Pilgrimage in the Middle Ages: A Reader (review)

Pilgrimage in the Middle Ages, the sixteenth volume of the University of Toronto Press’s “Readings in Medieval Civilizations and Cultures” series, provides an impressively comprehensive collection of medieval pilgrimage narratives. In the words of its editor, Brett Edward Whalen, “This Reader offers students an opportunity to take a journey of their own across approximately fifteen centuries of history organized around the theme of pilgrimage, defined in the widest possible sense as any sort of travel, both local and long-distance, made at least in part for the purpose of religious devotion” (xi). From the beginning, he asks his readers, defined first as “students” and later as “students and historians,” to understand the act of reading as a pilgrimage—experiencing new places, seeing familiar places (especially Jerusalem) in new ways, and meeting new people: “men and women who left their homes and routines to seek out God’s grace as mediated through their ‘liminal’ experience of travel, an intermediary or transitional time outside the strictures and norms of daily life” (xii). In doing so, he successfully evokes in his short introduction the sense of excitement felt at the outset of a long journey, at least to readers who come to the book with an interest in the subject matter. By defining pilgrimage in this way, Whalen breathes life into medieval pilgrims for students, revealing the dynamism and excitement of their act of walking away, at least for a time, from the familiar. And yet, he does not allow this image of the wide-eyed, devoutly idealistic medieval pilgrim to hold the stage alone for long as he reminds us of the not-so-devout motivations of many and the blood spilled in Jerusalem and elsewhere by the crusaders and other military pilgrims.

The historical scope of this reader is broad, including pilgrimage accounts and writings about pilgrimage in a wider sense from the fall of the western Roman Empire to a staged debate between Sir Thomas More and Martin Luther. The organization of the book is chronological. Jerusalem provides a focal point from the beginning, and the first chapter, “The Origins of Christian Pilgrimage,” traces its development as a pilgrimage site as well as providing a few accounts of pre-Christian devotional travel. Whalen seamlessly places biblical material next to the historical writings of Josephus and other travel narratives. His second chapter explores the creation of “Europe’s Christian landscape” from the fifth to the tenth centuries, while the focus of the third is the effect of the Muslim conquest upon Jerusalem itself. Chapter 4 is centered around the millennium in Europe, and chapter 5, “Pilgrimage and Holy War,” shifts to military pilgrimage in the form of the crusades. The formation in the High Middle Ages of the well-known great pilgrimage routes of Europe, such as Canterbury and Santiago de Compostela, is the subject of the sixth chapter, while chapter 7 moves away from the European focus of the book to include African and Asian pilgrimage narratives such as those of Ibn Battuta and Mansa Musa. The final chapter, “Pilgrimage and Piety in the Late Middle Ages,” provides accounts of critics as well as defenders of pilgrimage at the end of the Middle Ages. Included in this final chapter are also selections from the Middle English works of Chaucer and Margery Kempe. The inclusion of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, in prose translation and alongside chronicles and other historical works, feels slightly strange and runs the risk of eliding its formal, poetic elements, but this is consistent with the approach of this volume which compiles a vast variety of texts in disparate forms and languages.

The fact that this book groups together works such as the Canterbury Tales and Pope Boniface’s declaration of plenary indulgences also brings me to what is perhaps the work’s greatest strength: it makes this impressive variety of texts accessible to a reader of English—linguistically as well as conceptually, for Whalen has translated a number of...