dedication, they are reflected in his argument there. Echoing Henneberg’s edict again and borrowing from Jerome, who quotes Horace, Breydenbach launches an attack on substandard books:
I have come to the opinion that … there is no end of making new books. (If anything of these times can be called new. I mean such things as receive new clothes only on the outside or are painted over in a different color than before yet their substance remains unchanged …).… New findings are getting well out of control…. It has already come to the point that … anyone who can simply hold the stylus or follow the particular forms of writing, he can turn [things] and move [them] around, and he thinks he has made a new book. And this is not only happening in the liberal or natural arts, such as grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, music, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and general philosophy, but also, what is more, in the sacred divine scripture. As Saint Jerome attests: doctors handle medicine and smiths that to which they are entitled, so the same for every craft. So it is alone the art of writing, especially the holy [scripture], that everyone presumes to understand. The educated and uneducated write poems and make books—the chatty crone, the witless old man, the blathering sophist—indeed, all people presume to write, to mutilate writing [zu rysssen die geschrifft], and to say something different that they neither know nor understand.23
The “foolish, rash, and ignorant” translators targeted in the edict are here even more colorfully disparaged as ninnies in comparison to the untouchable, sainted paragon of biblical translation, Saint Jerome. By the end of this reproof, Breydenbach has subsumed the edict’s concern about shoddy translation and greedy, deceitful practices into a criticism of more general incompetence in the making of books, with the implication that by composing books members of the craftsman class overstep their appropriate social roles. This, too, complements the edicts’ implicit assertion that the prerogative for creating and disseminating knowledge belongs to the clerical estate. The great works and great rewards belong to men of superior intellect who dedicate themselves to sacred or human learning from youth to old age, Breydenbach writes—another sentiment that parallels the archbishop’s mandate (2v, ll. 18–21).
Breydenbach does not presume to be one of those scholars. He claims another basis for his expertise: his completion the previous year of a lengthy pilgrimage, “as is recognized and known” (2v, ll. 34–35). As Breydenbach continues in the dedication, he develops an argument that says in essence, I may not be presenting your princely grace with a worthy work of the high genre of theology, but I have taken unusual care in composing a useful book with a pious purpose on a subject that suits my abilities and social station. He then alludes to the novel extent and effect of his working process by describing his “little book” (bůchlyn) as having “a form and size perhaps not seen before and brought to print with writing and pictures together” (2v, ll. 38–40). While following the archbishop’s argument in many ways, Breydenbach has at the same time subtly shifted the definition of expertise. The foundation remains knowing and understanding a subject matter appropriate to your class, but in this case that knowledge is grounded in personal experience, rather than longtime scrutiny and debate. In denigrating books that only pretend to be “new,” he has added an implicit call for some kind of originality. First he sets up the inference that his book offers that in contrast to those that merely “turn and move” things, and then he makes it explicit—a form and size not seen before, combined text and image, based on his own experience.
Shortly after the dedication, in a section entitled “Explanation of Intent” or “Expression of the Opinion of the Creator [angeber] of this Work,” Breydenbach will add two more claims that distinguish his project, and, therefore, implicitly bolster his justification for publishing: the extent of his research and his careful editing. First, Breydenbach emphasizes that during the journey he “investigated and learned all the things necessary to know with special diligence,” “sparing no expense.” For this purpose, he thought it worthwhile to bring along a “clever and learned painter, Erhard Reuwich of Utrecht.”24 In attaching the account of Reuwich’s work to his own, Breydenbach promotes the painter’s contribution as the visual counterpart to his own research. The three times Reuwich is named are the first times an artist is identified in the text of a printed book he illustrated. Breydenbach doesn’t just claim to have taken a painter with him on pilgrimage for the purposes of researching a book; he actually did. Describing it in the text in these terms was equally exceptional.
In that same section, in the Latin edition, Breydenbach also mentions that he had a learned man add explanatory material in Latin and German to his own offering (ad votum meum) (7v, ll. 8–10). Via Felix Fabri we know the collaborator was Martin Rath, a Dominican and Master of Theology at the University of Mainz, a colleague of the faculty members that the archbishop appointed to the censorship edict’s review board in January 1486. According to Fabri, this outside expert organized the building blocks of the text and assured the quality of the language.25 Fabri also seems to credit Rath with composing the catalog of Holy Land heretics, but that section closely follows a text by their traveling companion Walther von Guglingen. In the German Peregrinatio, the verb straffen stands in for the more detailed sketch of the commission in the Latin (10r, l. 27). Meaning “to edit,” literally “to tauten,” the word is also used to express the correcting work of the archbishop and his most learned scholars in Breydenbach’s dedication (3r, l. 1). Although the text does not advertise the contribution of the editor as it does the work of the artist, the editing process had a significant impact on the shape of the work, and it seems an important aspect of Breydenbach’s strategy for setting his book apart as a piece of careful scholarship for a sophisticated readership.
The extent of Rath’s intervention has caused scholars to ask if he should be considered the book’s author.26 However, Breydenbach robustly claims the author function for himself.27 While keeping the editor anonymous, he refers to himself as the work’s “auctor principalis” in the Latin edition (116r, ll. 42–43) and “angeber” (10r, ll. 1–3; 137r, l. 30) in the German, takes clear credit for the book’s conception and research in the front matter, and incorporated a travel account couched in the first person. How Breydenbach builds his authority in the book with forethought and purpose becomes clear from assessing the disconnect between what he claims about the text and images and what modern scholarship has shown about their origins.
The theory of medieval authorship articulated by A. J. Minnis, in particular for the twelfth through fourteenth centuries, often serves as a starting point for examining how later medieval and early modern authors and their transmitters (e.g., Dante, Chaucer, or Caxton) altered, exploited, or lived within the traditional framework while creating elements of our modern notions of authorship.28 Via Bonaventure, Minnis describes a spectrum of writers, from scribes who copy, to compilers who gather works and copy, to commentators who compile while adding some of their own explanations, to authors, whose own analysis forms the basis of the work, corroborated by other sources compiled to support them. This is not a spectrum of originality, as all four types of writers are understood to be mediating the ultimate theological authority of God in the Latin language of the Vulgate. The author has the greatest authority, from his long-standing reputation and his texts’ reception as formative members of a delimited canon, but there is no special privileging of the type of writing at that end of the scale.29 It is this same understanding that undergirds the archbishop’s conception of the church as the (so to speak) copyright holder of sacred scripture and many other texts, as the church is the earthly guardian of the sacred truths from which all kinds of writing derive.
For “writers” of visual images, an analogous conception of draftsmen as mediators of nature comes to the fore in a court case in Speyer in 1533, where Johann Schott of Strasbourg sued a rival Frankfurt printer, Christian Egenolf, for plagiarizing his press’s Herbarium Vivae Icones, a landmark in the production of herbals, richly and intelligibly illustrated from life.30 It is amusing in our context to note that Egenolf used the new images he copied to update, not Schott’s text, but Breydenbach’s Gart der Gesundheit, and he uses this different textual model as one point in his defense. More slyly, Egenolf argues that both
