First Advisor

Carrie Collenberg-González

Date of Award

Spring 6-14-2025

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in World Languages & Literatures: German and University Honors

Department

World Languages and Literatures

Language

English

Subjects

Historiography, Late Medieval, Humanism, World Chronicle, Ethnography

DOI

10.15760/honors.1710

Abstract

The Nuremberg Chronicle (1493) is a late medieval humanist world chronicle compiled in its original Latin by Hartmann Schedel and translated into vernacular German by Georg Alt in the same year. It features exquisite woodcut illustrations from the studio of Michael Wohlgemut which bolstered the text's contemporaneous popularity among scholarly and lay audiences along with the unauthorized cheaper editions released by Johann Schönesperger within the decade. This project investigates depictions of collective identity as presented in the Geographic Addendum, a section of the endmatter discussing the peoples and lands of Europe which Schedel compiled from the writings of humanist scholar Enea Silvio Piccolomini, later known as Pope Pius II. This thesis offers the first faithful English translation from the German edition of this section of the text, emphasizing directness of translation and the retention of the Germanophone naming conventions, followed by assessment of its contents through ethnographic analysis and comparison to its source text. This research demonstrates the twofold process by which the Nuremberg team adapted Piccolomini's politically-motivated geographic writings for common German audiences: firstly, Schedel strategically excerpted and augmented Piccolomini's texts to highlight the ethnocultural identities of the described collectives from an ethnocentric German perspective lauding military might and Christianity; secondly, Alt reshaped Schedel's text to be accessible to broader German audiences, while using Germanophone names for each collective. These transformations ultimately superimpose Piccolomini's imperialist and Roman Catholic values into a German ethnocentric worldview, thus shaping how the German laity interpreted their continental contexts.

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In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/43816

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