Descriptions of Holy Land Sites and Monuments in Different Manuscript Versions of Burchard of Mount Sion’s Descriptio Terrae Sanctae

Abstract

The stemma recently established by Jonathan Rubin of the relationship between the surviving manuscripts of the longer version of Burchard of Mount Sion’s Descriptio identifies five families (a–e), which form a sequential chain, albeit with no direct relationship identifiable between any two of them. The purpose of this paper is to explore some of the differences in the accounts of Burchard’s visits to and descriptions of Holy Land sites provided by the manuscripts from Zwickau (Zw3) and London (Lo2), together with their respective families of related texts (a and b), assessing what changes might have been made by Burchard himself rather than by subsequent copyists. The accounts of visits to sites and monuments confirm that both family a and family b contain material attributable to Burchard that is not found in the other, while the account of St Mary of Carmel given in family c also raises the possibility of other revisions having been made, apparently by another hand, before the fall of Acre and the loss of the Dominican house there in 1291.