Some of the earliest examples of travel literature allowed the armchair traveler to enjoy foreign sights and sounds without the slow unpleasantness of actual transportation and the dangers of unpredictable native cuisines. Fifteenth and sixteenth-century European travel writers (and illustrators) sometimes characterized the difference between their reading public and the others they enjoyed reading about by describing their eating habits. In the narrative of Bernhard von Breydenbach's long voyage to the Holy Land at the end of the fifteenth century, the emphasis of Erhard Reuwich's panoramic woodcut illustrations remains on the cityscape rather than the table. The book pauses to pinpoints the outdoor eating arrangements of the Suriani, a sect of Christians living near Jerusalem. A relatively early owner of this copy, possibly from the seventeenth century, drew in their own emblem at the end in red and black ink—-a magnificent pelican who pierces her own breast to feed her young with her blood. A well-known symbol of Christian self-sacrifice with an allusion to the sacrament of communion, the bird also appears in Konrad Lykosthenes' mid sixteenth-century book of prodigies and abnormal creatures from uncharted lands. It includes a luridly hand-colored illustration of cannibal repast—-a human body turning on a spit above a fire. To the uninitiated, the pelican's self-mutilation and the Christian sacraments—-in which Jesus Christ's transubstantiated body and blood are consumed in the form of bread and wine—-might have seemed like cannibalism.

1. Bernhard von Breydenbach. Pilgrimage to the venerated and glorious divine sepulcher in Jerusalem (. . . peragrinationis ad venerandu[m] et gloriosum sepulcru[m] dominicu[m] in Iherusale[m] ... [Mainz: Erhard Reuwich, 11 February 1486]. (Prints and Drawings)
2. Bernhard von Breydenbach. Pilgrimage to the venerated and glorious divine sepulcher in Jerusalem (. . . peragrinationis ad venerandu[m] et gloriosum sepulcru[m] dominicu[m] in Iherusale[m] ... [Mainz: Erhard Reuwich, 11 February 1486]. (Prints and Drawings)
3. Konrad Lykosthenes. Prodigiorvm ac ostentorvm chronicon …(Chronicle and display of prodigies, which are beyond the natural order). Basileæ: Henricvm Petri [1557]. (Ryerson and Burnham Libraries)
4. Konrad Lykosthenes. Prodigiorvm ac ostentorvm chronicon …(Chronicle and display of prodigies, which are beyond the natural order). Basileæ: Henricvm Petri [1557]. (Ryerson and Burnham Libraries)