The research project aims to make this forgotten song art in Middle Low German accessible again. A collection of the scattered surviving pieces is planned, their new edition with transcription and translation as well as detailed linguistic, literary and music-historical commentary and the recording of all songs with melodies by a professional ensemble. Such a cataloguing of historical song collections is only possible within the framework of interdisciplinary research. For this reason, the project brings together the expertise of Franz-Josef Holznagel (German medieval studies and late medieval song research), Andreas Bieberstedt (Low German philology) and Hartmut Möller (musicology).

The aim is a combined digital and conventional printed presentation (study edition). The latter is based on the conventions of the ‘Middle Low German Library’.

The corpus currently comprises 33 texts, which are attested several times in widely differing variants, and 17 melodies. The period of transmission spans almost 250 years, with the earliest surviving text dating from the middle of the 14th century and the latest surviving text from 1588. The majority of the texts thus fall into the middle (‘classical’) and late phase of Middle Low German. The main focus of the tradition lies in the 2nd half of the 15th century and the 16th century, with a total of 17 song texts dating from the 2nd half of the 16th century.