Lamprecht

Lamprecht, called der Pfaffe ("the Priest"), was a German poet of the twelfth century. He is the author of the Alexanderlied (“Song of Alexander”), the first German epic composed on a French model.

==Biography== Of him practically nothing personal is known but his name, the fact that he was a cleric, and that he wrote his poem around 1130. According to the poet's own statement, the model for his poem was a French poem on Alexander the Great by Albéric de Besançon. Only a portion of the beginning of the French original, 105 verses in all, is preserved (discovered and published by Paul Heyse, Berlin, 1856). The poem contained a fabulous account of the life and deeds of the great Macedonian conqueror as it was current in Greek and Latin versions of the early Middle Ages, such as the Greek romance of pseudo-Callisthenes, dating from the third century A.D., the Latin translation of Julius Valerius, the epitome thereof, and especially the free Latin version made by the Neapolitan archpresbyter Leo in the tenth century, known as the Historia de preliis.