Like the Occitan troubadours and the trouvères from northern France, the Minnesänger celebrated courtly love and gave medieval German their letters of nobility. These "singers of love" - Minne is the old German word for love - thus continued a poetic and musical tradition that had begun almost two centuries earlier in Occitania. The Minnesänger, mostly of noble and knightly descent, gradually emancipated themselves from their French models and developed their own styles and forms over the course of the 13th century.
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