Singing the news in sixteenth-century cologne : the music broadsheets and pamphlets of Nikolaus Schreiber

Abstract

Active in Cologne between 1563 and 1598, the German printer Nikolaus Schreiber was a prolific publisher of Neue Zeitungen ("new reports"), short pamphlets and broadsheets which conveyed news of current events in both prose and ballad formats. Schreiber's five publications of news songs, which previously have received only passing consideration by scholars, are analyzed and contextualized in relation to his larger body of news pamphlets, as well as Cologne's mixed confessional environment during the late sixteenth century.