19 research outputs found
Pierre Belonâs singularity:Pilgrim fact in Renaissance natural history
From the 1540s through the 1570s, some French travellers started to write in a distinctive cosmographical genre of singularitĂŠs, 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 Mansâ Les observations de plusieurs singularitĂŠs et choses mĂŠmorables trouvĂŠes en Grèce, Asie, JudĂŠe, Ăgypte, Arabie et autres pays estranges (1553). In the context of this special issue, the author offers Belon as a âhardâ case for pushing the boundaries of âpilgrimage scienceâ. 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, Belonâs 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 Matareaâs 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 Belonâs account itself as an archetypic case, one embedded in later natural histories â in much the same way that pilgrimage accounts drew upon one another
Knowing like a Pilgrim
This article opens a special issue on âPilgrim Knowledgeâ with a programmatic argument for knowledge-gathering practices as an intrinsic part of pilgrimage in the early modern Mediterranean. It addresses the history of travel, on the one hand, and the history of science and knowledge, on the other. The article then suggests that Christian pilgrimage set a special value on bodily experience, which in turn demanded practices of witnessing, collecting, comparing, codifying, and authenticating, here worked out through a range of examples. Matters of faith were also matters of fact