The place of publication is the place where a publication was published. The place of publication, as well as the year of publication, as well as appearance, are cited in the imprint of the publication. In the case of printing presses, one also speaks of the printing location, which is usually the publisher’s seat, even if the work was actually printed elsewhere. The listed place of publication is however not always reliable. Above all, the publications of the Early Modern Period – the transition from the Late Middle Ages to the Renaissance – are sometimes characterized by false information. Here, false city data – especially with delicate writings – should obscure the real origin. Certain locations such as Cologne and the fictitious cities of Utopia, Freistadt or unlikely place names clearly pointed out that the content of the book was or should be at least so .
Consequently, the details of place and year of publication in the imprints of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and even eighteenth centuries are to be taken with caution, and can only give clues, but in part entirely fictitious. The content must always be viewed in the context of time. For example, there was a very strict censorship in Cologne, which is why works with critical or explosive content never made their way to the market of the early modern period, but were strictly forbidden.
If, in a work of this period, Cologne is the place of publication, the work is either non-critical and critical, or plays with ebendieser censorship. There is, after all, a certain comic that many explosive writings are supposed to have appeared in Cologne, although no critical writings came to the market at this time, although the location is obviously not correct.
A further hurdle in assessing the correct place of publication in the early modern period is the printout in the Latin language. On the one hand, it is necessary to examine exactly which city is actually meant and, in addition, that the data are not confused almost identical names.
