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Finely hand colored double page woodcut from the famous 'Nurnberg Chronicle', the most richly illustrated incunabula. Hartmann Schedel (born February 13, 1440 in Nuremberg; † November 28, 1514 there) was a German doctor, humanist and historian. His most important work is the so-called Schedelsche Weltchronik from 1493. Hartmann Schedel was born in 1440 as the son of the wealthy businessman of the same name in the imperial city of Nuremberg. The Schedel belonged to the so-called honorable families, which formed the second estate (after the Nuremberg patriciate) in the estate structure. His mother Anna Grabner died in 1445. At the age of eleven he was orphaned in 1451. He and his siblings grew up under the tutelage of his uncle Marcus Schedel. Of his two brothers, Georg Schedel became a businessman, while Johannes Schedel entered the Dominican monastery. Hartmann Schedel was enrolled at the University of Leipzig on April 20, 1456 at the age of 16, and in 1457 received his Baccalaureus. He obtained his Magister artium (Magister in the Liberal Arts) in 1459 and attended lectures in law and canon law. In 1459 he began to compile an extensive collection of songs. In 1461 he joined the humanistic circle around Peter Luder and made copies of his teaching texts presented in Leipzig from 1462 on. Hartmann Schedel received the minor orders in 1462. At the end of 1463 he followed Peter Luder to Padua, probably also in consultation with his thirty years older cousin, Hermann Schedel (1410–1485), who was the Augsburg city doctor at the time and who advised Hartmann during his studies. In addition to medicine, Hartmann also studied anatomy and surgery at the University of Padua and received his doctorate in medicine on April 7, 1466. At the same time as medicine, he had also attended lectures in physics and Greek and thus, as one of the first Germans ever, had access to the Greek language. View and description of Erfurt in the world chronicle (1493) In the summer of 1466 he returned to Nuremberg in order to spend a lot of time traveling and collecting and copying books over the next few years. In the years from 1470 to 1477 he worked as a city doctor in Nördlingen, joined the brotherhood of the "Carthusians in the Christgarten" and in 1475 married Anna Heugel († 1485) from Nuremberg. His further professional career led him via Amberg, where he had become a city doctor in 1477, back to Nuremberg in 1482, where he married Magdalena Haller († 1505) in 1487, his second marriage. Six of the twelve children from both marriages died at a young age. Hartmann Schedel was one of the wealthy and respected citizens of Nuremberg. He owned several pieces of land and fiefs and also inherited the house of his cousin Hermann Schedel in Burgstrasse, where the Haller, Scheurl and Albrecht Dürer also lived. He was listed in the register of 92 honorable families in the city and was named in 1482 by the Greater Council, which was composed of representatives of the patriciate as well as merchants, scholars and craftsmen. The Inner Council remained closed to Hartmann Schedel, as his family did not belong to the patriciate (the "advisable" families); His second wife was descended from the Ebner patrician family on his mother's side, but her father did not belong to the Haller patrician family, but to the Haller family, known as Münzmeister, who had moved from Bamberg and were only briefly represented in the Inner Council from 1418 to 1423. Hartmann Schedel ran a prosperous medical practice until his death. His notes, including the prescriptions he received, show how dutifully he performed his medical duties. With his professional colleagues, he formed an influential, medically and humanistically ambitious group of scholars. His current reputation was justified by his main literary work, the "World Chronicle". Schedel's library, which contained valuable manuscripts and incunabula, passed into the possession of Johann Jakob Fugger in 1552 and in 1571 fell to Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria. (Wikipedia)