Zürcher Liedflugschriften. Katalog der bis 1650 erschienenen Drucke in der Zentralbibliothek Zürich. Comp. by Eberhard Nehlsen

Abstract

For many years Eberhard Nehlsen has devoted virtually every spare moment to doggedly tracking down and describing the thousands of printed song booklets issued in early modern Germany. In the English-speaking world these things are often called ‘broadside ballads’ but such terminology is generally inappropriate when applied to the German material: very few of the German examples are ‘broadsides’ and few of them are ‘ballads’. In Germany, largely thanks to the work of Rolf Wilhelm Brednich in Die Liedpublizistik im Flugblatt des 15. bis 17. Jahrhunderts (Baden-Baden, 1974–75) and to Eberhard Nehlsen’s own Berliner Liedflugschriften (Baden-Baden, 2008–9), it has become customary to employ the terms Liedflugblatt for the broadsides and Liedflugschrift for the ubiquitous song-booklets (notwithstanding the fact that Flugschrift ‘pamphlet’ tends to imply a polemical intention which, however, is only rarely a characteristic of the songs they contain). The overwhelming majority of these Liedflugschriften are small octavo booklets (approximately...