The Illuminated World Chronicle: Tales from the Late Medieval City, by Nina Rowe

Abstract

Chronicles charting world history are familiar to historians of medieval and early renaissance Europe. Of these perhaps the best known is the Liber Chronicarum (also known as the Nuremberg Chronicle or Die Schedelsche Weltchronik): a richly decorated World Chronicle produced in 1490s Nuremberg by Hartman Schedel. Less well-known are the manuscript world histories—Weltchroniken—of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and these are the focus of Nina Rowe’s delightful book. Blending biblical stories, classical myth and popular histories, the Weltchroniken were often richly decorated and it is these images which form the focus of Rowe’s analysis. As Rowe notes in her introduction, the majority of medieval sources available for art historians are devotional, but the Weltchroniken offer an insight into secular concerns. While the Weltchroniken do use scriptural stories (and Rowe argues that one fifteenth-century reader classified her Weltchronik as a bible), their focus is rather more temporal, casting...