day of the stamp - Austria / II. Republic of Austria 1966 - 3 Shilling

The stamp image of this year's stamp commemorative stamp shows a letter carrier from the Ambraser Heldenbuch. In the cited book, many of the "best folk and courtly poems of the Middle High German period" were written by the customs officer Hans Ried from 1504 to 1516 according to models, when the glittering epoch of medieval poetry was long past and lived only in collections. The book is today one of the most famous source works of German literary history. Emperor Maximilian I, who also earns the honorary name of the last knight in the field of poetry, has commissioned this collection. The emperor saved not only an epic of the format of the "Kudrun" from oblivion, but also other poems, such as Ulrich von Liechtenstein's women's book. Two-thirds of the total of 25 texts have survived only here. Also included are "Iwein" and "Erec" by Hartmann von Aue and Meier Helmbrecht. The letter is shown on page 235, almost at the very end of the book. He illustrated as a marginal miniature the last text, which tells the overview at the beginning of the book "From the wealth of priests Johanns". It is a fragment of a German translation with additions handed down here alone, a total of five pages long.