Elizabeth Ross, an associate professor of Art History at the University of Florida presents here a deeply revised version of her PhD dissertation (Harvard University, 2004) about the Mainz's canon Berhard von Breydenbach's pilgrimage of 1483 to the Holy Land, through Venice, the Adriatic, Cyprus and Jaffa, and on his return Mount Sinai, Cairo, and Alexandria. Breydenbach was accompanied by a trained draftsman, Erhard Reuwich of Utrecht, and in 1486 a lavishly illustrated account of their journey was published in Latin, German, and Dutch editions, to be followed by many others in subsequent decades. Reuwich was the first illustrator of a printed book to be mentioned inside the book, Breydenbach emphasizing his role as an eye-witness and de facto co-author. Most probably printed by Peter Schoffer, successor to Gutenberg in Mainz, under the guidance of Breydenbach and Reuwich, the Peregrinatio immediately set a standard because of the exceptional quality of its twenty-six woodcuts that depicted the peoples, places, plants, and animals of the Levant, inspiring major artists such as Mantegna or Carpaccio. Ross's dissertation was known to scholars in the field of early book history and illustration, and this book version was eagerly waited for. Waiting was worth the while in front of a beautifully produced volume—the quality of photographs is outstanding—well worthy of one of the great monuments in the history of the Renaissance book.
The Peregrinatio has been studied for a long time by bibliographers, historians, and art historians since H. Davies classic book of 1911 (Bernhard von Breydenbach and his journey to the Holy Land. 1483. A bibliography), and Ross does not attempt to bring any novelty from the point of view of connoisseurship. The many problems that have been nagging Breydenbach scholars remain unresolved, from Reuwich's pictorial sources and his relationship with the Housebook Master to the precise circumstances of the book's production or the basis of the text in actual experience. The interest, and the appeal, of her book lies elsewhere, in the fact that she boldly considers Breydenbach and Reuwich's project as a global one, guided according to her by the inclusive concept of “viewpoint” that unites individual and collective aspirations, the singular point of view of Reuwich drawing Jerusalem from a hilltop and the collective point of view of Christendom preparing a new crusade against Islam, as expressed in Breydenbach's text.
Chapter 1, titled “Introduction: The Pilgrims and their Projects,” presents a clear and well informed compilation of everything that is known about the pilgrimage itself, the preparation of the book, and its authors—that is not much. Ross emphasizes in particular the meeting in Jerusalem of two mendicant friars who would eventually join Breyndenbach and Weurich, a Dominican from Ulm, Felix Fabri, and an Observant Franciscan, Paul Walther von Guglingen, who wrote their own accounts of the journey and contributed to the Peregrinatio. Having examined different copies of the book, but not all as her purpose was not bibliographical, Ross mentions en passant that some of the 44 copies of the first edition extant in Germany, seem to show that woodcuts were removed early to be used as independent images, a notation that could have been developed.
Chapter 2, “The Authority of the Artist-Author's View,” discusses at length the circumstances and aims of printing. Was Peter Schöffer the printer—which seems likely but with no concluding evidence? What kind of censorship was the book submitted to by university faculties? What was its intended audience, from educated laymen to cloistered nuns? This reviewer was particularly interested by the discussion of mimetic resemblance in Reuwich's representations of the Holy Land, where Ross proposes that Reuwich embraced “the view” because it belonged to the category of “works that function by telling a story about their own creation and the viewer's place in their system” (50).
Chapter 3, “Mediterranean Encounters: Lady Venice, Holy Land, Heretics and the Crusade,” essentially shows that the Peregrinatio was not only a guide for pilgrims but made the case for a new crusade, Mamluk Jerusalem being presented as a city under infidel occupation where Christians were denied their right to visit and worship. The book somehow compensated for that by offering the readers an opportunity to take possession of Jerusalem on a spiritual level thanks to the imaginary pilgrimage that it proposed. One of the best passages in the chapter confronts the aggressive visual and textual rhetoric that Breydenbach and Reuwich use to depict Islamic realities with the subtle treatment of Islamic history in the illuminations of books commissioned by the German merchant and collector Peter Ugelheimer, a personal contact of theirs in Venice, who offered them hospitality and even supported them in contract negotiations with the captain of the Venetian galley that would take them to the Holy Land. “They . . . left the collection's treatment of Islam behind” (90).
Chapter 4, “The Map of the Holy Land. Artist as Cartographer,” is essentially a commentary on the great foldout woodcut of the Holy Land that occupies fols. 143v-148 r. Comparing it to medieval mappae mundi, to contemporary illuminated manuscripts, paintings and drawings, Ross insists both on the synthetic origin of the city plan, bound to tradition, and on the fact that the layout of the city itself is constructed from the vantage point on the Mount of Olives.
Chapter 5, “The View of Jerusalem. Perspectives on a Holy City,” focuses on the symbolic relationship between Christian monuments in Jerusalem. Architectural details are carefully identified to claim spiritual ownership of the city, taking the reader on a virtual pilgrimage through the “Franciscan itinerary” that united sites where one could receive an indulgence, and offering him the benefit of a spiritual encounter by sight. Reuwich's view of Jerusalem “allows readers to experience an image of the Holy Land that they themselves can occupy, rather than an ideal vision of a Palestine regained” (182).
All in all, Ross's subtle and detailed analysis is a remarkable achievement in cultural history with which she proves to be a creative disciple of her Harvard masters, Joseph Koerner and Christopher Wood. Her book should thus be of interest to all historians of early modernity, not just of art historians or historians of the book. To end on a note of regret, though, she is less convincing when she ventures into a neo-Burkhardtian demonstration about the supposed role of the Peregrinatio in shaping an early modern concept of the individual. She could have dispensed with it.
