The Book of Chronicles
The complete and annotated Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493. Excerpt from the introduction by Stephan Füssel
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Schedel's approach to his books also indicates how intensively he explored their content, in a life spent working with these texts. In one of his books (Clm 224) Schedel wrote the words pertaining to the miracle of the loaves and fishes: Colligite fragmenta, ne pereant ("Gather the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost"; St John 6:12) This biblical quotation can be applied not only to his own collection of manuscripts, prints and printed books, but also to his treatment of other source materials. Hartmann Schedel drew upon a great number of different types of sources - from other manuscripts and hand-written chronicles, from pamphlets, from the specialist medical literature familiar to him as physician, from contemporary humanist works of the Italian and German Renaissance, from Boccaccio and Petrarch, from the many geographical and cosmographical writings by Ptolemy, Strabo and Pomponius Mela in his own collection, from Stephan Fridolin's Schatzbehalter published by Anton Koberger in Nuremberg in 1491, from the Peregrinatio in terram sanctam (Mainz 1486), by Bernhard von Breydenbach, canon of Mainz, with illustrations by Erhard Reuwich, the Fasciculus temporum by Werner Rolevinck published in Utrecht in 1480 and, in particular, both for text citations and woodcuts of city views, from Jacobus Phillipus Foresti da Bergamo's Supplementum chronicarum published in Venice in 1492. This last book was a particularly valuable source, as already acknowledged in 1494 by Johannes Trithemius, the learned Abbot of Sponheim, in his work De scriptoribus ecclesiasticis (Basle 1494, p. 401) in which he wrote: Comportavit et scribsit [...] ex Iacobo Pergomensi et aliis historiographis ..., describing the compilation as an opus grande et insigne, a great and peerless work. For Schedel, of course, the text of the Vulgate and the writings of the Greek historiographer Diodorus Siculus, translated into Latin by the Florentine humanist Poggio and cited by Schedel from the edition printed in Venice in 1481, were enormously important. In compiling the history of the Popes, he referred to the Liber de Vita Christi et pontificum by the librarian Bartolomeo Platina (1421-1481) as an outstanding source.
For the later Middle Ages, he looked to the writings of the papal secretary Flavio Biondo (1388-1463), whose famous Decades historiarum ab inclinatione Romani imperii was published in 1483, and in particular to the most important propagator of Italian humanist thinking in Germany, Enea Silvio Piccolomini (1405-1464; from 1458 Pope Pius II), from whose Europa Schedel drew copiously in the Addenda (in the revised version by Hieronymus Münzer). He also consulted Piccolomini's Asia (Venice 1477) and made his own hand-written copy of his Historia Bohemica (now in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, Clm 476), as well as of the Historia rerum ubique gestarum in Europa sub Friderico tertio imperatore (1457; now also in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, Clm 386).
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]
Schedel's approach to his books also indicates how intensively he explored their content, in a life spent working with these texts. In one of his books (Clm 224) Schedel wrote the words pertaining to the miracle of the loaves and fishes: Colligite fragmenta, ne pereant ("Gather the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost"; St John 6:12) This biblical quotation can be applied not only to his own collection of manuscripts, prints and printed books, but also to his treatment of other source materials. Hartmann Schedel drew upon a great number of different types of sources - from other manuscripts and hand-written chronicles, from pamphlets, from the specialist medical literature familiar to him as physician, from contemporary humanist works of the Italian and German Renaissance, from Boccaccio and Petrarch, from the many geographical and cosmographical writings by Ptolemy, Strabo and Pomponius Mela in his own collection, from Stephan Fridolin's Schatzbehalter published by Anton Koberger in Nuremberg in 1491, from the Peregrinatio in terram sanctam (Mainz 1486), by Bernhard von Breydenbach, canon of Mainz, with illustrations by Erhard Reuwich, the Fasciculus temporum by Werner Rolevinck published in Utrecht in 1480 and, in particular, both for text citations and woodcuts of city views, from Jacobus Phillipus Foresti da Bergamo's Supplementum chronicarum published in Venice in 1492. This last book was a particularly valuable source, as already acknowledged in 1494 by Johannes Trithemius, the learned Abbot of Sponheim, in his work De scriptoribus ecclesiasticis (Basle 1494, p. 401) in which he wrote: Comportavit et scribsit [...] ex Iacobo Pergomensi et aliis historiographis ..., describing the compilation as an opus grande et insigne, a great and peerless work. For Schedel, of course, the text of the Vulgate and the writings of the Greek historiographer Diodorus Siculus, translated into Latin by the Florentine humanist Poggio and cited by Schedel from the edition printed in Venice in 1481, were enormously important. In compiling the history of the Popes, he referred to the Liber de Vita Christi et pontificum by the librarian Bartolomeo Platina (1421-1481) as an outstanding source.
For the later Middle Ages, he looked to the writings of the papal secretary Flavio Biondo (1388-1463), whose famous Decades historiarum ab inclinatione Romani imperii was published in 1483, and in particular to the most important propagator of Italian humanist thinking in Germany, Enea Silvio Piccolomini (1405-1464; from 1458 Pope Pius II), from whose Europa Schedel drew copiously in the Addenda (in the revised version by Hieronymus Münzer). He also consulted Piccolomini's Asia (Venice 1477) and made his own hand-written copy of his Historia Bohemica (now in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, Clm 476), as well as of the Historia rerum ubique gestarum in Europa sub Friderico tertio imperatore (1457; now also in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, Clm 386).
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]
Ex-libris coat of arms of the Schreyer and Kammermeister families, on the inside front cover of the German layout of the Chronicle. Nuremberg, Stadtbibliothek