Bookworms with cranks

Bokworms likewise devore the volumes of Canisius and Luther, Boccaccio and Nicholas of Lyra, the Revelations and the Malleus Maleficarum. Hunger is not choosy: anything edible will do it as well. But there is a certain bookworm with a highly selective taste. The one that struck this book has consumed exclusively and with zealous gluttony all the areas where the name of Erasmus had been printed.


Most probably the name of this bookworm stands on the flyleaf of the book below the inscription Expurgatus iuxtà Indicis expurgatorii praescripta, “cleaned according to the prescriptions of the Expurgatory Index”. Unfortunately the next owner, angered by the misdeeds of the bookworm, cancelled it as a way of condamnatio memoriae. The year of the mischief, however, has remained clearly legible: 1618.


The new owner, the Canon Giovan Maria Taviani also recorded his name and the year of 1776 when he acquired this book for 13.4 lire, and thus we know who restored carefully the name of Erasmus throughout the book. Well, actually it could have been either him or another owner, as we do not know the full path covered throughout the centuries by this beautiful emblem book of Alciato provided with the notes of Francisco Sánchez – “El Brocense”. We do not know either who decorated it with the delicate red wax seal, almost a cameo. In any case, we are touched by the attention – even if sometimes a bit greedy – with which this book was owned over times. We only want to be a humble link in this chain, and momentarily content ourselves with the restoration of the broken spine.

Gorgojos con manías

Los gorgojos devoran por igual tomos de Canisio o de Lutero, de Boccaccio o de Nicolás de Lyra, el Apocalipsis o el Malleus Maleficarum. El hambre no es remilgada ni hace distingos: si algo es comestible, se zampa y basta. Pero hay un tipo de gorgojo muy selectivo. El que atacó este libro mordió exclusivamente y con caprichosa gula todas las zonas de papel sobre las que venía impreso el nombre de Erasmo.


Quizá el nombre de este gorgojo sea el que vemos escrito arriba de esta página de guarda, bajo la inscripción Expurgatus iuxtà indicis expurgatorii praescripta [expurgado según las prescripciones del Índice de libros prohibidos]. Lamentablemente el siguiente propietario, indignado por la fechoría del gorgojo, lo tachó para privar de su memoria a la posteridad y ahora es difícil leerlo. Queda, eso sí, bien registrado el año del desaguisado: 1618.


Ese nuevo propietario, el canónigo Giovan Maria Taviani, también estampó su rúbrica al comprar el libro en 1776 por 13'4 liras, aclarando así quién restauró celosamente el nombre de Erasmo. Bueno, en realidad, pudo haber sido él u otro propietario, pues desconocemos el recorrido completo de este hermoso Alciato comentado por Francisco Sánchez, El Brocense. Tampoco sabemos quién dejó el delicado sello de lacre, casi un camafeo. En todo caso, nos emociona el cariño —a veces un poco voraz, cierto— con que han poseído el libro a lo largo del tiempo y solo aspiramos a ser un simple eslabón de la cadena. De momento, nos limitaremos a restaurar el lomo, que está despegado.

Llonovoy

FOR SALE land in the sea

Our friend Miquel Àngel some years ago turned into Miquel Àngel Llonovoy (yo no voy ~ ‘do it without me’) like a fabulous animal which suddenly develops a member of its body whose function and spectacularity could be only intuited before. Since then he has done a thousand different things, but mostly a certain kind of stage performances – let us call it theatre – of an absolutely individual and intransferable character. Before that, we had published together six issues of a home-made journal of which there remains no memory (we will write about it on another occasion). But we did much more. For example I vividly remember how we protested in a kind of a performance (this is how these acts were called in Spain in the early eighties) against port expansion works in Felanitx (Porto Colom), where at the end we were covered with not very fresh fish. And above all, we have lived through a stormy period while growing up and trying to find out what will we be when we grow up (we still do not know and perhaps will never know it), stretching the limits of imagination and play in all direction. I keep those years in my heart with all the warmth imaginable.

One of our concerns was and has remained the accelerated self-destruction of Mallorca because of the alleged demands of mass tourism and its false profits. Miquel Àngel in one of his performances cried out: “The tourists have arrived and memories began to be called souvenirs.” Recently he was the greatest animator of the movement “Cimentiments (o no m’asfaltis el respecte)” (Cemento mori, o don’t asphalt my view) which, however, could not hold back the aggressive advance of the great building companies hand in hand with the different governing parties during the past four years. Nevertheless, it was a good try.

On Midsummer Night of this June it was Miquel Àngel Llonovoy to open the feast of Palma on the Parc de la Mar. In the shadow of the Cathedral, dressed half Saint John and half Bin Laden, he kept criticizing our external and internal problems from the almost invisible ones to those as obvious as a black eye, provoked by those governing us (and surely also by our own way of living). But as a herald of the feast, he effused humor above all, and his peculiar intelligence elevated the contradictions to the very level of self-parody. He was genial. For the sake of feeling, have a look at the video below even if his Catalan peppered with local allusions and word plays is nothing more for you than an eloquent Mediterranean verbal waterfall.

“…for a devil without a fork is like a representative in the local government without corruption, like a politician without a taylor, like a meadow without golf…”

But Miquel Àngel has his fix place in our “Río Wang” also as the creator of “L’Estrany Museu Llonovoy” (Llonovoy’s Curioseum). We talked about game before. Have a look at his collection of impossible toys, manufactured from objects trouvés provided with a new life and charged with a critical sense that ranges from the naïf to the antimilitarist.

Llonovoy

Nuestro amigo Miquel Àngel se transformó hace años en Miquel Àngel Llonovoy como un animal fabuloso que de repente despliega una parte del cuerpo cuya funcionalidad y espectacularidad solo podían intuirse. Desde entonces ha hecho mil cosas diferentes pero sobre todo un tipo de actuaciones escénicas —llamémoslas teatro—, de carácter absolutamente propio e intransferible. Antes de todo eso, juntos, publicamos seis números de una revista artesanal de la que no queda memoria (otro día hablaremos de ella). Pero hicimos muchas más cosas. Por ejemplo, recuerdo vivamente cómo protestamos con una especie de performance (así se llamaban estos actos a principios de los ochenta) contra las obras de ampliación del puerto de Felanitx (Porto Colom), donde acabamos cubiertos de pescado no muy fresco. Y, sobre todo, vivimos una temporada, mientras crecíamos e intentábamos averiguar qué acabaríamos siendo (no lo sabemos aún: quizá no lo sepamos nunca) disparando la imaginación y el juego en todas direcciones. Guardo aquellos años en el corazón con todo el cariño imaginable.

Una de nuestras preocupaciones ha seguido siendo la autodestrucción acelerada de Mallorca a causa de las presuntas exigencias del turismo de masas y sus falsos beneficios. Miquel Àngel, en una de sus actuaciones, clamó: «Llegaron los turistas y los recuerdos pasaron a llamarse souvenirs». Hace poco, él fue el máximo animador del movimiento «Cimentiments (o no m'asfaltis el respecte)», que no sirvió para frenar el expolio que las grandes constructoras, en connivencia con los gobernantes políticos, aceleraron todo lo que pudieron durante el período 2004-2008. Fue un buen intento.

Por San Juan, en junio pasado, Miquel Àngel Llonovoy hizo el pregón de las fiestas de Palma en el Parc de la Mar. Bajo un disfraz entre de San Juan y Bin Laden, criticó como un profeta loco, a la sombra de la Catedral, por igual los daños internos y los externos, los casi invisibles y los que son tan notorios como un ojo morado, provocados aquí por nuestros gobernantes (y seguramente por nuestra forma de ser). Era un pregón de fiesta y el humor estaba por encima de todo, y su peculiar inteligencia llevaba las contradicciones del discurso hasta la autoparodia. ¡Grande! Aunque esté salpicado de referencias a cuestiones locales y parte del humor descanse en juegos de alusiones o de palabras en catalán que puede que se os escapen, vedlo.

Pero Miquel Àngel tiene un lugar fijo en nuestro «Rio Wang» también por ser el creador de «L'Estrany Museu Llonovoy» [El Extraño Museo Llonovoy]. Hablábamos antes del juego. Echad un vistazo a su colección de juguetes imposibles, construidos con objects trouvés dotados de nueva vida y cargados de un sentido crítico que cubre desde lo naïf hasta el antimilitarismo.

Na Slovensku po slovensky!

Recently we have criticized the new language law of Slovakia which, in defence of the Slovakian language – and in sharp contrast with the norms of the EU and with the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages, also accepted in 2001 by the Slovakian parlament – strongly limits the public use of minority languages, and it even penalizes the “incorrect use” of Slovakian as much as 5000 euros. Now, however, we have to recognize that our opinion was too rash. Today’s edition of the popular and moderate Slovakian daily SME.sk published a document that clearly attests: the Slovakian language is in a great danger.

In this document Anna Belousovová, the vice-president of the co-governing Slovakian nationalistic party announces the standpoint of her party on the meeting which took place the day before yesterday between the Slovakian and Hungarian prime ministers in an attempt to find a solution for the tensions created by the new law. Upon the request of SME.sk, the statement of Belousovová was revised by Slovakian linguists who have found over twenty misspellings and grammatical errors in the text of the former elementary school math and geography teacher.


The mistakes run from over ten missing commas through incorrectly used and even phonetically spelled prepositions, confuse sentence structures and the misspelled name of the Hungarian prime minister to the very fact that the adamant champions of the Slovak language use a Czech expression – mi vadí, “I dislike” – instead of the correct Slovak mi prekáža. Na Slovensku po slovensky! – in Slovakia speak Slovakian, as the slogan of the party says.

The Slovakian National Party has not yet reacted upon the article. It is, however, meaningful that in the text of the statement published on their official page they have silently corrected at least the most serious errors, and that exactly so as SME.sk proposed it.


The piquancy of the affair, observes Lukáš Fila in his commentary to the article of SME.sk, is that Belousovová on the same day sent round a subscription list in the parliament with the slogan “Slovenčinu si nedáme”, we do not give the Slovak language! “All right”, Fila says. “But they could at least take one lesson or two.”

Apotheosis of the Bookworm

The “foreign materials” in old books deserve a special red-titled chapter in the great encyclopedia of bibliophilia. Until it is written, we feel it appropriate to insert here, after the pilgrim’s beard included in the cover of a codex, another similar finding of ours. True, we have already reported about it in Mesa revuelta, the “professional blog” of Studiolum, but finally here’s an apropos to present it also to the readers of Río Wang.


Recently I had a really curious experience. I asked for the Opus Catechisticum sive De Summa Doctrinae Christianae of Petrus Canisius (edition of Cologne 1586, shelfnumber 542.863) in the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and as the volume arrived, the first thing I noticed was something that could be most appropriately described as a papal bull hanging from between the leaves of the book:


However authoritative the Catechismus of Canisius was, nevertheless this appendix was not a papal bull. Its circumscription said in a slightly archaizing Hungarian:

I’VE FOUND THESE INSECTS BETWEEN
THE PAGES OF THIS BOOK.
MDLXXIV - 1962

Was this extraordinary collection of natural history the opus magnum of an exceptionally thoroughgoing restorer? The outpouring of an übertreibener Antiquargeist? A fanatic of zoohistory avant la lettre? One thing is sure: in those days of high Communism time was a cheap commodity, and people could at ease addere limam to a restored bookbinding well done.

I’m only embarrassed with the year indicated in the bull as of the first tumulation of these late Renaissance insects before the translation of their relics in 1962. It is 1574, that is, twelve years before the very printing of this Catechism. Were they documentedly transferred to this book from another one? Had they been buried in an earlier volume, but the restorer regarded it more honorable to confide their remains to this authoritative Catechism so they look forward with brighter hopes to the dies irae? Or did time flow this much at ease in those days of high Communism?

Terra Sancta

The library of the Kalocsa Cathedral preserves a strange book. This is how I wanted to begin this post, but on second thought I have considered how many posts could be started like this. The magic of these old church libraries is precisely that they preserve so many strange books, personal documents, legacies never studied, collections untouched. You do not expect the same from those ancient libraries in state ownership that have been reorganized, catalogized and disciplined a number of times. When you nestle in such a library for some days, you feel the same happy excitement of discovery as the Italian humanists of early Renaissance did when browsing through ancient monastic libraries in search of Classical authors. And in most cases you will not be disappointed.


The book I am speaking about is a handwritten German diary in which a certain Konrad Beck recorded the events of his peregrination to the Holy Land in 1483. The manuscript of only 36 leaves gets lost in the much larger, beautifully elaborated, embossed, painted, mounted and clasped leather binding like a puppy dog in its oversize fur coat. You may have the impression that the author took a large book cover with him on the long way, and he gradually added the sheets to it as he was advancing with the diary. But no, the binding is a later addition from the seventeenth century. It was then that one of the author’s late descendants inserted the diary of his grand-grand-grandfather, preserved as a precious relic, in the binding of a book that had become superfluous.



But the most peculiar feature of the book is on the inner side of the cover. Here a small two-leaved parchment window opens, similar to those on the Advent chocolate boxes arranged for each day from Saint Catherine to Christmas.


Behind the window, in a niche cut into the wooden book cover and protected with a small Muscovy glass plate, there is some strange black hair wrapped in paper. A German inscription of difficult reading announces that this is Cůnrat becken bart von Iherusalem anno 1483º, that is, “the beard of Konrad Beck from Jerusalem, 1483”. This is why the librarians called this volume “Bart-Codex”, that is, “Beard Codex” already in the 19th century.


An explication for the unusual Holy Land relic can be found some pages further, on a separate leaflet written in Latin and inserted between the folios by a descendant of Konrad Beck at the middle of the 17th century. It was him who bound the diary of his highly estimated pilgrim ancestor in this reused book cover.


Illustris Generosus et magnificus vir Dominus Joannes Truchses de Waldburg Junior deuota peregrinatione 1483. XII. Julij Hierosolymam venit. Et secum habuit Cunradum Beck de mengen Joannis fil[ium], Petrum coquum de Waldst et Vlricum pictorem familiares et famulos suos. Cunradus Beck totam peregrinationem breuiter descripsit, et barbam suam nescio an voto aut deuotione aut alia de causa abscissam in complicatam chartam condidit et inter alias e terra sancta adnectas res diligenter asseruauit, cum inscriptione proprij chyrographi: Cuenrat Becken part von Jerusalem 1483. – Hieronijmus Beck a Leopoldstorf Marci fil[ius] aui sui Itinerarium sua manu scriptum in librum hunc conligare fecit, illiusque Barbam huc reposuit, et in rei memoriam M. H. scripsit.

The illustrious, generous and magnificent Lord Johann Truchsess von Waldburg the Younger arrived on a pious pilgrimage to Jerusalem on July 12, 1483. He was accompanied by Konrad Beck of Mengen, son of Johann, the cooker Peter from Waldsee and the painter Ulrich, all of them his servants and members of his household. Konrad Beck made a short description of all the pilgrimage, and he cut his beard – it is not known whether for a vote, piety or any other reason – and, wrapping it in a paper, he assiduously kept it together with the other things he had brought from the Holy Land. He wrote on the paper with his own hand: The beard of Cuenrat Beck from Jerusalem, 1483. – Jeremias Beck, son of Markus from Leopoldsdorf caused the Itinerary, written by his ancestor with his own hand, to be bound in this cover, in which he also enclosed his beard, and in memory of all this he composed the present note.

This is all we know of the origins of the beard. Even Felix Fabri specifies only that much that Ulrich was no painter but a merchant who during one of his business journeys had been condemned to the galleys by the Saracens, and thus he accompanied Count Waldburg in the quality of an experienced interpreter. The further flamboyant details decorating the beard’s history in the poem of the popular 19th-century Jesuit poet Kálmán Rosty in the November 22, 1883 edition of the provincial daily Kalocsai Néplap are completely apocryphal. The benevolent Readers will excuse me – and if they knew its content, they would be even grateful – for not translating the text of this jovial poem.


The journey described in this diary was an important one in the history of the pilgrimages to the Holy Land, because at least six of its participants kept a journal, and two of these, the itineraries of the Dominican Felix Fabri of Ulm and of the canon Bernhard von Breidenbach of Mainz became the most popular medieval guides to the Holy Land. They were read and translated even in the 19th century.

Count Johann Truchsess von Waldburg (†1511) was the head of one of the most distinguished aristocratic family in the German Empire. The family was granted the title of Truchsess, that is “the Emperor’s steward” in 1170, and its members bore the most important offices of the empire for centuries. Johann – the Younger, to distinguish him from his uncle living in the same time (†1504) – was the counsellor of Sigismund, Archduke of Austria, while his nephew, Otto, Cardinal of Augsburg, counsellor of Emperor Charles V – and a protagonist of the popular TV series The Tudors – was one of the most consistent supporter of 16th-century Catholic reform. The seat of the family, the Upper Swabian castle of Waldburg to the north of the Lake of Boden was the official place of preservation of the imperial insignia. Their coat of arms – like those of Johann’s grandfather and father Wilhelm and Georg above – displayed three rampant black lions (or, in other descriptions, leopards). We see a similar coat of arms on the binding of the Beck manuscript, which is not surprising if the Becks belonged to the Waldburg household, although these figures appear rather grayhounds than leopards.


We do not know what moved Johann von Waldburg to his pilgrimage, but some personal crisis might have played part in it as well. It was in the previous year that he took over the heritage and offices of his deceased father, and already in the spring of 1483 he was reluctant to participate at the Imperial Diet. He asked his lord Archduke Sigismund to excuse him, but without success. Shortly afterward he asked the Archduke for permission of absence for himself and three of his fellow counsellors Johann Werner von Zimmern, Heinrich von Stoffeln and Bär (Ursus) von Hohenrechberg for the purpose of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Fabri in the list of the pilgrims mentions that “he was, as it were, a father of all the aforesaid, and from whom they all received the impulse which sent them on their pilgrimage”, and he notes only about him that he was “of respectable and lofty character, serious, and deeply concerned about the salvation of his soul”.

Joseph Vochezer in his monumental monograph (1900) on the Waldburg house on pp. 393-396 of Vol. II gives a detailed chronology of this journey. Here he notes that Count Waldburg first of all looked for an appropriate guide, and he was recommended to take with him the Dominican preacher Felix Fabri from the monastery of Ulm.

Fabri, the son of a Zurich blacksmith, seems to have been a restless and extroverted figure who took the greatest pleasure in traveling. From 1467 he organized pilgrimages to more and more distant places: to Aachen, Nuremberg, Rome, Venice and in 1480 to Palestine. But as soon as he came back from there, he was “caught by a burning desire” to return and visit the holy places again. Several travelers can identify with his remarkably precise self-analysis:

For I was by no means satisfied with my first pilgrimage, because it was exceeding short and hurried, and we ran round the holy places without understanding and feeling what they were. Besides this, we were not permitted to visit some of the holy places, both within Jerusalem and without. Nor were we allowed to walk over the Mount of Olives and its holy places more than once; and we only visited Bethlehem and Bethany once, and that in the dark. So after I had returned to Ulm and began to think about the most holy sepulchre of our Lord, and the manger wherein He lay, and the holy city of Jerusalem and the mountains which are round about it, the appearance, shape, and arrangements of these and of other holy places escaped from my mind, and the Holy Land and Jerusalem with its holy places appeared to me, shrouded in a dark mist, as though I had beheld them in a dream; and I seemed to myself to know less about all the holy places than I did before I visited them. From this I used to conceive a burning desire to return and prove the truth of this.

His superior in Ulm, however, was happy to finally have the restless monk in the monastery, and had no intention to let him go again. But Fabri pulled a lot of strings in his own interest. During the Nuremberg chapter of the order he secretly seized the permission of the Roman superior, and then he arranged with the imperial bailiff of Ulm Konrad Lochner that if this latter heard about any aristocrat going to the Holy Land, he would recommend Fabri for chaplain. This is how Count Waldburg got to know about the monk. He personally went for him to the monastery, but the superior asked time to consider. Waldburg without hesitation went to the town hall where he called upon the town council to summon the superior to fulfill his request. It indeed happened so, and Fabri happily stood at the disposal of the count and his companions. He guided them through all the wonders of the Holy Land, and in the autumn, when the others turned upon the back trail, he decided to continue his way alone (once he was granted such freedom and probably also some money for the way out of the Count’s generosity) to visit the monastery of his patron saint Catherine of Alexandria in Egypt. Later he also went to see the pyramids, he saw hippopotamuses, crocodiles and giraffes, and when finally back in Ulm he gave detailed description of them all.

The wonders of the Holy Land from the 1486 Mainz edition of Breidenbach: These animals were
faithfully painted just as we saw them in the Holy Land. From top to bottom:
Giraffe. Crocodile. Indian goat. Unicorn. Camel. Salamander.
The name of this one is not known.

Although the itinerary of Fabri became very popular, it had to go through a windy road just like the author himself. Its autograph Latin manuscript is preserved in the city library of Ulm, but the Latin text was published for the first time only in 1843. The section on the Holy Land was translated in 1896 to English by Aubrey Stewart (his name means the same as German Truchsess) on behalf of the Palestine Pilgrims’ Text Society, and it can be found on the net in the excellent Traveling to Jerusalem collection of the Colorado University; but the Egyptian adventure can be only read in Latin to this day. A practical German summary of the Latin text was made as early as the end of the 15th century, and this was published in print in 1557.

A very early, probably pre-1490 manuscript version of the German text is also preserved in the library of the Kalocsa Cathedral. However, with its 132 densely written folios it is much more bulky than the other manuscript or printed German versions. As it was never collated either with the German edition or with the Latin text, it is quite possible that it is in fact more complete than the other German texts. Its large volume and early hand both fuel our secret hope that this manuscript, probably purchased by Achbishop Ádám Patachich (†1784) together with the Beck Codex, was the German original of Fabri’s Latin text. Let us cherish this dream at least as long as we start to collate them.

Ship building in the Arsenal of Venice. From the 1486 Mainz edition of Breidenbach.

Among the participants of the pilgrimage Fabri also remembers Konrad Beck, a vir honestus et providus civis de Merengen qui Dominorum provisor fuit et procurator, a honest and careful man and a burgher of Mengen who took charge of food and provisions of the aforementioned lords. Fabri also recalls a custom of the pilgrims that may shed some light on the origins of the beard kept as a relic:

So I from this day forth [from the day of departure] let my beard grow,and adorned both my cap and my scapular with red crosses, and I assumed all the other outward signs of that holy pilgrimage, as I had a right to do. There are five outward badges of a pilgrim, to wit, a red cross on a long gray gown, with the monk's cowl sewn to the tunic-unless the pilgrim belong to some order which does not permit him to wear a gray gown. The second is a black or gray hat, also marked in front with a red cross. The third is a long beard growing from a {ace which is serious and pale on account of his labours and dangers, for in every land even heathens themselves when travelling let their beards and hair grow long until their return home; and this, they say, was first done by Osiris, a very ancient King of Egypt, who was reputed to be a God, and who travelled throughout the whole world. The fourth is the scrip upon his shoulders, containing his slender provisions, with a bottle-sufficient, not for luxury, but barely for the necessaries of life. The fifth, which he assumes only in the Holy Land, is an ass, with a Saracen driver, instead of his staff.

Saracens in the Holy Land. One of the women wears a burka. From the 1488 Augsburg edition of Breidenbach.

The third chronicler of the pilgrimage, also recalled by Fabri, was Bernhard von Breidenbach, a canon of Mainz, who accompanied Count Johannes von Solms of Hessen. They joined the Waldburg company in Venice together with some more pilgrims, including four Hungarians: Johannes archidiaconus, Matheus canonicus, Oschwaldus plebanus and Petrus von Ethews ein Burger. Breidenbach thus visited and described the same places as Fabri and Beck, but already with a guide as a business enterprise in mind. In the spring of the following year of 1484 Count Ludwig von Hanau-Lichtenberg already visited the holy places with the help of a guide compiled by him. And two years later, in 1486 Erhard Reuwich of Mainz published the book in Latin and German, illustrated with his own woodcuts which then were also taken over by the great Chronicle of the World by Schedel. A copy of the 1488 Augsburg edition of Breidenbach’s guide is also preserved in the library of the Kalocsa Cathedral.

When ninety-nine years after the pilgrimage, in 1582 the tomb of Breidenbach (†1497) was opened, his body was found entire, because – as the contemporaries wrote – on his Eastern journey he had taken the precaution of bringing back with him the best of spices for embalming. And his face, though in life clean shaven, as witness his statue in the Cathedral of Mainz, was covered with prolixa ac ruffa barba, an abundant and ruddy beard, thus even in his death attesting his being an illustrious pilgrim.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the 1486 Mainz edition of Breidenbach.

In the Studiolum we plan to publish during the next months the facsimile of the Bart Codex with the transcription of the German text and a summary of its content in English, Spanish and Hungarian. We will also note what Fabri and Breidenbach saw in the same places, and will also quote from other guides as well as from the ancient and modern descriptions of the holy places. Although this virtual pilgrimage grants no indulgence whatsoever, at least it will evoke something of that region which was at once the center of the world and the gorgeous East for the Middle Ages. Come with us.