Franz Josef Mone (Mingolsheim 1796 – Karlsruhe 1871) studied philology and history in Heidelberg between 1814 and 1816, where he was subsequently employed as librarian and professor of history. In 1827 he was appointed to a chair of statistics and political economy in Louvain/Leuven, where he developed an interest in the literature of the Low Countries. An adept of Grimm, he edited an early Latin version of the Reynard Fox animal fable in 1832, of which Grimm had found a copy in Paris and he himself a copy in Liège. In 1838 he published an Übersicht der niederländischen Volks-Literatur älterer Zeit which drew on earlier sketches (Van Wijn, Hoffmann von Fallersleben) but also on his own archival researches. These had been interrupted by the Belgian secession of 1830, which alarmed him to the point of relinquishing his post and returning to Karlsruhe (where he became a leading archivist in due course). In 1835 he undertook another field trip to Belgian libraries. The Übersicht is the Grimm/Gervinus mode, beginning with a definition of the notion of a “national literature”, which Mone equates with the literature of the mass of the people (Volks-Literatur). The work also contains a chapter on Frisian literature and was the first text to draw attention to the manuscript work of the medieval woman mystic Hadewych, who became a highly-regarded canonical author in subsequent decades but had slipped into total oblivion before Mone’s rediscovery of her work.

In Germany, Mone published an Anzeiger für Kunde der deutschen Vorzeit between 1835 and 1839 (with Hans von Aufseß), and Altteutsche Schauspiele for the Bibliothek der gesammten deutschen National-Literatur (2 vols, 1841-46).