The Making of the Nuremberg Chronicle by Adrian Wilson

The German title refers to its primary maker, Die Schedelsche Weltchronik (Schedel's World History'). The Nuremberg Chronicle has three titles in three different languages, although none of them appear in the work itself. As an artifact that both reflects and develops biblical interpretations and real-world events, it not only spoke to us about the time of its production but also invited us to reflect on how works of text and image function in our own day. When we examined the copy, we quickly recognized its rich interplay of religious significance and spiritual dimensions.

We were immediately struck by the book's complex interweaving of biblical and European history illustrated by numerous woodcuts, many of which had, in the Queen's copy, been coloured and embellished by one of its early owners. It described Queen's recent acquisition for the Schulich-Woolf Rare Book Collection of one of the few remaining original copies of the late fifteenth-century Nuremberg Chronicle (see exhibits/show/manuscript-and-print-in-the-is/liber-chronicarum-or-the-nurem). Early in the semester, however, a news item in the campus paper caught our eye. IN fall 2018 we were co-teaching an undergraduate course on religion and art in which we regularly took our students into the Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen's University to discuss various objects it houses. We might come to think of the two modes, image and text, in more egalitarian terms, as two sides of the same coin.

We can think of the image as a kind of annotation to the text, but perhaps we might also think of it in the reverse, as we might with the drawings in an ethnographic field notebook, where images are often embellished with textual explanations in and around the drawings.

Because the Nuremberg Chronicle is a text-image hybrid, it calls us to account for the interplay between the visible and the readable.

The Making of the Nuremberg Chronicle by Adrian Wilson