Pierre Belon’s singularity: pilgrim fact in Renaissance natural history

Abstract

From the 1540s through the 1570s, some French travellers started to write in a distinctive cosmographical genre of singularités, a term that brought together the exotic and unusual with the factuality of first-person observation. Especially influential examples include the learned apothecary Pierre Belon du Mans’ Les observations de plusieurs singularités et choses mémorables trouvées en Grèce, Asie, Judée, Égypte, Arabie et autres pays estranges (1553). In the context of this special issue, the author offers Belon as a “hard” case for pushing the boundaries of “pilgrimage science”. The straightforward claim is that he depended on genres describing voyages to the Levant, extending back to fifteenth-century accounts by best-selling authors such as Hans Tucher, Felix Fabri, Bernhard von Breydenbach, and Arnold von Harff. More significantly, framed as a case in the formation of natural history as a discipline, Belon’s account of the balsam grove of Matarea lets us see how the practices of layering of observation into a fact could not separate science from pilgrimage. To make this point, Oosterhoff begins with the scholarship on Matarea and fact-making, before taking up the manner in which Matarea’s balsam was related in pilgrimage narratives from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He pauses briefly on the Renaissance topical theory that underpinned natural history, and examines Belon’s account itself as an archetypic case, one embedded in later natural histories – in much the same way that pilgrimage accounts drew upon one another.