The Nuremberg humanist Hartman Schedel compiled the Liber chronicarum or Nuremberg Chronicle on the eve of the discovery of Americas. Schedel famously possessed a wide library of ancient texts that provided sources for the work, but is rarely considered as a geographer: the maps in the volume are more striking for their absence of geographic accuracy and indeed the absence of the New World. Yet the prominent inclusion of both "chorographic" images of cities, as well as geographic images in the volume, if of derivative nature, suggests that Schedel belonged to a circle of German humanists who, returning from their studies in Italy, sought to remap central European cities, located at the margins of the Roman world. By resituating their location at the center of the final epoch of worldly empire, they created a new 'world map' for Maximilian I.
Daniel Brownstein is Senior Lecturer at the California College of the Arts, Oakland, CA. He wrote his dissertation at the University of California (Berkeley) on "Cultures of Anatomy in Renaissance Italy", he is author of several articles on the history of cartography – e.g. "Geography and Cartography, " in Jonathan Dewald, ed., Europe, 1450 to 1789: An Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World (2004).