Chiselled in rock, printed on paper: Francesco Quaresmio and the epigraphy of the Holy Land

Abstract

The substantial two-volume work Terrae Sanctae Elucidatio (1639) by the Franciscan friar Francesco Quaresmio (b. Lodi, Italy, 1583–1656) is known as a veritable encyclopaedia on the Holy Land. It is also an itinerary of pilgrimage through the sacred sites, taking their monumentality and graphic landscape into account. Quaresmio was especially attentive to the Latin inscriptions made by the Crusaders, here copied by him as autoptic testimonies. This is part of a more general phenomenon. From the fifteenth century through to the seventeenth, in Europe this period is sometimes called the “Age of Inscriptions”, during which epigraphy was recognized as a source of ancient history on a par with philology and archaeology. The overall aim of the present article is to show how Quaresmio, while continuing a medieval tradition of Franciscan scholarship, improved upon epigraphical study by deploying a specific technology, namely the visual rendering of uncial inscriptions in printed form. His rigorous observations, however, would have come to naught without the technical mastery of the Flemish printer-typographer Balthasar Moretus (1574–1641). Following previous developments in pilgrimage literature, where inscriptions – especially the Crusader epitaphs at the foot of Calvary – were commonplace, Quaresmio studied inscriptions not only as texts, but also considered their formal and material aspects. Ultimately, the present study argues that these Latin epigraphic texts played a role in the man’s theological argumentation and in the defence of the loca sancta as Latin possession.