themselves, so that Schott cannot claim a privilege or special invention. The court’s opinion has not survived, though Egenolf’s blocks reverted to Schott, suggesting that the court had begun by this time to recognize at least the printer’s monetary investment in commissioning the blocks, if not the intellectual investment in the images’ design. Yet Egenolf’s argument, however self-serving, witnesses a conception of printmaking similar to that of authoring based in transcribing an external truth, even if that conception was in the midst of change.
When Breydenbach (or his source) leans on the Bible or a recognized author like Virgil (160r, ll. 6–8), he often mentions it, but he brings together without attribution a very long list of other texts: the pilgrimage account of Hans Tucher of Nuremberg; information about the peoples of the Holy Land and laments over the Muslim occupation of the Holy Land from the manuscript of Walther von Guglingen; a geographical description of the Holy Land attributed to Burchard of Mount Sion, a crusader-era monk; reports by the patriarch of Constantinople, the head of the Hospitallers, and other anonymous authors of Ottoman attacks in the Mediterranean; and many others.31 The origin of much of the source material of the book does speak for Breydenbach as the primary researcher, as so much came from Venice or his traveling companions. For example, beyond the borrowings from Walther von Guglingen, it seems plausible that Fabri, who carried Hans Tucher with him on at least one of his journeys, brought that account to his friend’s attention.32
There would be no contradiction for Breydenbach in the fact that most of the text of the Peregrinatio, including the first-person narrative of the travelogue, is drawn from other sources with interpolations as well as editing to streamline and customize the prose. Outside sources are compiled to support his contribution, which rests not necessarily in his analysis, but more fundamentally, in his eyewitness testimony that gives the collection its unifying purpose and imprimatur: “I, the person named as author, saw [what these other sources confirm].” Rather than mediating the theological authority of the Word through writing, he and his artist, or rather, their viewing, mediates the worldly Christian and natural order through images (as well as text). The censorship edict speaks of knowledge as a consensus that arises through discussion among learned persons, and this had traditionally taken the written form of a text scaffolded with other texts, as with the Pauline Epistles that Henneberg used as his example. In the Peregrinatio, it is Breydenbach and Reuwich’s first-person observations that are scaffolded by the compiled texts and by the images. The use of outside source material implicitly validates what the Peregrinatio team claims to have seen.
The origins of this support structure are obscured, however, by the act of ventriloquism that subsumes them under the first-person narrative and authorial claims of the text and images. In perhaps the most telling maneuver, Breydenbach emblazons his arms and the arms of the two other noblemen in his party at the center of the Peregrinatio’s attention-grabbing frontispiece. In honoring these three, the Peregrinatio frontispiece draws upon the common practice of Holy Land pilgrims’ commemorating their journey with public monuments, which ran the gamut from entire churches to chapel furnishings (like those provided by William Wey to the Chapel of the Holy Sepulcher at his monastery in Edington) to single images (like the stone relief of the Virgin and Child given by Breydenbach and Bicken to the Mainz Church of Our Lady) (figure 5).33 They gave the relief in thanksgiving for their safe return, and many pilgrims’ donations were similarly motivated. Pilgrims also put objects commemorating their accomplishment on display in other contexts where they did not serve a cult function. This was the case, for example, with the painting of Jerusalem that Breydenbach hung in his chapter house. Successful completion of a Holy Land pilgrimage also conferred social honors. After being dubbed Knights of the Holy Sepulcher during the all-night vigil at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, many then adopted the Jerusalem Cross as a heraldic device on portraits and other works marked with their arms.
The use of a printed image as a vehicle for commemorating a pilgrimage was, however, a new form invented for the Peregrinatio. In the first decades of printing, publishers experimented with empty first pages; title pages with just type; title pages with type and ornament, a woodcut illustration, or a printer’s mark; or pictorial pages without any title information. While a title page grew increasingly common from 1480, the form of the paratext at the very front of the book had not yet stabilized as a pictorial hook to draw readers or as a label to identify books that had just begun to circulate far from their origin. Opening a book with a full-page woodcut across from the first page of text was and remained a highly unusual choice.34
Here on the inside, it turns the direction of its address, figuratively as well as literally, from an appeal to the reader to a commentary on the text. The adaptation of the Peregrinatio frontispiece in the Liber chronicarum will turn the focus back to the reader by replacing the lady and her heraldry with God the Father and two wild men, who display empty escutcheons ready to receive the arms of the volume’s owner (figure 10).35 (The Peregrinatio’s views are equally influential for the Nuremberg Chronicle’s famous profusion of city skylines.36) The example illustrated here happens to have belonged to the author, Hartmann Schedel, who has illuminated it with his own markings. The frontispiece of the other book orchestrated by Breydenbach, the Gart der Gesundheit, offers the same fill-in-the-blank bookplate, suspended from a foliage canopy that is in many other ways a prototype for the Peregrinatio’s opening image (figure 11). These swaps that displace the insignia of book’s readers (Gart) for its modern creators (Peregrinatio) and then back again to that of its readers (Liber chronicarum) begin to suggest the very distinctive choices of the Peregrinatio opening.
In featuring a convocation of eminent classical, Muslim, and Christian physicians who contributed to the knowledge collected in the book, the frontispiece of the Gart der Gesundheit is more typical of incunabula that adapt the conventions of medieval manuscripts. One type of manuscript frontispiece depicted an author on bended knee offering his work to a patron, as implied allegorically in the metalcut of the Mainz Agenda. That genre aside, medieval author portraits by and large depicted well-established authors of sacred texts. The fifteenth century did see a rise in secular and vernacular author portraits, as seen in the Gart, but the depicted writers, such as Aristotle, Aesop, or Chaucer, generally had long-standing literary reputations. Or a frontispiece can play to the new market for printed books with an image directly illustrating the content of the work. Peter Drach’s 1505 edition moves Reuwich’s image of the entrance court of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher from the interior of the book, where it originally introduced the description of the church, to the title page, where it advertises front and center what Drach wanted to market as the substance of the work (figures 12, 13). Reuwich has brought unusual technical care and prowess to bear on constructing an image that substitutes the visual rhetoric of nobility and the social sheen of the Jerusalem pilgrim for more traditional renderings of canonical authors or the book’s subject matter. And he chooses to place this unconventional, but forceful, framing of the foundation of the authority of the book where no image was necessarily even expected.
The Artist as Eyewitness
Just as Breydenbach asserts himself as author in the text, so the images strengthen his voice by adding the eyes of the artist. On July 14, 1483, Reuwich stood on the Mount of Olives, faced Jerusalem, and took in the view as an artist, a pilgrim, and a publisher in the nascent printing industry. We know he stood there as an artist because he translated his experience into the woodcut View of Jerusalem embedded into the Map of the Holy Land (gatefold). We can even call this image a perspective view because the print
