Picturing Experience in the Early Printed Book: Breydenbach’s ‘Peregrinatio’ from Venice to Jerusalem by Elizabeth Ross (review)

In her richly illustrated new book, Elizabeth Ross conducts a thorough, multifocal investigation into Bernard von Breydenbach’s Peregrinatio in terram sanctum (‘Journey to the Holy Land’). Breydenbach was a well-connected cleric from Mainz who took the unprecedented step of including an artist in his team for a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1483. Northern artist, Erhart Reuwich, was employed to create visuals to accompany Breydenbach’s written account of the journey, which according to Ross, resulted in reconceptualising the book. The travelogue was first published in Latin in 1486 and was subsequently published in several European languages in the following decades.

Ross investigates the historical milieu that motivated Breydenbach to undertake the project, while considering the role of cultural influences on both author and artist that, in combination with their own creative and technical innovations, brought the work to fruition in the context of the newly emergent print culture. Ross argues that author and artist collaborated diligently and deliberately to create an innovative work that would be deemed credible by the intended audience. They achieved this by re-conceptualising the book as a ‘multi-media bricolage’ (p. 18), and implementing the ‘eyewitness account’ and the newly emergent visual genre of the ‘view’, as proof of their empirical experience of the Levant and Holy Land. Concomitantly, they constructed the scaffolding to make their respective accounts ‘truth’.

Ross emphasises the fundamental role of the print medium in enabling the experimental manipulation of text sources and visuals by the creators, and in facilitating the broad dissemination of an authoritative and convincing spiritual and temporal message against heresy. This message was aimed at a European Christian audience fearful of the westward expansion of the Muslim Ottoman Empire. As Breydenbach states, his book was intended as a practical guide to pilgrimage but more importantly, it was constructed to arouse crusader spirit in the West and ultimately return the Holy Land to Christendom.

The book is divided into five chapters and includes notes on editions and folio numbers, 111 illustrations, and a gatefold map, as well as a bibliography that contains useful references for incunabula and modern editions of primary sources. Ross begins her book by introducing Breydenbach, his team, and the details of their journey. A thorough visual analysis of the Peregrinatio’s decorative frontispiece demonstrates the makers’ appropriation and amalgamation of historical sources. The image exemplifies the role symbolism played in announcing the authority of author and artist to the early modern reader, which served to validate the content that followed.

Chapter 2 further examines the concept of authority in the work and the way in which artist and author utilised diverse contemporary and historical factors to advantage. These include Breydenbach’s exploitation of the 1485 Censorship Edict issued by the Archbishop of Mainz, and Reuwich’s use of the relatively novel ‘view’ genre in art, which worked to give authority to their respective ‘eyewitness’ accounts. In Chapter 3, Ross considers Breydenbach and Reuwich’s approach to the challenge of ‘difference’ in relation to Islam and other Mediterranean heresies. The pilgrims spent a month in Venice preparing for their departure, picking up rhetorical devices and artistic influences from the Venetians that infiltrate the travelogue. To further validate their cause, Ross claims, Breydenbach and Reuwich deliberately portrayed Venice as the last bastion of true religion in an eastward journey that culminated in the Holy Land, itself conversely represented as a hotbed of heresy.

The remaining chapters are devoted to in-depth visual analyses of Reuwich’s Map of the Holy Land with View of Jerusalem. The fourth chapter concentrates on investigating the way in which Reuwich critically collated and amalgamated numerous cartographic and textual sources in constructing the map. In combination with empirical experience and Northern traditions of spatial representation in painting, the...