Broader Horizons: A Study of Johannes Witte de Hese's 'Itinerarius' and Medieval Travel Narratives by Scott D. Westrem (review)

Abstract

528 Reviews thoroughly recommended to anglophone graduate students who have already mastered the clear exposition by Gibbs and Johnson in the extensive Afterword of their 1984 translation in the Penguin Classics series. More seasoned scholars will also find the volume indispensable as a bracing contribution to the issues and cruxes thrown up by this idiosyncratic text in the last three decades. University of Durham Neil Thomas Broader Horizons: A Study of Johannes Witte de Hese's Ttinerarius' and Medieval Travel Narratives. By Scott D. Westrem. (Medieval Academy Books, 105) Cambridge, MA: The Medieval Academy of America. 2001. xxiii + 359 pp. $30. ISBN 0-915651-10-6 (hbk). This book, the fruit of two decades of intermittent work developing the author's doctoral thesis (Northwestern University, 1985), is a study of what purports to be an account of a pilgrimage undertaken by the shadowy Johannes Witte de Hese, apparently a cleric in the diocese of Utrecht but not more precisely identifiable, to Jerusalem in 1389. Unlike Hans Tucher'sgenuine travel account ofninety years later, recently edited by Randall Herz (Die Reise ins Gelobte Land Hans Tuchers des Alteren (i4jg-i48o) (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2002)), Witte's is a fantasy pastiche of places and data culled from a variety of medieval sources. It tells us nothing about Jerusalem but focuses on his alleged experiences in the Red Sea area and on his subsequent travels to Egypt, Mount Sinai, Prester John's empire, the church of St Thomas in India, Purgatory, and other exotic locations. A sixteenth-century reader of a copy now in the Stadtbibliothek at Trier already declared: 'Dieser author ist ein leibhaffterfabularius gewesenn.' While the work has not previously attracted much serious attention, schol? ars having considered Witte a fantasist 'worthy more of neglect than attention', it is of interest as testifyingto a growing interest in literature about the East in the Lower Rhine area in the fourteenth and fifteenthcenturies: significantly,Prester John's capital is specifically said to be twenty-four times the size of Cologne, and the firstfour printed editions (all published in the 1490s) came from Cologne, with other early ones from Antwerp and Deventer. After considering the content and context ofthe Itinerarius (as the firstprinter,Jo? hann Guldenschaff, called it), the problem of the author's identity and the reception of his work, Westrem presents a painstaking investigation of the textual transmission. The work was written in Latin, of 'sophomoric' quality (p. 65), but was subsequently revised by unknown editors. Eight Latin manuscripts are known, the oldest (not the original but the earliest 'recovered', a term Westrem prefers to 'surviving') perhaps copied in 1424; this is MS 1424/C0 in the University of Minnesota (formerly MS Phillips 6650). Three of the manuscripts were copied from printed editions, testify? ing to continuing interest in the work around 1500. A Middle Dutch translation was also produced, now best known from a transcription made around 1690. Westrem discusses the development of the text in some detail, and then prints the Latin, the Middle Dutch translation, and a modern English rendering ofthe Latin as Chapters 4, 5, and 6 respectively. This mode of presentation already makes it rather difficultfor the reader to compare the three versions, but worse is to come. In Chapter 4, beneath the Latin text, we findthe critical apparatus (pp. 124-54), but this is then followed on pp. 155-81 by seven distinct categories of textual notes: (1) variant spellings of place names and proper nouns; (2) scribal corrections in the Latin manuscripts; (3) ortho? graphical variants in the manuscripts and printed editions; (4) variant presentations of numerals, roman and arabie; (5) grammatical errors in the textual witnesses; (6) scribal marginalia and rubrics; and (7) an inventory of typographical errors in the printed MLRy 99.2, 2004 529 editions. While it is undeniably more convenient to have such details brought together than to have to search for them in the masses of variants recorded in the apparatus, it does make the book extraordinarily difficultto use, unless one is solely concerned with what the work is about, in which case one may safely ignore everything except the Latin text and/or the English translation and the commentary. The...