LITERARY ACTIVITY in early medieval Germany, as throughout most of medieval Europe, was dominated by the production of Latin texts rather than those in the vernacular, and these texts form an important part of the history of German literature in the early period. From the beginning of the reign of Pépin the Short, the first Carolingian ruler, largely as a result of reforms instituted by Charlemagne, the Latin language had acquired an unprecedented authority among educators, courtiers, and ecclesiastics. Its privileged status was maintained, as recent research has suggested, by the curricular centrality of grammatica, the first of the seven liberal arts, within the most powerful educational institutions of the Carolingian empire (both within and outside the Germanic kingdoms). As a written literary language, by comparison, Old High German remained comparatively neglected, lacking both the authority of Latin and the weight of an established literary tradition. Therefore, relatively few vernacular texts were copied and circulated, and many survive, sometimes fragmentarily, in unique manuscripts. That these had been read within the context of a predominantly Latin culture is often clear from their authors' words, but a more subtle dialogue between Latin and the vernacular is also apparent from the texts themselves. Typically, the vernacular manifested itself in glosses and translations, whose derivative status is clear. Translation of German verse into Latin was unusual, but the preservation of a complete Latin text from the eleventh century (the Galluslied) suggests that even in such cases, the Latin rendering was generally prized above the vernacular original (which was either lost or destroyed).