Nuremberg Chronicle

   A history of the world from the Cre-ation to the end of the 15th centry, compiled by Hartmann Schedel, a physician and collector of books. It was published in both a Latin edi-tion, Liber chronicarum, and a German edition, Das Buch der Chroniken und Geschichten, both of which appeared in 1493. The books, printed in handsome folio format, have more than 1,800 illus-trations printed from 645 woodcuts (many woodcuts were reused several times). These illustrations are more important than the histor-ical text, which is a conventional compilation of events from the Cre-ation to the author's time. Schedel was a member of the Nuremberg humanist circle but produced what was essentially a traditional me-dieval chronicle unaffected by the more tightly organized structure of contemporary Italian humanistic histories by Leonardo Bruni, Nic-coló Machiavelli, and Francesco Guicciardini