In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Crusade historian Reinhold Röhricht published a series of studies on maps and plans of the Holy Land (or, as he termed it, Palästinakunde) from the seventh to the sixteenth centuries, thereby establishing a corpus of materials for future scholars. Yet despite their apparent centrality for medieval studies, it has taken some time for Christian maps of the Holy Land to come into focus as the object of close scrutiny. Now, however, the topic is gaining some momentum: Patrick Gautier Dalché's important article, “Cartes de Terre Sainte, cartes de pèlerins” (in Tra Roma e Gerusalemme nel Medio Evo: paesaggi umani ed ambientali del pellegrinaggio meridionale, ed. Massimo Oldoni, 2005, 3:573–612), and the efforts of scholars such as Paul Harvey (Medieval Maps of the Holy Land, 2012), Lucy Donkin and Hanna Vorholt (eds., Imagining Jerusalem in the Medieval West, 2012), Emmanuelle Vagnon (Cartographie et représentations de l'orient Méditerranéen en occident, 2013), and Ingrid Baumgärtner (“Das Heilige Land kartieren und beherrschen,” in Herrschaft verorten. Politische Kartographie im Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Ingrid Baumgärtner and Martina Stercken, 2012, 27–75), among others, have brought a new intensity to the study of Holy Land maps. Pnina Arad's Christian Maps of the Holy Land continues this work, offering an elegant and thought-provoking overview of the corpus established by Röhricht and supplemented by later authors, while enlarging its temporal and spatial reach.
Arad organizes her material chronologically, starting with a brief consideration of the Christian perception of a holy land, with particular emphasis on the emergence of pilgrimage—from the fourth century a “vast phenomenon” (10). Subsequent chapters introduce the reader to the sixth-century mosaic map of the Holy Land found in a Byzantine church in Madaba, Jordan, before she moves on to the Latin tradition: maps of Jerusalem and surrounding sites from the twelfth century; the more detailed maps of Matthew Paris, Pietro Vesconte, and Marino Sanudo; and a selection of fifteenth-century maps of the Holy Land compiled by pilgrims, with attention devoted to the works of Gabriele Capodilista, William Wey, and Bernhard von Breydenbach. A thoughtful chapter on a map made by Lucas Cranach to commemorate the 1493 pilgrimage of Friedrich III (the Wise) moves the study to the cusp of the Reformation, and the unstable setting of Luther's Wittenberg; the final chapter explores the role of the Holy Land map between Protestantism and Catholicism, with a coda on the remarkable proskyntaria produced as souvenirs in Jerusalem for Greek Orthodox pilgrims between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.
The genre of Holy Land map books lends itself to slim, lavishly illustrated surveys, and at around 150 pages with eleven plates and sixty-two figures, Arad's volume certainly falls into that category. Nevertheless, the footnotes and around thirty pages of appendices reveal something of the scholarly labor that underpins Arad's findings, and the consideration of post-medieval and Greek material pushes the book into unfamiliar territory, allowing useful continuities to come into view. Above all, Arad emphasizes the role of pilgrimage as a spur to map production, not because pilgrims needed maps to get about (they had human guides for that), but because maps served to allow for contemplative experiences before and after pilgrimage, and offered those who could not travel the opportunity to visualize the holy sites. Arad's expertise as an art historian brings notable advantages to her analysis, particularly in the later stages of the book as the maps in question become increasingly figurative. However, while Arad's argument for the longue durée of the association between pilgrimage and maps is largely successful, it is repeatedly hamstrung by her superficial treatment of pre-twelfth-century materials. Arad claims that the western maps of the Holy Land that survive from the twelfth century adapted what she terms “the Byzantine mapping tradition of the Holy Land” (33), a tradition whose sole surviving representative is the Madaba map. How, where, and when this Byzantine tradition was transported to the West is not established. The problem seems to lie in Arad's uncritical acceptance of a line of transmission proposed by Milka Levy-Rubin in a 2014 article (“From Eusebius to the Crusader Maps: The Origin of the Holy Land Maps,” in Virtual Constructs of Jerusalem, ed. Bianca Kühnel et al. [2015], 253–63), which refers to a “tradition that began in the Byzantine period with Eusebius [of Caesarea, d. 339] and Jerome [d. 420]” (263). In Arad's work, this loose phrasing (Jerome, for all his virtues, is not normally considered Byzantine) has hardened into a Byzantine “tradition” (3) and “prototype” (4). As a consequence, Arad construes the use of toponyms from Jerome's Liber locorum, a translation of Eusebius's Onomasticon, as evidence for a “Byzantine environment” (45). Leaving aside the questions of whether Eusebius actually produced a map (Jerome mentions a pictura of Jerusalem and the Temple) and whether that map actually survived to influence later images—both of which are very far from certain—it is surely more accurate to say that the Latin West and what little historians know of Byzantine mapping of the Holy Land shared elements of the same late antique tradition. Unfortunately, Arad's problematic assertion of a Byzantine model hampers discussion of a number of the maps in question—Matthew Paris is said to use “the prototypic Byzantine layout” (47) in one of his maps—and it undermines her conclusions. Here the brevity of the book militates against a less hurried, and more rewarding, discussion.
That flaw in the argument aside, Arad makes a fluent, often enlightening, contribution to the study of the representation of the Holy Land. The appendices will also be a useful resource for future researchers. Note, however, the following corrections: at 142 for apostolic read apostolis, and for verice read vertice; at 144 for sancea read sancte; at 145 for Rachel read Rachelis; at 146 for loxus read locus; at 147 for Snna read Anna, and for clastrum read claustrum; at 148 for sangulis read sanguinis; at 161 for mullum read nullum, and for palcium read palacium; at 162 for decapitaus read decapitatus.
