Johannes von Saaz

Writer, born in Sitbor, Bohemia. A notary, school director, and town clerk, his great linguistic model was Johannes von Neumarkt, whose Prager Kanzleisprache (created for the imperial Chancellery) was one of the bases for New High German. Von Saaz's disputatory Der Ackermann aus Böhmen or Streitgespräch zwischen dem Ackermann und dem Tod (c.1400) combined mediaeval (cf. Langland's Piers Plowman) with Renaissance themes, as the ploughman takes issue with Death for robbing him of his wife and pleads the value of life. It proved highly influential on German literature and was translated into Czech.

Johannes von Tepl (c. 1415), also known as Johannes von Saaz, was a Bohemian writer of German language, one of the earliest known writers of prose in Early New High German (or late Middle German — depending on the criteria).

Not much is known about him;

Johannes von Tepl is best known for his early-humanist poetry work Der Ackermann aus Böhmen (Ploughman of Bohemia), sometimes also called Der Ackermann und der Tod (Ploughman and the Death), written around 1401 and first printed in 1460. (In history of Bohemia, ploughman is an important symbol of Bohemian kings — Přemysl, the legendary founder of the Přemyslid dynasty, was originally a ploughman.) The poem is regarded as one of the most important German poems in late Middle Ages.