Wandering Women and Holy Matrons: Women as Pilgrims in the Later Middle Ages (review)

This monograph explores a wide range of Western European evidence concerning late medieval female pilgrimage. Stretching from satirical material critical of wandering women to devotional works designed to inspire imaginative pilgrimage, Craig's account is pleasingly sweeping: Inquisition records reveal the imposition of penitential pilgrimage, and pilgrimage badges and contact relics help to show the manifold ways in which pilgrimage touched communities far and wide. Her most important sources, however, are the records of miracles at seven late medieval shrines: These are scrupulously analyzed, with several pages of the appendix offering various statistics pertaining to the gender of the suppliant, penances imposed, and the like.

Craig begins by looking at the misogynistic tradition critical of female pilgrimage and its most famous fictional opponent, the Wife of Bath. Although this section is well written as a discrete unit, it feels quite distant from the argument of the rest of the book: The lines between proscriptive literature, historical evidence, and Chaucerian narrative are never entirely clear, and the result is an odd sense of discontinuity when one finds oneself moving from Chaucer to Inquisition records and wills. Craig includes an image of one of the many badges depicting a vulva-as-pilgrim (this one complete with jaunty hat, staff, and prayer beads) but dismisses it as a purely satirical gesture critical of female pilgrims—failing to return to the possible significance of such images in her later discussion of miracles concerning childbirth and fertility (Alistair Minnis's discussion of such badges in the context of The Pardoner's Tale, for instance, is most illuminating).

In the following chapters, Craig is on more solid ground, deftly gathering together evidence from an impressive range of sources and elegantly spinning it into a vivid narrative. She discusses, in order, miraculous pilgrimage, devotional pilgrimage, and compulsory pilgrimage. The sheer amount of information contained in these chapters is a delight; it was, at times, frustrating to have approximations such as "about two-fifths" employed alongside exact percentages (with all the figures calculated to percentages in the appendix, why not use the most exact figures one has?). There are a few errors in quoting medieval texts, unfortunate (but not uncommon) for a press as devoted to the Middle Ages as Brill: uppercase thorns instead of lowercase thorns and subscript numeral 3 instead of yogh when quoting Margery Kempe on page 143 and an odd form of citation on page 160 (Nicolaus Muffel in the text, the German quotation from his work discussed in a footnote of John Capgrave's text quoted in the note).

The final chapter, on "non-corporeal pilgrimage," demonstrates the interaction between literary and historical studies at its most energetic and engaging. Here Craig discusses the varieties of proxy pilgrimage one could make: from hiring someone to perform a pilgrimage on one's behalf (in degrees of formality from a casual promise to a clause in a will) to purchasing the dust from a holy tomb. Most fascinating, however, is her description of imaginative pilgrimages and devotional texts designed to inspire them. Her analysis of Francesco Suriano's treatise on pilgrimage is especially illuminating—a dialogic text that engages its readers in creating an all-female imaginative pilgrimage to Jerusalem (even to the point of the narrator excusing himself to hide so that the ladies might have the imagined Church of the Sepulchre to themselves!). Craig helpfully contrasts this with The Book of Margery Kempe—and yet this is treated too much as historical document rather than literary text. Surely Margery is as much text as she is person—and, despite her idiosyncrasies, would have delighted in playing an exemplary role in the imaginative re-creation of pilgrimage in the mind of a reader.