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Hartmann Schedel (1440-1514), a native
of Nuremberg, first studied in Leipzig from 1456 to 1462,
obtaining the degree of Master of Arts (Magister Artium).
Schedel then followed his teacher, Peter Luder (c. 1410-1472)
to Padua, Italy to continue his humanistic studies and
also to study medicine. While there, he was one of the
first Germans to study Ancient Greek under Professor Demetrios
Chalkondydes (1424-1511). After receiving his doctorate
in medicine in 1466, Schedel returned to Nuremberg. Medicine,
however, would always play second fiddle to Schedel's
great passion in life—books. In fact, most of his library
still survives, consisting of 370 manuscripts (many of
them copied out by himself) and 670 printed books. Also
extant is Schedel's 1498 inventory of his library, which
lists in the following thematic order works of grammar,
logic, rhetoric, astronomy, astrology, mathematics, philosophy,
a variety of books relating to Schedel's studies in the
humanities, medicine, surgery, and the history of science,
and, lastly, religion and theology. Indeed, it was an
intense, life-long communion with these books that can
help to explain how Schedel composed the text for the
Nuremberg Chronicle.
"Among the most learned and outstanding
men who have described the true nature and history of
the creation of the world and the first birth of man,
a twofold opinion has emerged. We wish
to write briefly of these first days and the beginnings,
as much as befits things that lie so far in the past.
Some have put forward the opinion that the world is
without beginning and indestructible, and that the human
race has existed for eternity. And that there was no
beginning and no origin. Others maintain that the world
was created and is destructible. And they say that mankind
had its beginnings in a birth."
These first sentences of the Chronicle provide
a window into Schedel's compositional technique. The
non-italicized words are those of the first-century
BC Greek writer Diodorus Siculus, whose work was translated
into Latin by the Florentine humanist Poggio in 1481.
The italicized text is Schedel's own words.
From one perspective, we might conclude that Schedel
is at best a copyist (the modern term plagiarist does
not apply to a fifteenth-century writer) who occasionally
interweaves additional material into the text for clarification
(e.g., the phrase of the creation of the world and
the first birth of man, the word opinion)
or personal commentary (we wish to write briefly...).
But from another perspective it is these very additions
to his source material, additions that have been estimated
to make up less than 10% of the Chronicle's
text, which can often reveal something about Schedel's
own mindset as well as that of the culture which produced
him. For example, Schedel apparently inserted the phrase
of the creation of the world and the first birth
of man into the first sentence not only to specify
what the 'most learned and outstanding men' are talking
about, but also to balance the phrases 'that the world
was created' and 'mankind had its beginnings in a birth'
in the last two sentences of the citation. But an even
more important reason for its inclusion, perhaps, was
that, as a product of Judeo-Christian culture, the creation
of the world and the birth of man, given their important
theological ramifications, were such pivotal events
in Schedel's world view that they were unworthy to be
simply understood from the context. This was not the
case for Diodorus or other ancient Greeks, to whom these
questions were simply scientific/philosophical ones
open to investigation and debate.
Even the sentence that reads We wish to write briefly
of these first days and the beginnings, as much as befits
things that lie so far in the past, though innocuous
enough on the surface, carries a Thucydidean echo in
its important historiographical claim that the treatment
of ancient history must, of necessity, be of a somewhat
different nature than that concerning the recent past
or contemporary events.1 This is not to suggest that
Schedel is to be equated with Thucydides for his historical
insight-far from it!-or that his views on ancient history
were applied equally to biblical and non-biblical sources.
For Schedel, a deeply religious man, the Bible's account
was not to be questioned, since it was vouchsafed by
God. Ancient Greek and Roman history, however, was,
in Schedel's opinion, recorded by human (and therefore
fallible) individuals, often at a much later date than
the historical events themselves.
1See
especially Thucydides, 1.3, "For though the events of
remote antiquity, and even those that more immediately
precede the war, could not from lapse of time be clearly
ascertained, yet the evidences which an inquiry carried
as far back as was practicable lead me to trust, all
point to the conclusion…" (Richard Crawley translation).
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