Grimm (1834) argued that the author is Vrîdanc is a pseudonym and that the author of Bescheidenheit is Walter von der Vogelweide. This hypothesis was immediately rejected by the majority of scholars; according to Bartsch (1878), the only German philologist convinced by Grimm's idea was Wackernagel.

Based on the contents of Bescheidenheit, its author was educated in writing and proper speech, and it is likely that he was a cleric by education. It seems likely that in 1228–1229 he was involved in the Sixth Crusade of the Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick II, as the section about Acre seems to refer to this period.

Freidank may have died in 1233, if he was the magister Fridancus whose death was reported in the annals of the Cistercian monastery at Kaisheim. The chronicler Hartmann Schedel claimed to have seen a monument with Freidank's epitaph in Venetian Treviso in 1465. Gion (1870) argued that the Freidank buried in Treviso died in the 1380s and is not to be confused with the author of the Bescheidenheit.

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