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Knights, Cooks, Monks and Tourists: Elite and Popular Experience of the Late-Medieval Jerusalem Pilgrimage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Kathryne Beebe
Kathryne Beebe*
Affiliation:
Pembroke College, University of Oxford
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Extract

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the late Middle Ages was the centre of a range of pilgrimage activity in which elite and popular beliefs and practices overlapped and complicated each other in exciting ways. The Jerusalem pilgrimage, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in particular, abounded in multiple levels of ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ experience. Through the pilgrimage writings of a fifteenth-century Dominican pilgrim named Felix Fabri, this paper will explore two specific levels: the distinction between noble and lower-class experiences of the Jerusalem pilgrimage (both physical and spiritual), and the distinction between spiritually ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ conceptions of pilgrimage itself – that uneasy balance between the spiritually-sophisticated, contemplative experience of pilgrimage promoted by St Jerome and the more ‘popular’ interest in traditional ‘tourist’ activities, such as gathering indulgences or stocking up on holy souvenirs and relics to take home. However, as we will see, even these tourist acts were grounded in the orthodox spirituality of late-medieval piety, and the elite and popular experiences of pilgrimage, whether social or spiritual, were not so distinct as they may first appear.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 42: Elite and Popular Religion , 2006 , pp. 99 - 109
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2006

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References

1 Publications useful to the study of medieval pilgrimage include Morris, Colin and Roberts, Peter, eds, Pilgrimage: the English Experience from Becket to Bunyan (Cambridge, 2002)Google Scholar; Stopford, J., ed., Pilgrimage Explored (York, 1999)Google Scholar; and several by Diana Webb including Pilgrims and Pilgrimage in the Medieval West (London, 1999) and Medieval European Pilgrimage, C.700-C.1500 (Basingstoke, 2002). The standard reference work remains Jonathan Sumption’s Pilgrimage: an Image of Mediaeval Religion (London, 1975, repr. 2002).

2 Useful assessments and studies of early Jerusalem pilgrimage can be found in the collection of essays edited by Ousterhout, Robert, The Blessings of Pilgrimage (Urbana, IL, 1990)Google Scholar. Georgia Frank explores early-Christian pilgrimage not only to holy places but also to holy persons in The Memory of the Eyes: Pilgrims to Living Saints in Christian Late Antiquity (Berkeley, CA, 2000). More general studies of fourth-century pilgrimage include Walker, P. W. L., Holy City, Holy Places?: Christian Attitudes to Jerusalem and the Holy Land in the Fourth Century (Oxford, 1990)Google Scholar; Hunt, E. D., Holy Land Pilgrimage in the Later Roman Empire AD 312–460 (Oxford 1982)Google Scholar; and Leyerle, Blake, ‘Landscape as Cartography in Early Christian Pilgrim Narratives’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 40 (1996), 119–43 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A useful collection of later pilgrimage accounts is Wilkinson, John, Jerusalem Pilgrimage, 1099–1185 (London, 1988)Google Scholar.

3 Egeria, Itinerarium Egeriae, in Itineraria et alia geographica, ed. P. Geyer and O. Cuntz, CCh.SL 175–6 (Turnhout, 1965) [hereafter: Geyer and Cuntz (1965)], 35–103, transl, into English by John Wilkinson, Egeria’s Travels to the Holy Land (rev. edn, Jerusalem, 1981).

4 Jerome, Epistulae (esp. Ep. 46, 58, and 108), ed. Wace, H. and Schaff, P., St. Jerome: Letters and Select Work Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser. (Oxford, 1893; repr. 1989), 6: 60–5, 119–23, 195–212 respectivelyGoogle Scholar.

5 Pilgrim, Piacenza, Pseudo-Antonini Piacentini itinerarium, in Geyer, and Cuntz, (1965), 127–74 Google Scholar, transl. Wilkinson, John, Jerusalem Pilgrims before the Crusades (Warminster, 1977), 79–89.Google Scholar

6 Pilgrim, Bordeaux, Itinerarium Burdigalense, in Geyer, and Cuntz, (1965), 1–34 Google Scholar, transl, (in extracts) by Wilkinson, Egeria’s Travels, 153–63.

7 Theoderich, Guide to the Holy Land, ed. Ronald Musto, transl. Aubrey Stewart (2nd edn, New York, 1986).

8 Burchard of Mt Sion, Description of the Holy Land, transl. Aubrey Stewart (London, 1896).

9 Howard, Donald, Writers and Pilgrims (Berkeley, CA, 1980), 38 Google Scholar. Fabri is most accessible to readers of English in Felix Fabri, circa 1480–1483 [Wanderings in the Holy Land], transl. Aubrey Stewart, 1 vol. in 2 (London, 1892–3) [hereafter: Fabri, Wanderings], or in Hilda Prescott’s Jerusalem Journey: Pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the Fifteenth Century (London, 1954) and Once to Sinai: the Further Pilgrimage of Friar Felix Fabri (London, 1957).

10 Brasca, Santo, Viaggio in Terrasanta, quoted in Canon Pietro Casola’s Pilgrimage to Jerusalem … 1494, transl. Newett, M. M. (Manchester, 1907), 11.Google Scholar

11 Ibid., 12.

12 Ibid., 95.

13 Ibid., 12–13.

14 Suriano, a Franciscan from a noble Venetian family, was secretary to the Prior of Mount Sion in 1483 and served as Prior in 1493 and 1512. See ibid., 384–5, n. 76.

15 Ibid., 95.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid.

18 Fabri, Felix, Felix Fabri, Die Sionpilger, ed. Carls, Wieland (Berlin, 1999), 81.Google Scholar

19 Fabri, Wanderings, 1: 6.

20 Ibid., 2: 104.

21 Ibid.

22 See: The Itineraries of William Wey, ed. B. Bandinel, Roxburghe Club 75 (London, 1857), 67.

23 Sumption, Pilgrimage, 266.

24 Fabri, Wanderings, 1: 608.

25 Ibid., 617.

26 Canon Pietro Casola’s Pilgrimage, 265.

27 Fabri, Wanderings, 1: 608.

28 Ibid., 6.

29 Ibid., 2: 623.

30 Ibid., 624.

31 Fabri, Sionpilger, 78; all translations from the Swabian are mine.

32 Fabri, Wanderings, 1: 49.

33 Jerome, Ep. 108: 9–10, in St. Jerome, 198–200.

34 Jerome, Ep. 58, in St. Jerome, 119.

35 Fabri, Wanderings, 2: 60 (my italics).

36 Ibid., v. 567.

37 Ibid., 2: 412–13.

38 Ibid., 85.

39 Ibid., 214–17.

40 Ibid., 85.

41 See Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, Sumption’s Pilgrimage, and Diana Webb’s volumes mentioned above at n. 1, for a useful starting point.

42 Fabri, Sionpilger, 79.

43 Unify, Stripping of the Altars, 252.

44 Fabri, Wanderings, 2:623.

45 For the Evagatorium, see Konrad Haβler, Fratris Felicis Fabri Evagatorium in Terrae Sanctae et Egypti peregrinationem, Bibliothek des Litterarischen Vereins 2–4 (Stuttgart, 1843–9). For the Pilgerbuch, see Die Pilgerfahrt da Bruders Felix Faber ins Heilige Land, ed. Helmut Roob (Berlin, 1964), or in modern German: In Gottes Namen fahren wir, ed. and transl. Gerhard Sollbach (Kettwig, 1990).