Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, for Sebald Schreyer and Sebastian Kammermeister, 12 July 1493
The Nuremberg Chronicle is the most extensively illustrated book of the fifteenth century. Gifted to the University of Cambridge in 1574 by Matthew Parker (1504-1575), Archbishop of Canterbury, this copy is lavishly and subtly coloured, but is anomalous in many ways. The woodcut of God the Father was printed with blank armorial shields, to be filled in with a patron’s arms, yet in the Cambridge copy these are empty, and despite the high-quality hand colouring throughout the book, the initials have been left starkly blank. Is this a half-finished presentation copy without a patron, evidence of the division of labour between decoration and illumination and rubrication in the printing house, or a copy sold uncoloured, then later personalized by an early owner?
Inc.0.A.7.2[888], fols. XII verso – XIII recto
The celebrated Nuremberg Chronicle is not a rare book, but it is an extraordinarily interesting one. More than 1,200 copies still survive, and there are no fewer than four in Cambridge University Library. It is a history of the whole world, in Latin, from the Creation to the Last Judgment (with a few blank pages so that owners could fill in any events between the book’s publication and the end of the world, for total comprehensiveness). The author was the Nuremberg physician and book collector Hartmann Schedel. The book was printed by Anton Koberger (died 1513), a goldsmith who had set up a flourishing printing shop in Nuremberg in 1470. The Chronicle includes the astonishing total of over 1,800 vivid woodcuts, some of great complexity, printed from approximately 645 different blocks designed and cut for the purpose by the Nuremberg artists, Michael Wolgemut (about 1434/36–1519) and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff (about 1450–1494). In this copy they are coloured by hand. The young Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) had been an apprentice in Wolgemut’s workshop and was the godson of Koberger, and it is an old question whether he too was in some way involved in this mammoth artistic and patriotic enterprise.
This glorious copy was given in 1574 to the University Library by Matthew Parker (1504–1575), Master of Corpus Christi College 1544–1553, Vice-Chancellor in 1545 and 1548, and Archbishop of Canterbury from 1559 to 1575. Parker assembled a vast private library of books and medieval manuscripts, some of extreme age and value, which in 1574 he entrusted into the care of his former college in Cambridge, where they remain in what is still known as the Parker Library. He especially sought chronicles and texts touching on the origins and antiquity of the English church. Parker was also, very unusually for his time, interested in the history of printing. In a unique Caxton (now Parker Library EP H.6) he jotted down different opinions on the date of its invention, including ‘Cronica magna testatur inventam fuisse Anno Domini 1440.’ That Chronica magna, ‘Great chronicle’, is this copy. The reference to printing having been invented in 1440 occurs on folio 252 verso, where it is marked by Parker with one of his distinctive symbols of three dots and a flourish.
Essay by Dr Christopher de Hamel
