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

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 89% of those in the Zürich Zentralbibliothek) of eight, twelve, or sixteen leaves containing the words of one or more religious or secular songs. These were generally sold at markets or fairs or hawked from door to door by itinerant booksellers or their agents. Nehlsen’s three-volume Berliner Liedflugschriften described 2,298 pre-1650 examples of such material in the State Library in Berlin, and now he has produced a similar catalogue of the holdings (577 items) in the Zentralbibliothek at Zürich. These two catalogues (henceforth referred to as BLF and ZLF respectively), important though they both are, are however only an interim measure: Nehlsen’s ultimate aim is to produce a comprehensive catalogue, projected to run to about ten volumes, recording all the surviving printed booklets of German songs from the years 1501 to 1650 (currently estimated to number around 9,000 editions). While the booklets held in major libraries such as Berlin State Library, Zürich, the Herzog August Bibliothek at Wolfenbüttel, the Austrian National Library, the British Library, and many others have of course been catalogued (though not much studied), other examples still regularly come to light in smaller collections, municipal archives, the stock of antiquarian booksellers and the private libraries of individual collectors.

In his succinct introduction (pp. 9–25) Nehlsen outlines the broad characteristics of the booklets in the Zürich collection. Those printed in Switzerland at Basel (mainly by Johann Schröter and Samuel Apiarius), Bern, and Zürich are of course particularly well represented, but there are many others from Augsburg, Strasbourg, Nuremberg, and elsewhere. This contrasts with the picture presented in BLF where editions from Nuremberg overwhelmingly predominate with Augsburg, Magdeburg, and other towns following at a distance. Nehlsen’s comprehensive list, based on 7,074 booklets to date, shows Nuremberg with 1,644 items far outstripping Augsburg (817), followed by Basel (414), Strasbourg (392), and Bern (316), then Zürich, Magdeburg, Leipzig, and Lübeck with between 100 and 150 each.

Probably the greatest problem Nehlsen has faced in compiling ZLF is that of knowing how best to arrange the entries. The poets who composed the songs are seldom named (a few have half-hidden their names in acrostics), so arranging them by authors is impracticable (though around 140 have been identified). Nor can they be arranged chronologically because very many of them are undated and furthermore it is often difficult to determine whether a particular booklet is an original edition or a later reprint. Arranging them by place of printing or by a particular printer is equally impossible because the relevant information is often lacking and the tell-tale peculiarities of the fonts employed, so helpful for identifying printers in the incunable period, are rarely observable in sixteenth and seventeenth-century printing. Arranging them by their title or by the first line of the songs is equally unhelpful because the titles are often formulaic: Ein hüpsches (sometimes with a further adjective such as newes) Lied is found 54 times, Ein schönes newes Lied 56 times, Zwei schöne Lieder 39 times, for example. Similarly, arranging them by the melodies to which the songs were to be sung is unavailing because many songs were sung to the same familiar tune; thus 12 songs in ZLF were sung to the tune of Es ist das Heil uns kommen her, 18 to Wiewohl ich bin ein alter Greis, and 24 to Kommt her zu mir spricht Gottes Sohn. Nor would arranging them by subject-matter help much because many songs were on common subjects (the Virgin Mary, Jesus, etc., or secular figures such as Wilhelm Tell or the Thirty Years War generals like Wallenstein or Tilly. Nehlsen has wisely chosen to arrange the entries simply according to their shelfmarks in the Zentralbibliothek’s Department of Early Printed Books (items 1–360) and Department of Manuscripts (items 361–572, plus five addenda noted on p. 517) and has greatly facilitated access by providing an impressive set of eight indexes: of first lines; tunes; titles; authors; places of printing and printers; provenances; libraries; and persons and subjects.

As with BLF, the whole volume is well planned and the individual entries are clearly laid out. The description of each booklet begins with a lightly modernized title, e.g. no. 47: Ein neues Lied von dem teuren Helden Huldrych Zwingli rather than the original Ein Nüw Lied von dem thüren Helden Huldrychen Zwinglin. A very careful diplomatic transcription of the title page and impressum or colophon (if any) and of the first two lines of each song follows, with line-breaks marked and its structure (number of strophes and number of lines in each strophe) indicated; format; pagination; notes on provenance (if known); notes on the title-page woodcuts; and references to a wide range of secondary literature. Many of the title pages are reproduced in the copious illustrations. If there is anything further one could have wished for, it is that it Nehlsen might have included references to the Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC; www.ustc.ac.uk) where appropriate. A few random examples are ZLF 146, a song by the famous shoemaker-poet Hans Sachs, which is recorded in USTC under 2216735. ZLF 10 by Johann Jakob Irminger = USTC 2174291. Other editions of songs ZLF 294 and 304 are recorded in USTC as 673650 and 610030 respectively, while USTC 708105 is an earlier edition of ZLF 514. ZLF 96 = USTC 644052 is a song by the prolific Swiss poet Benedikt (or Benedict) Gletting who is recorded in ZLF with at least 23 or perhaps even 32 songs, in BLF with 15, but in USTC with 83 song booklets (of which barely more than a dozen are recorded in more than a single surviving copy).