Even though courtly literature dominates our concepts of the Middle Ages, a more careful examination of the large variety of relevant documents confirms that peasants, above all, figured in many different texts, often ridiculed, but often also identified as honorable and dignified individuals. At times, various poets focused on peasant women and idealized them as pure, virtuous, and beautiful, making them to the ideal marriage partner of a knight or a prince. Major examples can be found in the works by Hartman von Aue, Der Stricker, Boccaccio, and Heinrich Kaufringer. Moreover, late medieval artists often projected idyllic rural settings in the illustrations of Books of Hours. As much as the courtly world seems to have ignored peasants, a closer analysis demonstrates that there were numerous circumstances where individual representatives of the rural class gained high respect. This does not necessarily mean that medieval and early modern peasants enjoyed a much better position than what chroniclers and others authors had projected, but relying on literary evidence, we can identify a considerably more complex situation, at least as perceived by the various poets who might have intended their works as correctives to the actual social conditions. Within the literary discourse, to be sure, which generally appealed to wide social circles, peasant figures fared considerably better than we are commonly informed about.