Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Editorial Conventions
- Map
- Introduction: To Be A Pilgrim
- 1 Genre and Purpose: The Itineraries of William Wey
- 2 Bernhard von Breydenbach: The Religious Other and Other Religions
- 3 Curiosity and Pilgrimage: The Case of Arnold von Harff
- 4 Writing the Holy Land in the Age of Print: Thomas Larke and Bernhard von Breydenbach
- Conclusion: Ways To Be A Pilgrim
- Appendix: Selected German and English Jerusalem Pilgrim Writers
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Writing the Holy Land in the Age of Print: Thomas Larke and Bernhard von Breydenbach
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 March 2021
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Editorial Conventions
- Map
- Introduction: To Be A Pilgrim
- 1 Genre and Purpose: The Itineraries of William Wey
- 2 Bernhard von Breydenbach: The Religious Other and Other Religions
- 3 Curiosity and Pilgrimage: The Case of Arnold von Harff
- 4 Writing the Holy Land in the Age of Print: Thomas Larke and Bernhard von Breydenbach
- Conclusion: Ways To Be A Pilgrim
- Appendix: Selected German and English Jerusalem Pilgrim Writers
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
At the time our four pilgrims were travelling and writing, the new technology of print was spreading across Europe, altering the ways in which people wrote, read, and thought about books. Genre, the religious other, and curiosity are conceptual issues that have different implications for each text, but the development of print is a concrete and external technological change, and some pilgrim writers quickly took advantage of it. It therefore exerted a substantial influence on written representations of the Holy Land. Bernhard von Breydenbach's Peregrinatio in terram sanctam and the Pylgrymage of Sir Richard Guylforde, as printed works with a shared history, clearly illustrate some of its effects. That Thomas Larke translated and included various descriptive sections of Breydenbach's text when composing a description of his own pilgrimage provides the opportunity to consider directly the shared religious experience of a German and an Englishman. This textual relationship was only possible because print enabled the wide transmission of Breydenbach's Latin text. These texts, then, as a result of their publication, contrast with the accounts of Arnold von Harff and William Wey, which existed only in manuscript form. Harff's text was affected by the availability of printed books, although it was not itself printed until the modern period. It therefore draws upon printed representations of the Holy Land, without directly contributing to print culture. The Itineraries of William Wey, meanwhile, was written shortly before print made an impact in England, and can therefore be largely – although not entirely – excluded from our discussion. But the German Breydenbach's Latin printed text and the Englishman Thomas Larke's vernacular narrative, itself ultimately printed, are part of a larger, international community of printed pilgrimage texts, whose authors clearly made use of their printed predecessors. The relationships between these texts are crucial to understanding the influence of print culture on the written representation of the Holy Land, both in terms of its construction by pilgrim writers, and its reception by a much-broadened audience. These were not mutually exclusive groups. Print culture enabled audience to become writer and writer to become audience more quickly, and in possession of more (and more recent) information, than in the past.
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- Information
- Writing the Jerusalem Pilgrimage in the Late Middle Ages , pp. 153 - 191Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2021