The Nuremberg Chronicle I. The Creation and the First Ages of the World

About this book

The Nuremberg Chronicle (Liber Chronicarum) was printed by Anton Koberger in Nuremberg on 12 July 1493 and became one of the most splendid books of the early age of printing. Its 1,809 woodcuts came from the workshop of Michael Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff, where the young Albrecht Dürer was then an apprentice. Schedel tells the history of the world in seven ages — and beside the stories of the Bible he places the ancient gods and heroes, the Trojan War, the Sibyls, the first philosophers and the founding of cities from Babylon and Troy to Venice, Paris and Rome.

About the translation: translated into modern English from the Latin edition of 1493 by BlusaBooks with the help of AI tools, working from images of the pages of a hand-coloured copy. A complete, sentence-by-sentence translation — not a summary; where a word had faded in the print, the sense was restored from the context and from Schedel's own sources.

What is inside

• six parts: the prologue and the seven days of Creation; the First Age (Adam to the Flood); the Second Age (Noah to Abraham, the Tower of Babel, Nineveh, the monstrous races and the world map after Ptolemy); the Third Age — Abraham and the patriarchs (Joseph in Egypt, Semiramis, the ancient gods); the Third Age — Moses to David (the Exodus, the Tabernacle, Troy, Ruth, Samson, Carthage, Venice); the Fourth Age (David and Solomon, the prophets, Rome, Genoa, the Seven Sages and the destruction of Jerusalem)
• the complete text, to be read straight through, with 817 footnotes — every strange name explained on the page where it first appears; Schedel's mistakes are kept and explained
• 91 original woodcuts from the 1493 edition, in the colours of a hand-painted copy: the days of Creation, the Fall, Noah's Ark, family trees and great city panoramas
• six colour illustrations in the manner of late 15th-century manuscript miniatures, one opening each part (created with AI tools)
• a Commentary section at the end: each part in plain words and what history tells us
• foreword

Who it is for

Readers of medieval and biblical history; lovers of old books, woodcuts and early printing; anyone curious about how people in 1493 imagined the history of the world from its very beginning.

About the series

This is the first book of a series of six. It covers the prologue, the seven days of Creation and the first four ages of the world.

A historical source: Schedel writes as a man of the fifteenth century, with the beliefs and prejudices of his time; our explanations are in the notes and the commentary.