Wandering Monks, Virgins, and Pilgrims: Ascetic Travel in the Mediterranean World, A.D. 300-800 (review)

In this study, Maribel Dietz assesses the implications of travel in its various forms to European Christianity during a crucial period of social, political, and cultural change. The volume opens with a general discussion of mobility and migration within late Antiquity in which she argues rightly that models of "pilgrimage" derived from later Christian centuries do little justice to the wide variety of religious mobility evident in late Antiquity, from the peripatetic monks berated by the early monastic founders, to the penitents and religious sight-seers familiar from the writings of Palladius and Rufinus. Of the subsequent chapters, two deal specifically with the Hispanic provinces—one on religious travelers from the region in the fourth and fifth centuries, the other on monasticism within the Visigothic kingdom. The remainder considers the hostility to peripatetic monks in many late antique texts, the importance of travel as a mode of religious expression for women (the highlight of the study), and finally the peculiar importance of the Holy Land pilgrimage within the Anglo-Saxon and Hibernian missionary movement of the seventh and eighth centuries.

As will be apparent from this summary, the volume has an admirable breadth, both chronologically and geographically. At its best—as in the discussion of the great journeys of Helena, the two Melanias, and the anonymous Piacenza pilgrim in chapter 4—the study clearly demonstrates the role that Christian travel played in the emerging Christian Weltbild of the late Roman world. By embracing such a variety of source material, moreover, Dietz does an impressive job of illustrating the many different kinds of travel that the new faith generated. But this catholicity also has its drawbacks, and at times the study lacks a rigorous focus. At times, the author seems drawn by the idiosyncrasies of her texts, rather than by any overarching thesis. The Vitae sanctorum patrum Emeritensium, for example, has little to say on either long-distance "pilgrimage" or itinerant worship, and yet is discussed for a full seven pages (pp. 168-175). Conversely, several subjects of central importance would seem to have been neglected. Brent Shaw has convincingly deconstructed the infamous circumcelliones of North Africa as a figment of the heresiological tradition, but the very popularity of these "wandering monks" within the imagination of sedentary writers surely deserves closer investigation. Some of these issues are hinted at in the discussion of pre-Benedictine monastic law in chapter 3, but much remains unsaid.

There are also one or two errors of fact within the text. The Vandal occupation of North Africa took place in the fifth century (from 428 to 439 A.D.) and not the sixth (p. 23), and Egeria's travels may be dated to a couple of generations after the journey of the Empress Helena, not "just a generation before" as stated on page 109. These are surely simply slips of the pen, but a more serious error is apparent in the discussion of the context of the monastic rules of Fructuosus of Braga during the mid-seventh century. The suggestion at page 183 that general social instability was caused by "[t]he invasions and battles between the Germanic tribes" hardly applies to Visigothic Spain in the seventh century. Here, as elsewhere, migrating barbarians are cast as a major cause of social and religious instability—a model which owes more to the apocalyptic pronouncements of writers like Hydatius (who appears frequently in chapter 1) than to contemporary scholarship on the political and social world of the late antique period.

Despite lacking a precise focus, there is much here to be commended: not least the sensitive analysis of some neglected texts. It represents a thoughtful and idiosyncratic contribution to an important field.