By Edmund Kern
Associate professor of history
Lawrence Today magazine, Spring 2002
One of the real gems in Lawrence University's rare book collection is its lone incunabulum (book published before 1501), Hartmann Schedel's Liber Cronicarum from 1493. Best known under the title The Nuremberg Chronicle, after its place of publication, it is a history of the world told from a Christian perspective.
It begins, understandably enough, with the creation of the world and then traces human history through seven ages. Accounts of the first five consist mostly of biblical history, while the sixth age corresponds to the emergence and development of Christendom. The history of the sixth age is the longest section of the work by far, and the publishers kindly included six or seven blank pages so the owner could conclude the work before the coming of the seventh age -- apocalypse and the end of time! Following the blank pages, the narrative concludes with the story of the anti-christ and the second coming. The work therefore confidently asserts how the world began and how it would come to an end. Including so few pages to conclude the sixth age betrays some of the millennial thinking quite common in the years preceding 1500.
The book is lavishly illustrated with portraits of important people and depictions of significant events (including the creation and destruction of the world), and it includes numerous cityscapes from around Europe. Though quite a few pictures are simply generic depictions found again and again throughout, most were specially commissioned for the volume.
The Nuremberg Chronicle has proven especially useful in the classroom because of its extensive illustration. I have used it in an advanced historiography seminar to illustrate how writers during different periods construct histories particular to their own perspectives and circumstances, and I've used it in a course called Religion, Magic, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe because it provides brief accounts and illustrations of two events that we study at some length. It tells the story of the 11th-century Sorceress of Berkeley, whose corpse is stolen from an English monastery by the devil himself, and it gives an account of the late 15th-century Drummer of Niklashausen, who preached rebellion against religious and secular authorities in Germany, because he believed that the Blessed Virgin Mary told him to do so.
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