The Schembart book purchased by Kerry Stokes in 2006 represents a graphic and beautifully illustrated record of the annual pre-Lenten carnival parade, called the Schembart, that took place in the city of Nuremberg on Shrove Tuesday between 1449 and 1539. Shrovetide festivities were common throughout European cities in the late Middle Ages, as a time for physical pleasure, enjoyment, and excess before the rigours and fasting of Lent, which began on Ash Wednesday, the first of forty fasting days before Easter. The pre-Lenten Shrovee tide festivities in southwest Germany were called Fastnacht or Fasching and were strongly linked to the regional Swabian and Alemannic traditions of mumming, costumes and masks. The city of Nuremberg, located in the cultural region of Franconia, shared in these mumming traditions, and mounted one of most extravagant and well-known of such festivals, held sixty-three times between 1349 and 1524.

It was cancelled in some years because of plague and war, and was also suspended in the year the religious Reformation was introduced in the city in 1525; thereafter it was only held one more time in 1539 before being permanently banned. The extravagance and civic support of Nuremberg's Schembart had much to do with its strong link to the city's social and political history in this period, and its ongoing civic memory was a result of the numerous recordings of these events by different Nuremberg families in their Schembart books.