The Nuremberg Chronicle was not a book on devotion, but in the age of Reformation it managed to evoke readers’ personal piety. The Chronicle’s predictions of Apocalypse made them contemplate over the vanity of life, meaning of death, and hope for salvation. The margins of the Chronicle preserve manuscript prayers, pious quotations, as well as the records of the flows of births and deaths in readers’ own families.

The copies of the Nuremberg Chronicle had been sold and resold all over the Western and Eastern Europe and beyond for several centuries. The readers in various regions often highlighted the information on the history of their motherland, both out of general interest and for peculiar purposes (as in case with Henry VIII’s copy).

The Nuremberg Chronicle, a work on history, attracted the readers by its encyclopaedic nature. The readers generally used its text to find information on particular subjects of secular or church history. Some of them were also keen on reconstructing chronological course of events, and even on continuing the Chronicle’s narrative up to their own times.

In the age of Reformation both Catholic and Protestant readers eagerly reacted on the way sacred history was presented in the Nuremberg Chronicle. They censored and supplemented its text, thus continuing raging confessional debates in the margins.

The copies of the Nuremberg Chronicle reflect not only how readers read the text, but also how they kept and used the books. They personalised their volumes, equipped with indexes, and tried their pens in the margins. Some traces on the pages – dirt and stains – also fascinatingly reflect the life of the copies as material objects in early modern household.