The preceding commentaries on trial by fire in secular literature and legend were all written before or shortly after the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215: in spite of the obvious difference in attitudes toward the ordeal evidenced in Tristan, on the one hand, and the legends, on the other, all of these works contain explicit legal and liturgical references to the ordeal and the procedures connected with it, as they deal with the cases of queens caught in a web of accusations of sexual misconduct that had grave implications for the monarchies in question.

The final literary ordeal by fire in this study, Der Stricker's story of the hot iron, written some thirty to forty years after Gottfried's Tristan, well after the Lateran Council, differs from Tristan and the legends in almost every way, beginning with genre. “Das heisse Eisen” belongs to the tradition of the “märe,” short fictitious narratives with comic elements written between approximately 1250 and 1500. Stricker, the first important writer in the genre, is credited with raising the literary level of this type of narrative. The battle of the sexes formed the subject matter of a great many of these works, as it does here, while parody, especially of religious ceremony, was a characteristic element. Stricker's account of the ordeal is a burlesque; it contains neither the theological inferences nor the fieriness of Gottfried's attack nor the vindication of a saintly queen.