City Walk or Booklore? Eighteenth-Century Inscription Hunters in Action

This article offers a critical inquiry of the compilation of inscriptions and their transmission through books and manuscripts. It focuses on a bundle of hand-written slips which record about fifty-two inscriptions from early modern Brussels and which offers a glimpse on the preparatory work for publishing a town description or history. Its title suggests that the authors have used the peripatetic method, an approach in which an author, in the course of a stroll around a place, lists and describes any interesting buildings and sites he encounters. The method seems very appropriate when it comes to collect the texts of public inscriptions in a city or town, since it is generally thought that such texts on buildings could be read by every passer-by. Yet, nonetheless the authors of the Brussels’ compilation certainly recorded texts while walking around in town, they apparently copied texts from existing books as well.