Virtual Pilgrimages in the Convent: Imagining Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages by Kathryn M. Rudy (review)

This is a magnificent, revisionist study of an important topic. It examines the ways in which nuns, religious women, and even a few laywomen from the Low Countries interacted with texts, images, and objects to go on virtual pilgrimage to Rome and Jerusalem during the half-century or so before the Reformation. This much is well known; but much less so is the fact that although many were motivated by lack of resources and opportunity, not a few simply did not want to compromise their commitment to poverty and enclosure. At the book’s core is Rudy’s sensitive and nuanced discussion of seventeen manuscript texts, dating from the fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries, which were copied by nuns or devout women (mostly tertiaries). Several of these texts have been transcribed in their original language, Middle Dutch, with parallel English translation, in the extensive appendices on pages 263–448. As a corollary to the fact that these accounts, more often than not, drew on diaries or guidebooks written by those who had actually visited the sites in Rome and the Holy Land, their users—and this word is used advisedly, given the passive, modern-day connotations of “reader”—tended not to interpret pilgrimage metaphorically but sought to replicate the experience as physically and literally as possible: “not just with the imagination, but with the eyes, the hands, and the feet” (p. 21). A striking manifestation of the desire for “authenticity” was the importance of so-called “metric relics”—“the measured distances between holy places … which could then be remapped onto the local environment to construct personal Passion theaters” (p. 97). Rudy sets these phenomena firmly in the context of the influence in the Low Countries of the devotio moderna, which she considers responsible not only for spurring production of vernacular devotional literature in the century up to the Reformation but also for “the ubiquity of women’s vernacular literacy” (p. 25) as testified by the survival of literally hundreds of manuscripts written in Middle Dutch with feminine pronouns and nouns. Although the lion’s share of Rudy’s attention is paid to the ways in which the Holy Land was evoked in text and image, as she notes, the earliest work that consciously sought to provide a substitute for physical pilgrimage was an early-fifteenth-century text, attributed spuriously to Jean Gerson, which explained how its readers could journey to Rome in their imagination. However, it was not only owing to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, which made actual travel to the Holy Land much more difficult, that Jerusalem became the focus of attention. Key to this development was the direct association of visits to the specific locations where Christ walked, talked, suffered, and was crucified with spiritual reward in the form of indulgences. The master impresarios here were friars of the Franciscan order who had been given the role of custodians of the Holy Places by the pope in 1342. It was they who transplanted the spiritual boon of plenary indulgences—nine of which could be gained in Jerusalem alone (and four of those within the single site of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre)—to Western Europe. Their vehicle was the so-called Portiuncula indulgence—named after the favorite church of St. Francis just outside Assisi where he died—which was granted to those who underwent an overnight vigil within the church (based upon the prototype in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre). In due course, provided that papal permission was forthcoming, this spiritual boon could be earned wherever devout souls virtually “walked in Christ’s footsteps” during Passion week; following as they did so the path of the first Christian pilgrim, the Blessed Virgin Mary, who daily relived her son’s final suffering by tracing his last journey until she herself was taken up into...