href="#u6402150d-63d2-5086-a722-4269312d09c7">chapters 1 and 3 first appeared in articles published in Cultural Exchange between the Netherlands and Italy, 1400–1600, edited by Ingrid Alexander-Skipnes for Brepols in 2007, and The Books of Venice / Il libro veneziano, edited by Lisa Pon and Craig Kallendorf for Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, La Musa Talìa, and Oak Knoll Press in 2008. I would like to thank Brepols and the editors of The Books of Venice for permission to incorporate elements of those essays in this work.
My interest in German art circa 1500 was first stirred by the intellectual charisma of two scholars in the field, Joseph Leo Koerner and Christopher S. Wood. As teachers, they both ask unexpected questions that led to better answers. Year in, year out, Henri Zerner’s office was open for counsel, and David Roxburgh introduced me to the Umayyads and their successors and shaped my thinking about Jerusalem. Susan Merriam played the role of mentor before her time. Many have praised the geniuses of Scott Rothkopf, but his greatest gift may be his generosity as a friend. Graham Bader, David Drogin, Emine Fetvaci, Sean Keller, Aden Kumler, Amanda Luyster, Cammie McAtee, Christine Mehring, Benjamin Paul, Lisa Pon, and Alexis Sornin all offered intellectual exchange that helped bring this work to better completion.
The University of Florida Office of Research Scholarship Enhancement Fund allowed me to develop the project substantially through an extended stay in Jerusalem and travel to libraries and print collections in Europe, and it has provided a subvention for acquiring and publishing images. That was augmented by a semester’s stay at the Paris Research Center of the University of Florida at the invitation of its director, Gayle Zachmann. Gila Yudkin navigated my first walk around the Mount of Olives and other parts of Jerusalem with exceptional enthusiasm. Lisa DeCesare agreed to photograph the Gart in a pinch. And Gretchen Oberfranc provided skilled editorial services right when needed.
Melissa Hyde, Katerie Gladdys, Joyce Tsai, and Glenn Willumson have all gone well beyond the call of duty to support my work in Gainesville. The company of such colleagues is one of the pleasures of life at the University of Florida. I know I am lucky to have fallen in with such a collegial group, in particular, Barbara Barletta, Oaklianna Brown, Lea Cline, Ben Devane, Richard Heipp, Ashley Jones, Howard Louthan, Victoria Masters, Scott Nygren, Robin Poynor, Maria Rogal, Vicki Rovine, Maya Stanfield-Mazzi, and Maureen Turim. Pamela Brekka, Choi Jong Chul, and Denise Reso provided particular research and administrative assistance. The conversation that started when Rebecca Zorach visited our campus helped refine many elements of the text.
Carrie and Danielle Zublatt seem to grow fuller in empathy with each passing year, and the strength of their relationship is an inspiration. During the course of this project, my brother Matthew found Wendy, and they brought us Madison and Ethan, who helped in their own special way. My mother has waited patiently at the bottom of Mount Sinai while I climbed to the top to take in one view, and my father has tromped with me across the Mount of Olives as I searched out another. They have read drafts and continually championed art-historical life in deeds large and small. Of course, my father learned all this from his father, Papa Sol, whose memory is one of our great blessings.
NOTE ON EDITIONS AND FOLIO NUMBERS
References to the Peregrinatio in terram sanctam are cited in the notes or in parentheses in the body of the text. The folio and line numbers refer to the June 21, 1486, German edition, unless the text makes explicit reference to the Latin edition, published on February 11, 1486. Neither edition has printed signatures. The foldout woodcuts were assembled by gluing extra sheets onto the outside edge of one folio of an opening. Each sheet of these extensions is counted as two folios. Blank lines are not counted in the line numbering. Latin abbreviations have been expanded.
Incunabula are cited using the conventions of the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC), which has an English-language interface but often uses the Latin name for authors. Each ISTC entry links to the database of the German Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke (GW), which often contains more and different information. Both the ISTC and GW entries link directly to library websites that make incunabula available online in digital format. The Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Darmstadt offers the Latin edition with the most easily navigable interface, and both it and the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich facilitate the download of entire volumes in PDF format. In addition, Isolde Mozer has published a modern edition of the text of the June 21, 1486 German Peregrinatio with folio numbers. In light of the availability of the Peregrinatio text and with limited printed space, full quotations from the original text of the Peregrinatio and other recently published or digitized works have been limited.
The online editions do not include all of the Peregrinatio’s foldouts, but they can be viewed together on the website of the Beinecke Library at Yale University in their digital collections. They were printed in facsimile in Elisabeth Geck’s 1977 edition with abridged text in modern German.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
THE PILGRIMS AND THEIR PROJECT
Gatefold
IN 1483, AN AMBITIOUS GERMAN CLERIC named Bernhard von Breydenbach set out to use the new medium of his day—print—to reconceptualize the form and making of a book. Our own historical situation has opened a special sympathy with those who experimented with printing in its first decades. We weigh the purchase of e-readers, navigate Wikipedia’s bounty of fickle facts, contend with piracy, and debate attempts by Google Books and others to shape jurisprudence. In all these ways and others, we apprehend a future transformed, without being able to anticipate clearly how its material forms, economic models, legal systems, or structures of knowledge will work out. Breydenbach did not feel the portent of his moment in quite the same way, but he stood, nonetheless, at a juncture in the history of media similar to the one we have been experiencing with the introduction of digital technologies. New technology presented new possibilities, but as creators and entrepreneurs innovated, they opened an era when the nature of a work of art—as well as the nature of a book, an artist, and an author—stood in flux.
Of this instability Breydenbach was certainly aware; he wrote a bit about it. His project offers perhaps the best window available onto the medial shift as a multimedia phenomenon, where the rethinking of the form and role of images is integral to the content, material apparatus, and cultural positioning of the work. He published one of the seminal books of early printing, known as Peregrinatio in terram sanctam (Journey to the Holy Land), the first illustrated travelogue, a work especially renowned for the originality, experimental format, and unusually skillful execution of its woodcuts. To accomplish that, he recruited a painter, Erhard Reuwich of Utrecht, to travel with him on pilgrimage to the Holy Land to research these images, create the woodcuts, and print the book. Taking an artist on such a reconnaissance mission was unprecedented, and with this travel their project engages another topic of particular concern—Christian European encounters with the Muslim Middle East. The pair grapple throughout the book with the challenge of Islam militarily, in the Ottoman Empire’s successful offensives, and spiritually, in the Mamluk Empire’s domination of Jerusalem and its built environment. Together author and artist presume to offer readers an authentic introduction to a Mediterranean basin caught in a contest between faith and heresy. But to do this convincingly, they must also work out their own model of authorship and art-making as they work through the problems and potentials of print.
Inspiring and facilitating pilgrimage was a stated and real aim of the book (2v, ll. 42–43; 7r, ll. 12–16; 10r, ll. 17–20). A good portion of the Peregrinatio is given over to describing the course of a Holy Land pilgrimage, providing readers with geographical information, and offering practical advice, such as a table of distances
