Housebooks of Nuremburg

 

So, while exploring an internet rabbithole, I've just found "The Housebooks of Nuremburg or the Twelve Brethren Books". On a project that bears some resemblance to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying, I was searching for a fairly comprehensive list of the types of occupations regular people might have had during the middle ages, and these books came up.

In 1388, the wealthy merchant Konrad Mendel had an old people's home built to provide accommodation and meals for twelve needy old Nuremberg craftsmen and had it endowed with capital for permanent management. From around 1425/26, each ‘Mendel brother’ was portrayed with a full-page portrait in Mendel's Housebook. By the end of the imperial city period, it had grown to a total of 857 illustrated pages with 765 portraits of craftsmen in folio format. 

The website for a project focused on digitising the work can be found at https://online-service.nuernberg.de/viewer/hausbuecher/, and elements of it can be found at wikimedia commons.

I'm not entirely sure what I'll do with this information, but I thought it was cool and figured it would interest a few other people out there as well. 

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