This single page succinctly diagrams how the rhetoric of the eyewitness is constructed—and then used to credential and cohere a work that is in fact composed of elements drawn from representationally and epistemologically diverse sources. For this menagerie, the verbal statement’s visual corollary is not the structure of the perspective view, but the pictorial format used to illustrate categories of flora and fauna in books of natural history, as in illustrated printed editions of Conrad’s Buch der Natur (Book of nature) (figure 20).49 Each chapter of Megenberg’s book discusses one category (e.g., animals, birds, sea wonders, fish, bugs), and each begins with an illustration of members of the category loosely arrayed in a simple frame with minimal setting. The members of each group share certain characteristics of form and habitat (for example, wings and air for birds), and the illustration shows off the diversity of forms within the group while visualizing the textual catalogue that constitutes the text. Reuwich has borrowed a framing device that normalizes his collection as a category of natural philosophy. This repeats more succinctly how the peoples of the Holy Land are cordoned off in a documentary register, where they cater to curiosity with their own menagerie of costumes, but within a visually and textually disciplined framework, as explored in the next chapter.
The treatment of individual animals encapsulates different types of experiences of the exotic, and the presentation of the group as a whole exemplifies how, as a book, the Peregrinatio framed and disciplined the expression of those experiences. At first glance, the “Indian goats” (capre de India) seem curious only for being utterly pedestrian amidst a collection of real rarities. But they belong where they are across from their partner, the unicorn, as marvels that work their wonder only in tandem with the viewer’s expectations. Each of the Indian goats carries a single attribute that marks its difference from the homegrown variety: pendulous ears. In this period, well before the introduction of Eastern breeds, European goats sported only short, pointy ears. Pilgrimage accounts testify to the fascination of these types of differences, namely long ears and tails, in the most quotidian of animals, goats and sheep.50 For the unicorn, the artist and his party had a name and a mental image before they had the opportunity to observe a real specimen. They brought with them an expectation waiting to be fulfilled, and it was. The knowledge the pilgrims (and the reader) bring with them about goats opens them up to a moment of surprise.
Reuwich had good reason to believe there were unicorns in the Holy Land; his Muslim guide pointed one out on September 20. The Peregrinatio relates that, while crossing the Sinai Peninsula to Saint Catherine’s Monastery, the pilgrims saw “a big animal, much bigger than a camel,” that their guide told them “was truly a unicorn” (139v, ll. 39–41). Felix Fabri specifies that they espied the animal standing at a distance on the top of a mountain. According to his account, the pilgrims thought it was a camel at first until their guide identified it as a rhinoceros or unicorn and pointed out the single horn growing from its head.51 The pilgrims might not have believed their guide, however, had tourists’ wonder and wishful thinking and their own cultural mythology not already predisposed them to find unicorns in the wilderness of the Holy Land.
At other moments, the pilgrims, or at least Fabri, did suspect their guides were having a little fun at their expense. The guides’ state of mind remains elusive, though of course Fabri thought he had figured it out. When he came to them on September 16 to ask the name of their campsite, as he did every evening on their way through in the desert, a guide paused and then announced, “Albaroch,” with apparent mirth and to the general hilarity of the listening camel drivers. Or so Fabri imagined. They pressed the monk to write that down, which he did, despite what he understood as their continued laughter.52 Fabri seems to have conveyed the information he gathered to Breydenbach, who gives many of the same campsites, including the place “named Abalharock in the Arabic tongue” (140r, l. 17). Ever tenacious, Fabri researched the meaning of the name when he returned home and claimed to have found the answer: al-Buraq (“lightning” in Arabic) is the winged mount that the archangel Gabriel let the prophet Muhammad ride from Mecca to Jerusalem for his Night Journey.53 Fabri self-consciously suspects he was the butt of a jest, but he may have in fact received a straight answer. The group does seem to have been camping in a tributary of the Wadi el-Bruk, which can be said to flow to (al) Bruk.54 Just a few days later, that same guide called the creature they saw in the distance a unicorn.
The giraffe represents a different outcome of the impulse to map experience with names. The animal carries an Arabic name (scraffa), one of the many transliterations brought back by pilgrims in this era to form the root of “giraffe” and its variants in European languages. The adoption of the foreign word marks a shift from camelopardus (literally, camel leopard), the Latin name used by the Christian Fathers to remember a largely forgotten beast. Here the Arabic name also helps mark out the path of the pilgrim’s wonder. Handlers brought a giraffe, a lion, and a baboon riding a bear to entertain the group in the courtyard of their lodging in Cairo.55 Reuwich or one of his companions must have asked, “What is that?” and recorded what they heard of the answer, “Zarafa.” In the act of transcription, the word slipped away from the Arabic toward what would become the German Giraffe. The visual form of the giraffe slipped, too, away from an actual giraffe toward the form the animal would take in the European imagination.
At the bottom of the frame, a humanoid form with an electric mane, a tail, and a walking stick faces a camel (Camelus) he holds on a tether. For this beast, the artist declares he does not know the name (Non constat de nomine). If the giraffe represents the foreign import or the lost object found under a new name, the ape-man stands as the object whose utter strangeness defies culture and its naming. The scale of the creature and the anthropomorphization bestowed by the props delay our recognition that he is simply a baboon, a “canine monkey” (simia canina), as Fabri calls the primate he saw with the giraffe, using an archaic descriptor carried forward in the name for one baboon species, Papio cynocephalus.56 A former owner of a Peregrinatio in Houghton Library (f Typ Inc 156) helps bring the portrait into focus by coloring red the distinctive fleshy rump. The artist encourages us to mistake the monkey underneath the two miscues of scale and situation, perhaps to evoke the dog-headed people, the cynocephali, who were one of the legendary monstrous races thought to inhabit the margins of the world. Perhaps we see instead a caricature of the camel drivers who the pilgrims had to follow blindly and with some unease through the desert. Maybe he is the artist’s last laugh at them. Or maybe he is just a play on the human characteristics that made monkeys a symbol in this era of man’s folly and baser instincts. Either way, the artist himself is responsible for playing up the comedic or uncanny qualities of the baboon, and his refusal to name may reflect his ignorance as much as his desire to heighten the viewer’s sense of wonder.
Each member of this zoo represents a moment of curiosity and that curiosity’s visual expression. And each of these is composed of varying measures of preconception and openness, cross-cultural communication and uncertainty, and facticity and interpretation. Even within a class as narrowly defined as “Holy Land animals,” these examples hint at the heterogeneity of the artist’s encounters. We must also count al-Buraq, precisely because Reuwich does not depict him. He is the creature who translates from the Islamic cultural imagination only as an artifact of a pilgrim’s self-consciousness in the face of his own vulnerability as an alien. The frame set around the group reduces them to a set of animals varied in physical form but alike as statements of fact; however, membership in Reuwich’s category is not simply defined by a shared habitat. With the visual conventions of the page and then the caption, the pilgrims’ complex perceptual experience of each animal is reduced to a straightforward truth statement, “we saw them,” that functions much like the classification “birds have wings.” Having been observed by the pilgrims becomes the property that delimits and naturalizes the set. This is how experience becomes information in the images of Peregrinatio and how the information in turn obscures the complexity and heterogeneity of the experience and its recording.
By such means, the Peregrinatio
