Saint Matthew's executioner - a possible case of intertextuality from the Nuremberg Chronicle

Every now and then I spend some time in the reading room of the library of University of Southern Denmark, leafing through some of the incunabulas in its collection and photographing details, sometimes with a specific purpose, other times just to explore the books and get lost in the beautiful woodcuts. One of the books to which I often return is the university library's copy of The Nuremberg Chronicle, a name commonly applied to the world history by Hartman Schedel which was printed in Nürnberg in 1493 and illustrated with woodcuts by Michael Wolgemut. The work is extant in both a Latin and a German edition, and the university library has copy of the Latin one. This incunabula came to the university library from the school of Herlufsholm in Næstved in Sjælland, a school that was established in 1565 and most of whose library was sold to the university in 1968. It is a work I will return to many times, and most likely in several future blogpost.

In the present blogpost, however, I want to point to a small detail, whose significance is probably not notable but which nonetheless caught my attention because it touched on something that I have put a lot of thought into during my PhD. The detail comes from the account of the martyrdom of Matthew the evangelist, an account drawn from the apocryphal legend of Matthew's missionary activities in Ethiopia.  

The martyrdom of Matthew in The Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493

Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek RARA M 38

The detail in question comes from the description of how the Ethiopian king sent his executioner (or possibly executioners depending on whether the plural -ae is spelled -e as is the case in many medieval manuscripts). It says in the text "rege spiculatore misso", the king sent his executioners. What interests me about this phrasing is that it is a very common and well-established phrase from the martyrdom of John the Baptist as it is described in Mark 6:27: sed misso speculatore praecepit afferri caput ejus in disco. This is translated in the Douay-Rheims Bible as "But sending an executioner, he commanded that his head should be brought in a dish". The phrase "misso spiculatore", and indeed the crucial word "speculatore", cannot be found anywhere else in the Bible and can therefore very easily evoke the story of John the Baptist. Furthermore, it is even likely, and also to be expected, that anyone reading this phrase and even this word would be reminded of the death of John the Baptist. I have elsewhere - in a previous blogpost and in a recently published article - written about how this phrase was used to typologically connect John the Baptist and Saint Edmund Martyr of East Anglia.   

As for the occurrence of "misso spiculatore" in The Nuremberg Chronicle, I don't know how to interpret it. The inevitable question is of course whether this phrase is meant to establish a connection between Matthew and John the Baptist in the mind of the reader, as I have argued was the case in the cult of Saint Edmund. In order to approach an answer to this question, a lot of other details need to be established and so far I have not got around to do so. I should very much like to know whether the phrase "misso spiculatore" can be found in the apocryphal story of Saint Matthew, whether it appears in later medieval versions such as the readings for the liturgical office or in Legenda Aurea, or whether it is a phrase first used in the context of Saint Matthew by Hartman Schedel. If it is the latter, I don't know how that should be understood, whether Schedel sought to link John the Baptist and Matthew, or whether - and this is currently my favoured interpretation - it was simply a phrase that, due to its long history and its specificity, came to Schedel's mind very easily as he was writing his chronicle. 

This is a set of questions to which I yet have no answers beyond the speculations mentioned in this blogpost, but I would like to hear the opinions of my readers as I'm fascinated by the problem.