Pilgrimage in the Middle Ages: A Research Guide by Linda Kay Davidson, Maryjane Dunn-Wood (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER us to continue with the investigations of medieval women and to accept their epistolary documents as equally important representatives of medi­ eval culture as romances and courtly love songs. ALBRECHT CLASSEN University of Arizona LINDA KAY DAVIDSON and MARYJANE OuNN-WOOD. Pilgrimage in the Middle Ages: A Research Guide. Garland Medieval Bibliographies, vol. 16. New York and London: Garland, 1993. Pp. xiv, 480; 10 illus. $74.00. As someone who tried to research the subject of pilgrimage for a book written before this bibliography, or even computerized card catalogues, appeared on the scene, I can only applaud the publication of Davidson and Dunn-Wood's guidebook. This volume has no real predecessor that the authors or I know of, though Petzoldt's Bibliographie zur Ikonographie und materiellen Kultur des Wallfahrtswesens (1972) overlaps somewhat, at least for the purposes of those who read German and are interested in iconogra­ phy. It does what its title says it does, and the need for such a resource on a topic of interest to intellectual workers in such a hugh variety of fields is obvious. The authors have restricted themselves to mainly, although not exclu­ sively, English-language scholarship and translations of primary sources. Some French works and translations are listed, a very few in German, Spanish, and Italian. Editions ofLatin works without accompanying trans­ lations are rare, but since most extant firsthand accounts ofpilgrimage have been translated into modern languages, this is not as serious as it sounds. Other restrictions include the understandable elimination of the category of crusade, which is handled in other bibliographies and would have greatly enlarged the volume; they give a few important general references in Chap. 3 (section 11.B). The focus (not indicated in the title) is on Chris­ tian, and Western, Europe. Medieval Islamic and Jewish pilgrimages are not ignored but seem marginal, and given the language restrictions, it is inevitable that Scandinavian, eastern European, Russian and North African pilgrimages are under-attended to. Constantinople, like the Crusades, re­ ceives a page of "basic starting points for further research" (p. 197). Clearly 172 REVIEWS the book is intended to organize the large body ofmainstream, Eurocentric medieval scholarship into what that scholarship sees as a mostly Christian phenomenon. Pilgrimage in the Middle Ages is divided into two main parts: (1) a guide to research, elaborately outlined in seven divided and subdivided chapters, listing several primary and secondary works in most sections of each chap­ ter, and (2) an annotated bibliography, alphabetically arranged. There is no index, which is a shame, since not all works squirreled away in sub­ subsections of the guide are listed in the bibliography, and since many works are listed in several different chapters and sections, and one could glean more about them than there is space to say in the annotations of the general bibliography if one could easily look up all their manifestations in the authors' taxonomy. The guide focuses, after two chapters of general overview, on a division ofmaterials by sites: there are chapters on the Holy Land, Rome, Compostela, and "Other Sites," which include Canterbury, Norwich, Walsingham, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland generally and St. Pat­ rick's Purgatory specifically, Chartres, Conques, Mont-Saint-Michel, Roca­ madour, Vezelay, Loreto, Bari, Assisi, Germany in general, and Constanti­ nople. A distribution map ofmajor twentieth-century shrines in (Western) Europe (p. 36) suggests in its densiry how many places have had to be left out. The final chapter of this part of the book gives access to the presence and influence of pilgrimage in the fine arts: Dante appears in this chapter only by way of John Demaray's Invention of Dante's Commedia and an article by Julia Holloway on the Vita Nuova (Dante is more or less absent from the general bibliography as well). The authors must be historians. The annotated bibliography contains 1,062 items, and the annotations are blessedly longish. Not all the works listed in the various sections ofthe guide are also here; some works that are here, like the New Grove Dictionary ofMusic and Musicians, seem to have wandered in from another world. By and large, the annotated bibliography aims to include...