Niklaus Schradin

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Niklaus Schradin (* in Allensbach on Lake Constance; † between February 1506 and 1518 in Lucerne ) was a Swiss chronicler and scribe in the service of the St. Gallen Abbey and the city of Lucerne.

Life

Niklaus Schradin is recorded for the first time in September 1491 as a clerk in the office of the Abbot of St. Gallen, in whose service he was until April 1500. In 1499 he is also proven as a notary. In the spring of 1500 he moved to the office of the city of Lucerne, where he worked from June 1, 1500 to February 14, 1506 as the third clerk (named substitute since 1503) under the city clerk. On April 14, 1505, Schradin acquired Lucerne citizenship . After the death of the previous signatory, he expressed interest in his position in February 1506, but later decided not to apply. Then his tracks are lost. However, he must have died before 1518, as the year book of the Franciscan monastery in Lucerne published that year reports a year donated by his wife Anna Giesin, called Wagnerin, for the deceased. The claim made in earlier research without evidence that Schradin was still the host of the Lucerne Gasthaus zum Bären in 1531 is wrong.

Rhyming chronicle about the Swabian War

Schradin is the author of a rhyming chronicle about the Swabian War (1499), printed in Sursee on September 1, 1500 and provided with 42 woodcuts , which is dedicated to the authorities of the ten Swiss Confederation . It is based in part on the prose chronicle of the Swabian War by St. Gallen's Kaspar Frey , who was his colleague in the abbot's office until Schradin's move to Lucerne in the spring of 1500.

The rhyme chronicle is considered to be the first work in Swiss history to be printed in Switzerland and is a revealing testimony to the Swiss awareness of history around 1500. Because of its aggressive pro-federal orientation, the text was particularly popular with the Upper Rhine-Swabian humanists (such as Jakob Wimpfeling ) Contradiction.

Older researchers assume that the printing date is January 14th 1500, according to the information on printing in the chronicle's colophon ( interest day before sant Anthengen day in the XV C Iar = Tuesday before the feast of St. Anthony [the hermit] [= January 17] in 1500), but Schradin, who describes himself in his chronicle as schriber zu Lutzern , was still in the service of St. Gallen at that time. The information therefore probably refers to the feast day of the holy martyr Antoninus (also Antonius) of Apamea, celebrated within the Diocese of Constance, to which St. Gallen as well as Lucerne and Sursee belonged, which falls on September 2nd or 3rd. This results in the new, now consistent date of September 1, 1500.

The printing location Sursee is being questioned in research. The printing types used are similar to those from the workshop of the Basel printer Michael Furter, whose quality standard, however, the print does not meet. On the contrary, it is very poor, with numerous typographical errors, incorrectly placed or missing letters; Individual chapter headings are set twice, in one case the printer even adopted a printing instruction from the template manuscript for positioning a woodcut in the text of a heading. The rich set of 42 woodcuts could come from the unknown woodcut master with the monogram "DS", who worked in Basel as the successor to Albrecht Dürer.

After its publication, the chronicle was received extensively by the Lucerne chronicler Petermann Etterlin , who used it as a template for the depiction of the Swabian War in his Kronica from the laudable Eydtgnoschaft (1507); The same can be observed for Diebold Schilling's Lucerne Chronicle (1513), and the Zurich chronicler Johannes Stumpf also knew and used the chronicle. Today 12 copies are known worldwide, 6 of them in public libraries in Switzerland.

Print, digitized, facsimile and text reproduction

  • Niklaus Schradin: Cronigk diß kiergs against the very translucent hern Romschen king as ertzhertzuged zu Osterich and the Schwebyschen pundt, who has accepted the heylig Romisch rich, one part and stett and lender common confederacy of the other , Sursee September 1st, 1500; ( Digital copy) of the copy from the Herzog August Library Wolfenbüttel (call number: inkunabeln / 37 - 4-poet-1).
  • Schradin, town clerk of Lucerne: Swiss Chronicle , Sursee 1500 [facsimile reprint based on the copy in the Herzog August Library Wolfenbüttel, with an introduction by Ernst Weil], Munich 1927.
  • The Swabian War of 1499, sung about in German rhymes by Nicolaus Schradin zu Lucern 1500 , in: Der Geschichtsfreund 4 (1847), pp. 3-66.

literature

  • Andre Gutmann: The Swabian War Chronicle of Kaspar Frey and its position in the federal historiography of the 16th century (publications of the commission for historical regional studies in Baden-Württemberg, series B: research, vol. 176, part 1 and 2), Stuttgart 2010. ISBN 978-3-17-020982-4 , therein pp. 44-58, 566-581, 665f.
  • Regula Schmid: Schradin, Niklaus . In: Encyclopedia of the Medieval Chronicle, ed. by Graeme Dunphy u. a., Vol. 2, Leiden 2010, ISBN 978-90-04-18464-0 , Sp. 1343f.
  • Konrad Wanner: writers, chroniclers and early humanists in the Lucerne city chancellery in the 15th century . In: Jahrbuch der Historischen Gesellschaft Luzern 18 (2000), pp. 2–44, therein pp. 41f.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Romy Günthart: German-language literature in early Basel book printing (approx. 1470-1510) ; Waxmann Verlag, Münster 2007, ( Studies and Texts on the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times , 11), ISBN 978-3-8309-1712-0 , p. 52, note 248.
  2. ↑ Complete catalog of incandescent prints M 40897.
personal data
SURNAME Schradin, Niklaus
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schradin, Nicholas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss chronicler and writer
DATE OF BIRTH 15th century
PLACE OF BIRTH Allensbach
DATE OF DEATH between February 1506 and 1518
Place of death Lucerne