Smaller Middle High German rhyming couplets represent significant innovations in the literature of the 13th century. Part I of this book develops a model for their typological understanding, part II covers the history of its reception and part III describes the poetics of an important part of the corpus, the so-called secular and spiritual "orations". Here the starting point is the Vienna Codex 2705 "Der Stricker" (c. 1260/90).