The Ambraser Heldenbuch ("The Ambras Castle Book of Heroes") is a 16th-century manuscript written in Early New High German, now held in the Austrian National Library (signature Cod.
[1] Apparently Ried deliberately prolonged the writing process, in order to continue receiving payment without having to return to his tax collecting job.
[4] The Ambraser Heldenbuch was originally kept in the Chamber of Art and Curiosities at Ambras Castle, near Innsbruck,[5] but in 1806, because of the uncertainty of the Napoleonic Wars, the Austrian Emperor Francis I had it moved to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
The right-hand margin of folio 215r shows a naked woman playing a fiddle beside a shield with the date 1517 and the initials VF, which are assumed to be those of the artist, variously identified as Ulrich Funk or Valentin/Veit Fiedler.
The two final works, fragments of Wolfram von Eschenbach's Titurel and a German translation of the Latin Epistola presbiteri Johannis fall outside this scheme.
[19] The texts have been published on Open Access by de Gruyter in a series of eleven volumes, each containing transcriptions and facsimiles of a group of works.