In Early New High German (ENHG; 1350-1650) there is variation between genitive – noun and noun – genitive orders, even within a single text. In this paper, we present data from the Indiana Parsed Corpus of Historical German. We propose that the underlying locus of adnominal genitives has always been to the right of the surface position of N. However, in ENHG, adnominal genitives often moved to one of two positions to the left of the N. The first of these positions is low in the DP, and the second is Spec-DP. We argue that as this leftward movement applied less frequently to full phrasal genitives, it was reanalyzed as movement of a proper name (head) with possessive -s to the D position.