Since the early fifteenth century, prose gained the upper hand also in the field of fictional narratives. Before then, all romances, short narratives, and other fictional texts had been composed in verse to facilitate the oral presentation with musical accompaniment. Of course, in theology, philosophy, law, and medicine, for instance, prose had always been the dominant mode, but not in literature. This transformation can be observed all over late medieval Europe, and so also in the German-language areas of the Holy Roman Empire. This brief analysis outlines the progress in the literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, offering short interpretations and an outline of the major texts’ content to convey a broad understanding of what contemporary audiences found to be so intriguing and relevant. In other words, even before the discovery of the printing press by Johann Gutenberg in Mainz ca. 1450, the conditions in the book market were undergoing fundamental changes, which then accelerated tremendously with the technological innovation.