Medieval secular culture was a largely oral one, but in the course of the Middle Ages, literacy penetrated society deeply in Western Europe, eventually emancipating itself from the clerical class. The beginning of the thirteenth century saw a radical rise in the production of vernacular German manuscripts, but the exact relationship between these books and the medieval reception of the poems that they contain has been hotly debated. Did medieval audiences read, listen to, or watch performances of thirteenth-century vernacular German poetry? Were these early manuscripts performance tools or were they privately read? The answers to these questions probably depend on the poet, the audience, the codex, and the particular cultural circumstances. Thirteenth-century German poets composed in a literary context in which orality, aurality, and literacy overlapped, intersected, and coexisted, and they addressed this mixed context of reception in their poems.