The study examines a significant and extensive corpus of late medieval historical songs and poems from the 14th century to the Reformation at present consigned to the research limbo of an ill-defined area somewhere between German studies, public communication studies, and history and referred to over the last 150 years under the misleading heading 'historical folk songs'. After a detailed reexamination of these texts and the way they relate to specific events in history, evidence is adduced to demonstrate that we are in the presence of a genre in its own right, characterized by purpose-guided aesthetic principles, specific functions, and a high degree of public impact. It is the genre of historisch-politische Ereignisdichtung (literally: historico-political event literature).

This index is the final volume in the second revised and expanded edition of the Killy Literary Encyclopedia, a standard reference work in literary studies in the German-speaking world. This comprehensive index of persons features biographic information, and also cites each instance in which the individual is mentioned in the larger encyclopedia. In this way, it sheds light on interconnections between individuals, as well as on historical and literary interrelationships. The volume also contains a list of errata.