The Latin text of the Peregrinatio was composed in the year of the edict, and the German version was published six months after the edict’s reiteration.16 Moreover, the Gart der Gesundheit, Breydenbach’s herbal, came to press six days after the edict, from Schöffer’s press, which had just been used to issue a different archiepiscopal order and would continue to be favored by the archdiocese.17 Considering Breydenbach’s particular standing as a holder of high clerical office who was thoughtfully active in the printing industry, scholars have considered that he himself may have suggested the edict, ghostwritten it, or otherwise molded its content.18 With fluid energy, he engages Henneberg’s arguments in the dedication to the Peregrinatio, casting his project to make a book as a project to take advantage of the benefits of printing while avoiding its hazards. The edict, issued by the archbishop, and the Peregrinatio, orchestrated by a member of his circle, should be considered in tandem—a stick to impede the circulation of problem books followed by a positive model of how books should be produced.
Woven throughout the dedication are the expected statements of the author’s inadequacy, especially in the face of the dedicatee’s extravagantly praised merit. Breydenbach is the widow of Mark 12:41–44 and Luke 21:1–4 who makes the greatest offering because she offers all she has to give, even if it is but a paltry contribution in absolute terms (2v, ll. 23–24). Even within that formula he achieves a moment of self-congratulation in acknowledging that the countergift of the dedication is incommensurate with the goodwill, great love, graciousness, and favor the archbishop has always shown him, as everybody knows (3r, ll. 31–39). Breydenbach goes beyond these common expressions of modesty, however, to invoke the editing and correcting work of Henneberg and his representatives:
If this work also be lightly valued at first glance and, consequently, does not come to be very much edited [gestraffet] or corrected, as nothing important hangs on it, still I do not want to let it come out without your princely grace’s knowledge and consideration of it beforehand, not only to demonstrate reverence to your princely grace …, but also because I want to add advantage to this little book and work…. If this work were seen to come, checked and examined, from your gracious princely hand, it would undoubtedly gain more credence, luster, and worth. Above all for the reason that … nothing ever came under the rasp and test of your princely grace (which is quite sharp and takes off all the rust) that did not emerge most excellently straight, cleansed, and clarified. (2v, l. 43, through 3r, l. 14)
He invites the archbishop’s scrutiny, setting himself up as a model of proper submission to central oversight, with measures of sycophancy and market savvy as well. He does not just humbly petition for his patron’s approval; he explicitly submits to his or other scholars’ corrections. This dedication appears first in the Latin edition (2v, ll. 15–25), where there is no issue with translation and where, therefore, it serves as a voluntary social performance that enacts the paradigm of the edict without being compelled by its terms.
At the head of this dedication text stands the initial with Henneberg’s arms, the visual suggestion that the book does indeed come examined and tested from His Grace’s hand (figure 4). Breydenbach’s verbal supplication beneath an image of the archbishop repeats the structure of the metalcut in the 1480 Agenda, where a disabled indigent makes a meager offering to an enthroned Saint Martin, a bishop and the dedicatee of Mainz Cathedral (figure 9). The arms of the archbishop are strung above the saint, and the arms of Breydenbach hang below him at the level of the beggar. The layering of Breydenbach and the see of Mainz over the beggar and patron saint encourages the image to be read as an adaptation of the typical dedication miniature in a manuscript, where the author, on bended knee, presents a copy of his book to his enthroned patron. Here Breydenbach in all humility, a supplicant aided by the charity of Saint Martin, offers up his work to a patron who blesses him in return ex cathedra.
Breydenbach asserts that the Peregrinatio is intended for the edict’s ideal audience of clerics and educated elites, particularly preachers.19 The geographical description of the Holy Land is meant to elucidate the Map of the Holy Land with View of Jerusalem, so that it may serve “all who read or preach the Holy Scripture, which I especially want to encourage with this” (57r, 30–32). They will absorb the Peregrinatio’s information and then do the real work orally, disseminating the book’s message and arousing enthusiasm for it through sermons or reading aloud. In other places the author hopes this oral appeal will publicize the threat of Islam: if reading this book or hearing it read convinces noble men to resist the Turkish menace, then this book will be useful, he writes (167r, ll. 19–21). In another section, the Peregrinatio incorporates the work of a scholar found to be too soft on Islam and, therefore, potentially misleading for the general public. To mitigate that, the table of contents in the German edition points out a passage that is to be read “because of the common folk and uneducated people” in order to clarify the Islam section, and that passage is set off in the text with its own subheading (5r, ll. 7–10; 100r–103r). In the Latin edition, the same passage finds no special mention or typographical distinction, a difference that suggests how the production team attempts to guide the audience of the translation and address the concerns of the edict (4r; 86r–88r).
In reality, the Peregrinatio seems to have spread out of the hands of the elites through vernacular translations and new editions. At least the first of these editions was implicitly authorized by Reuwich, if not Breydenbach, when he provided the new printer in Lyons with the blocks. (Selling or renting blocks to another publisher was a common practice that allowed the original printer to make some money off others’ editions, since the new publisher could pirate the work with impunity with or without the initial printer’s cooperation.) Though early provenance information is rare, we know of at least one German copy that was read under different circumstances by members of “the female sex.” The Dominican nuns in Offenhausen, about thirty miles west of Ulm, coveted their German edition enough to try and deter errant borrowers with an inscription: “The book belongs to the women of Gnadenzell. Anyone to whom they lend it should return it as required and right away.”20 These nuns may very well have received their copy from Felix Fabri himself, who wrote a history of their house to contrast conditions before and after its reform in 1480.21
Breydenbach’s decision to pitch his work to elite masculine readers and the steps he takes to elevate his address should not be taken for granted. Female audiences, particularly those confined to cloisters, clamored for their own experience of the Holy Land, and their spiritual advisors obliged with texts that adjust style and language to their target. Felix Fabri’s four works about his travels were each tailored to a different audience. The Latin account was meant for readers like himself, while the German Sionpilger, composed in the early 1490s at the request of some local women of his order, refashioned his material as a guide to spiritual pilgrimage for them. Fabri’s guide sets forth twenty rules to direct the pilgrims’ behavior and state of mind before scheduling a devotional program of 208 days of imagined travel to the Middle East and back. Where Breydenbach hopes his book will serve as a prelude to real pilgrimage, Fabri crafts his book as an explicit substitute for physical travel. For more popular audiences he produced a German version of his Latin account, much condensed, and an even shorter account in verse intended to facilitate memorization of the order of holy sites. Francesco Suriano was less chameleon, but his treatise, discussed in the next chapter, was another example of an account pitched for women in a “simple style” that reproduces the instructional interchange between a nun and the priest assigned as her spiritual director.22
Breydenbach is well aware that pilgrimage accounts belong to a popular genre with a mixed audience. His characterization of the Peregrinatio as “lightly valued” and unimportant has a literal meaning apart from conventions of humility. The author seeks to remind his judge that he is not presenting the type of book, a work of theology or sacred scripture, that requires vigilant scrutiny. At the same time, Breydenbach seeks to distinguish his
