The
Golden Legend
Nuremberg
Chronicle
Foxe's
Book of Martyrs
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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.
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