Histories (The Book)
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The Golden Legend

Nuremberg Chronicle

Foxe's Book of Martyrs



The Great Cloud of Witnesses: Histories of the Faithful

"Write this for a memorial in a book" (Exodus 17:14)

In the books of Jacobus de Voragine, Hartmann Schedel, and John Foxe, we see the potential of the book to fashion the long story of the church, locating its origins in the distant past and tracing a continuous line of the faithful through to the present. These stories can function in ways both conservative and radical; Schedel's Nuremberg Chronicle monumentalizes the stories and places of western civilization, most notably in the vast, full-opening woodcut of the city of Nuremberg. Foxe's martyrology, on the other hand, locates radical action rather than the established church within the earliest church history, thus lending historical authority to reformers such as Wycliffe and Hus.