Pilgrimage Explained for Beginners
Pilgrimages in the Middle Ages
Even today, pilgrimages hold a certain allure for some people, offering paths that have been crossed by Christians and non-Christians for centuries. Destinations remain the same as in the Middle Ages—Jerusalem, Rome, or Santiago de Compostela. While journeys today are more comfortable and shorter, they still pursue the same goal. By travelling to a site of significance, such as the grave or place of activity of a saint or Jesus, one could deepen their faith and feel a special closeness to the worshipped figure.
A distinction must be made between the terms “Wallfahrt”, which usually involves a group travelling to a specific place and “Pilgerfahrt”, where the journey itself is regarded as a spiritual experience and goal. Additionally, there were distinctions between long-distance pilgrimages and shorter / regional journeys that lasted only a few days.
The term “pilgrim” is a loan word from the Latin adjective peregrinus, meaning foreign, strange, or unknown. As a pilgrim, one becomes a stranger embarking on a process of discovery. Pilgrimages were not exclusively a Christian practice but are also documented in other religions, such as Judaism and Islam.
There were various reasons to undertake a pilgrimage. One was to ensure the salvation of one’s soul or seek forgiveness for sins. Additionally, there were thanksgiving and penance journeys, hopes for relief or healing from illnesses, or the promise of intercession by a saint. A pilgrimage could also be undertaken on behalf of another person or as penance for a committed crime. However, pilgrimages were not always solely motivated by religion; they could also be tied to business interests, allowing participants to establish networks and conduct trade.
Information about pilgrimages could be found in so-called pilgrimage guides or pilgrimage reports. The oldest accounts of Christian pilgrimages to the Holy Land date back to the 4th century. Pilgrimages were undertaken by all social classes, including women. However, journeys to the Holy Land, especially to Jerusalem, were considered particularly exclusive due to the high costs.
Author: Katharina Wehl
Source:
Dorninger, Maria E. Pilgerreisen im Mittelalter. Christliche Fernpilgerziele am Beispiel von Jerusalem und Santiago de Compostela. Paris Lodron Universität Salzburg, https://www.plus.ac.at/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/549750.pdf, viewed 15.01.2025.
The navel of the world?
The Holy Land, which today encompasses parts of modern Israel and Palestine, was regarded in the Middle Ages as the birthplace and site of Jesus’ ministry and Christian teaching. A special attraction was the construction of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem in the first half of the 4th century. Even after Jerusalem’s conquest by the Arab caliph Omar in 638 C.E., its significance for the Christian world remained, often depicted on maps as the “navel of the world.”
Since early Christian times, sites of Jesus Christ’s ministry have been important destinations for pilgrims. In addition to purely religiously motivated pilgrimages, the Crusades emerged from the late 10th century onward. These movements, which combined religious and political motives, were carried out with military force and understood themselves as a kind of armed pilgrimage aimed at liberating the Holy Sepulcher from “infidels.” The Crusades led to an increased influx of pilgrims and stimulated trade, resulting in an economic boom.
The peak of pilgrimages occurred in the late Middle Ages, partly due to improvements in travel. Transportation routes were expanded and improved, and travel times were reduced. The adoration of saints and relics, as well as the trade in indulgences, reached their height during this time and attracted many. Indulgences absolved sinners of their sins and could be obtained in the late Middle Ages at sites housing relics.
Pilgrims were not allowed to carry weapons during their journey and travelled under a so-called special peace. Nevertheless, travel was not without danger. Pilgrims faced physical risks from external dangers and spiritual temptations. After the fall of Acre in 1291 C.E., journeys to Jerusalem increasingly took place by sea. Muslim rulers became more accommodating to pilgrims from the mid-14th century, leading to a significant increase in pilgrimages.
The usual starting point for a journey to the Holy Land was Venice, where one could “book” a package tour to Jerusalem. In the early 14th century, a pilgrimage cost roughly the same as a stately house. Those unable to afford this could travel as a servant of a wealthy person or at the church’s expense as a cleric. Faster ships, called galleys, could make the crossing in about four weeks, while slower vessels could take up to six months.
In Jerusalem, pious travellers could find accommodation at the Hospital of the Knights of St. John, which was managed by Franciscans living on Mount Zion. To be recognized as a pilgrim in foreign lands, various pilgrimage badges were used; the badge of Jerusalem pilgrims was the palm. These badges served as identifiers and protective symbols. It was common to bring home a souvenir after visiting a pilgrimage site. From the Holy Land, these might include oil from the lamps of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, water from the Jordan River, or the famous Roses of Jericho. Relics were also highly sought after but often difficult to obtain. After completing a successful pilgrimage, these souvenirs could be displayed at home as a memory of the journey.
Pious people in the Middle Ages took on difficult and hard journeys for their religion in the hope of obtaining salvation and redemption.
Author: Katharina Wehl
Source:
Dorninger, Maria E. Pilgerreisen im Mittelalter. Christliche Fernpilgerziele am Beispiel von Jerusalem und Santiago de Compostela. Paris Lodron Universität Salzburg, https://www.plus.ac.at/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/549750.pdf, viewed 15.01.2025.
The Mental Steps of Imagined Pilgrimage
Much of the contents in the Gebetsbuch Project manuscripts are dedicated to a guide for imagined pilgrimage. Within the pages of the manuscript, the different stops and sites on the pilgrimage are listed day by day. Many of these holy sites correspond with biblical events. These listings helped readers undertake the pilgrimages step by step in great detail. However, these were steps on a journey taken entirely in the readers’ minds. In the recent research on the process of imagined pilgrimage, I have found imagined pilgrimage to be a fascinating psychological process in the way it adapts to present constraints, provides an empathic sensory experience, and even blurs the mental lines of space and time itself.
There are many reasons why someone in the Middle Ages might not have been able to undergo an actual physical pilgrimage themselves. After all, it wasn’t uncommon for pilgrims to die on their journeys (Tingle 2018, 95). It was also quite costly as well, and this posed an immediate financial constraint based on who could afford to make such an arduous journey (Quigley 2022, 153). In this way, virtual pilgrimage guides like the one in The Gebetsbuch Project could provide a safe, easy, low-cost way for laypeople to spiritually experience a pilgrimage (O’Doherty 2021, 106). However, even people with religious authority couldn’t always go on pilgrimage either. Sometimes it was for similar reasons such as cost or safety.
Other times imagined pilgrimages appealed to certain clerical sects “for whom pilgrimage was either considered undesirable or outright forbidden” (O’Doherty 2021, 106). In some cases, imagined pilgrimage acted as a sort of practice of resistance by nuns, who were subject to the very gendered process of cloistering. After all, the original manuscript of The Gebetsbuch Project was traced back to the Medingen Dominican women’s convent near Ulm, Germany. This kind of resistance from nuns at the time is not surprising, considering how hard many groups such as the sisters of St. Katherine’s convent fought against the cloistering brought on by reformist groups (Quigley 2022, 153). Another social constraint against physical pilgrimage taking place in the late-medieval period, leading into the Early Modern period, was the Protestant Reformation. Many of the ideas driving the Protestant Reformation concerned having a more personal, direct relationship with God. Because of these ideas, the process of pilgrimage was often seen by scholars to have become less ubiquitous and common in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. Sometimes the practice of pilgrimage was even directly attacked by Protestant authors (Tingle 2018, 91). Within this momentous social shift, the practical value of the process of imagined pilgrimage becomes apparent.
Imagined pilgrimage often supplemented one of the key drives behind a physical pilgrimage, which was to feel the experiences and emotions of the people involved in key biblical stories. This would have been a huge psychological exercise in empathy as the pilgrims would have literally been putting themselves in these figures’ shoes. After all, much of the initial goals of medieval Christian pilgrimage were, according to Purkis, to achieve a “sensory engagement with the sites and sensations associated with Christ’s Passion and, as a result, an increasingly literal Christo-mimetic experience” (Purkis 2024, 203). Many aspects of the literature associated with the process of imagined pilgrimage were optimized to help readers achieve just that. To start, much of the language in imagined pilgrimage guides is written in a very embodied narrative manner. This helps readers more easily imagine themselves on their journey while they spiritually experience the holy events that occurred there. For instance, the narration in the manuscript of Stacions of Rome serves to “invit[e] readers to take part imaginatively in the original biblical event, while contemplating both the wickedness of human sin and our hope for its divine remission” (Quigley 2022, 150).
Along with the language used, pictures are often utilized to give readers an enhanced sensory experience on their imagined pilgrimage as well. These hand-drawn illustrations serve to provide a picture for pilgrims on an imagined pilgrimage to visualize when they mentally visit holy sites. For instance, the Egerton 1900 manuscript written in Passau, Germany in about 1467 utilizes detailed illustrations to help readers visualize the city of Jerusalem. Not only that, but the narrative also interplays with the illustrations by instructing the readers to turn the page on the reversible paper to “help the reader to experience the movement between [sanctuaries]” (DuBois 2021, 289). With these examples given, it is made clear that both text and illustrations in these imagined pilgrimage guides are optimized so that readers can have an enhanced sensory experience when imagining themselves witnessing holy events.
What I find the most fascinating about the idea of imagined pilgrimage is how it seems to bend the mental dimensions of space and time themselves. Much of Quigley’s writing on the topic of imagined pilgrimage centers around conceptions of space and time put forth by Deluze’s The Logic of Sense (Quigley 2022, 156). Within this framework, time is understood as the concepts of “‘Chronos,’ the time of bodies, and ‘Aion,’ the time of incorporeal events” (Quigley 2022, 157). In the context of imagined pilgrimage, the pilgrim current sense of time and space is the Chronos being imposed on the past incorporeal biblical events in far-away places, which then serves as the Aion. One example of what this imaginative bending of physical space and time can look like lies within the pages of Hans VI Tucher’s Memoria of his pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In this manuscript, Tucher superimposes the route of Jesus’ Stations of the cross in Jerusalem onto the city of Nuremburg, while providing a map for imagined pilgrims to follow (Dubois 2021, 279). This allows the pilgrims to walk the path of Christ himself in their minds without leaving their locality in Nuremburg. In this way, pilgrims are transported not only to a different place in Jerusalem, but to the life and time of Jesus Christ. In this way, the pilgrims use their imaginations to truly transport themselves on the same journey one would undertake on a physical pilgrimage
I myself find imagined pilgrimage to be a very vibrant and intriguing topic deserving of further research. I think the concept of imagined pilgrimage shows the power and persistence of human imagination throughout history. While looking at the recent literature on the topic, I have seen many ways research on imagined pilgrimage can be taken in further directions. For instance, Quigley’s research, which I have greatly utilized, also focuses on pilgrimage to the holy city of Rome, rather than just Jerusalem as a lot of other sources have (Quigley 2022). I have also noticed that a lot of the literature I have read is focused on imagined pilgrimage for German and English audiences. To counteract this, I think it could be interested to go in the direction Coneys did and focus more on Italian audiences (Coneys 2018). Overall, I think imagined pilgrimage is a very psychologically interesting historical concept with many potential directions for future research.
Author: Aubrey Atkinson
Works Cited
Coneys, Matthew. “Real and Virtual Pilgrims and the Italian Version of the Book of John Mandeville.” Viator 49, no. 1 (2018): 241–55. https://doi.org/10.1484/J.VIATOR.5.116881.
Etienne Du Bois, Raoul Marc. “Getting There by Manipulating the Medium: Material Dimensions of Virtual Pilgrimages to the Holy Land.” In Geography and Religious Knowledge in the Medieval World, edited by Christoph Mauntel. De Gruyter, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110686159-012.
Jotischky, Andrew, and William J. Purkis, eds. A Companion to Medieval Pilgrimage. Arc Humanities Press, 2024. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.21819449.
O’Doherty, Marianne. “Holy Land Pilgrimage and Geography in Fifteenth-Century England.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 51, no. 1 (2021): 105–39. https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-8796270.
Quigley, Logan. “Travels in Deleuzean Time: Virtual Pilgrimage, Temporal Paradox, and the Newberry and Bicester Stacions of Rome.” Exemplaria 34, no. 2 (2022): 148–67. https://doi.org/10.1080/10412573.2022.2070366.
Tingle, Elizabeth. “Sacred Landscapes, Spiritual Travel: Embodied Holiness and Long-Distance Pilgrimage in the Catholic Reformation.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 28 (2018): 89–106.