This guidebook for pilgrims describes the area around Palestine, focusing on Christian Holy Sites or sites of interest as mentioned in the Bible. It is descriptive of places without saying much about the people living in these places, other than references to Saracens, Christians and Nubians.
J. H. Bernard writes in the introduction to his translation, Guide-Book to Palestine:
The guide-book to Palestine here offered to the Palestine Pilgrims' Text Society is a translation of a Latin MS. [manuscript] in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin (d. 4. 7). It is based, in the main, on the account of the Holy Land given by Philippus Brusserius Savonensis, whose work has been published by Neumann in the OesterreichiscJie Viertel-jahresschrift fiir katholische Theologie for 1872 ; but it contains a considerable quantity of matter not given by Philippus,! though for the most part to be found in the works of later writers, such as Marinus Sanutus (1310), Odoricus (1320), and (as Dr. Rohricht has kindly pointed out) Poggibonsi (1345). It may be taken as certain that this guide-book is later than the work of Philippus, which was shown by Neumann to have been composed within the last decade and a half of the thirteenth century. How much later it is, is not very easy to say; but we shall probably not be twenty years wrong in dating it 1350 A.D. It can hardly be a more modern compilation than this, for the original MS. [manuscript] is of the fourteenth or (possibly) early fifteenth century. The colophon at the end of the MS. [manuscript] I read as follows: Expliciunt peregrinationes totius terre sancte s. m. p. de m.; but I can offer no explanation of the concluding letters. Were such explanation forthcoming, the date of the compilation might perhaps be more exactly determined.
The relations between the various extant descriptions of the Holy Land written in Crusading times are very complex. Like the compilers of modern guide-books, the authors did not scruple to borrow liberally from the works of their predecessors; and, even where the book professes to be the record of personal travels, the phrases of the older itineraries continually appear. The pilgrimages which have most in common with the present little book are those of Theoderich, John of Würzburg, Fetellus, and Felix Fabri. Fabri's account is at least a hundred years later, while the others are a couple of centuries earlier than the work of this Innominatus. The Holy Places at which indulgences, whether plenary (absolutio) or temporary (septem annorum et septejn quarentenarmn), might be obtained are practically the same as those to which the like privileges are attached by Quaresmius.
Rohricht has given a full catalogue of the MSS. [manuscripts] of Philippus in his Bibliotheca Geographica Palestinae (p. 60), and it is to be desired that some closer examination of these should be made than they have yet received. In Neumann's edition only five are used, and of these the Bruges MS. [manuscript] differs so much from the others that it plainly belongs to a quite different recension. To give a full discussion of the sources from which the Dublin MS. [manuscript] was compiled would be thus impossible in the absence of exact knowledge as to the varying texts of Philippus. But in any case from such an investigation for our present purposes little would be gained, for we can approximately determine from internal evidence the date at which the compilation was made. As a guide-book, it goes more into detail and is more systematic than any of the other Crusading accounts as far as I know. A few simple notes have been added, mainly with the object of comparing the account given by our author with that of the other Crusading pilgrims.
No bibliography of the author is available.
