The Road to Santiago and Pilgrimage

The Road to Santiago and Pilgrimage Guest Editors John K. Moore, Jr. & Thomas D. Spaccarelli THE ROAD TO SANTIAGO AND PILGRIMAGE Guest Editors John K. Moore, Jr. Thomas D. Spaccarelli "The Pilgrim's Guide", the famous fifth book of the Liber Sancii facobi, has made it easy to equate the Road to Santiago with the French Route described in Aymeric Picaud's breezy, sometimes unedifying travelogue. Easy,butmisleading.Asadiscussantpointedoutinasessiononpilgrimage at the 40th Annual Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, "In the Middle Ages, all roads led ... to Santiago". In the round-trip trek that every pilgrimage made in pre-modern times, wayfarers traversed a wide swath of land that could take them to many sites far from the locales mentioned in "The Pilgrim's Guide". Fray Justo Pérez de Urbel, in El claustro de Silos, mentions the shrine of Santo Domingo as one of those lateral attractions that drew aquellos peregrinos que ... daban un rodeo y se llegaban hasta Silos para postrarse ante las cenizas del Taumaturgo castellano. Sewanee: The University of the South has played an important role in fostering our relationship with the Road to Santiago and pilgrimage and thus in shaping this special issue. Individuals who contributed in valuable ways are Frank A. Domínguez, Jennifer I. Crook Moore, Ioseph T. Snow, lohn Jeremiah Sullivan and Sara H. Vollmer. We sincerely thank each ofthem. La corónica 36.2 (Spring 2008): 7-14 Moore & Spaccarelli La corónica 36.2, 2008 t4r^^^AÍÉÍ£Etá#E^ m Fig. 1. Bas-relief of the Road to Emmaus, Cloister of Santo Domingo de Silos (late llth-early 12th century). Line drawing adaptation by Edna V. Vollmer. The Road to Santiago and Pilgrimage9 ... Y debía ser para ellos una gran alegría verse retratados en aquella doble imagen, que representaba a su Salvador [el famoso Cristo que va para Emaus]. (97) This "doble imagen" was in fact triple, for the travelers in this Silos icon of Emmaus were accompanied by both their sacred goal and their spiritual companion. The sculpture is immensely evocative because it conceptually telescopes time, space and spiritual hierarchies to show medieval pilgrims as companions of Christ projected back in time to his historical setting, supremely validated in their own historical moment and enterprise, and admitted into the timelessness that pilgrimage itselfintimates. Just as there were many physical paths to and back from Maestro Mateo's Pórtico de la Gloria and the physical and imaginative structures that framed it, modern scholars frame the Road to Santiago and pilgrimage according to the latest theoretical insights of their varied disciplinary approaches. The unifying focus of this monographic issue is on the Camino and pilgrimage and the complex world associated with these phenomena, which have their origin in the Middle Ages but shed light on and are illumined by contemporary methodologies. From this project's inception, our goal has been to create an anthology enriched by a variety of disciplinary approaches, and indeed, the articles in this thematic cluster span numerous interconnected fields: language and philology; art history and architecture; comparative religion and history. The degree ofmutual overlap existing between and amongmany ofthese pieces is extensive. Linda Kay Davidson and David M. Gitlitz, in "Pilgrimage Narration as a Genre", study two Renaissance pilgrim narratives, one to Santiago de Compostela, the other to Jerusalem, and delineate the chief features ofthis first-person genre. That one pilgrim is a Catholic and the other a Jew allows these authors not only to tease out those elements particular to each faith but also, and more significantly, to underscore the commonalities between the two texts. In so doing, Davidson and Gitlitz "identify the basic elements that define a pilgrimage memoir genre that transcends the modalities of a single religious tradition". Diana Webb's "Choosing St. James: Motivations for Going to Santiago" provides examples of the various motivations that pushed 10Moore & SpaccarelliLa corónica 36.2, 2008 medieval people to undertake such an arduous journey. She surveys the records from numerous countries and finds reasons as varied as remorse and penitence, adventure, even "undertaking the journey on behalf of someone else". Such motivations are examined as part of the common religious culture ofthe time...