Gilles Caillotin, Pèlerin: Le Retour de Rome d'un Sergier Rémois, 1724 (review)

Gilles Caillotin, a master artisan of serge wool cloth, left his home town, Reims, on foot, June 17, 1724, as a pilgrim, first to the tomb of Charles Borromeo in Milan, then to the Holy House of Loreto near Ancona on the Adriatic, finally by way of Assisi to Rome. After spending seventeen days in Rome fulfilling pilgrim devotions, he returned to Reims, taking notes as he traveled. Eventually, about 1732, he composed an account of this pilgrimage, to which he added several other regional pious journeys, apparently working from notes he himself had taken, but also augmented with passages copied from other travelers' guides. His account of the Reims-to-Rome trip and his stay there has been lost, but the return has survived. This return trip is here elegantly edited by Dominique Julia, and lavishly furnished with an introduction, copious footnotes providing detailed explanations of places, persons, and events mentioned in the text, and an extensive Postface, where she discusses eighteenth-century pilgrim society, the characteristics of the text itself, and other details of Caillotin's experiences of journey, hospitality, and fellow travelers, as well as a sketch of his person and character.

For a modern reader it seems a formidable trip: more than 1000 miles on foot, averaging seventeen miles a day going and twenty returning (included crossing the Alps). He had his hat and cape, his bag of essentials, and his staff, but little else. We learn where he stopped each day (a nice map of the itinerary is included)—usually staying in pilgrim hospices, but sometimes in the open air—and we hear about other pilgrims from all over Europe, as well as about a few shady characters that he met along the way. With difficulty, he recovered his papally blessed rosary, with holy medals attached, that had been stolen by one pseudo-pilgrim. We hear about other travelers (he was almost never alone): AWOL soldiers, professional pilgrims (one making his seventh trip to Rome to fulfill other people's vows), pilgrims already at Compostela, a drunk priest, a Protestant minister supposedly on his way to Rome to adjure his heresy. Julia tells us, based on pilgrim hospice records, that eighteenth-century pilgrims were mostly young men, though both younger and older men and even women (usually with families) were also on the road.

Caillotin was then a typical pilgrim: twenty-seven years old, single, coming from a lower middle-class family of cloth artisans, pious, and, we would have to conclude, tough, though perhaps afflicted with scrofula. His passport (included with twenty-three other illustrations inserted into this journal) along with other Reims archival documents reveal that he was baptized December 1, 1697, was about five-feet-six-inches tall, never married, and died at forty-nine, July 11, 1746. Caillotin was close to Jesuits in Reims, perhaps educated by them, and was a member of a Jesuit Marian congregation of sergiers, which probably facilitated his finding lodging. He was a fervent Counter-Reformation Catholic, disdainful of superstitious practices but enthusiastic about relics, indulgences, and other forms of Catholic piety. He also shows himself a fierce anti-Jansenist and a stout supporter of the pope. Since he stayed in Rome with a Christian Brother (one of the first followers of St. John Baptist de La Salle), he may also have attended their school in Reims.

Here is an admirable fragment of eighteenth-century European culture and religion viewed from below, thus complementing more elite accounts from above.