Download PDF | Boyle, Mary - Writing the Jerusalem Pilgrimage in the Late Middle Ages-D.S.Brewer (2021).
253 Pages
Acknowledgements
Many eyes have been cast over this work at different stages, from idea to finished book, and it could not have reached completion without the particular input, support, and constructive criticism of the following people: Annette Volfing, Helen Moore, Almut Suerbaum, Elizabeth Andersen, Nigel Palmer, Charlotte Woodford, Nicholas Boyle, and Boydell & Brewer’s reviewers. I must also thank those people who have discussed and shared their own research with me: Neil Kenny, who spoke with me about curiosity at an early stage; David Wallace and Ora Limor for allowing me access to the Jerusalem chapter in the then-forthcoming Europe: A Literary History, 1348-1418; Professor Limor a second time for meeting me in Jerusalem to discuss pilgrimage; and Diana Lipton for showing me around the Old City.
Thanks are also due to Tristan Franklinos for assistance with unedited Latin, and to Meghan Quinlan and Henry Hope for help on questions relating to medieval music. I must also extend thanks to Marianne P. Ritsema van Eck for sending me a copy of her doctoral thesis ahead of its publication, and answering questions on Breydenbach and Guglingen, and to Matthew Coneys, for sharing his article on Mandeville in Italy. The Pilgrim Libraries Network, organised by Anthony Bale, provided a marvellous forum for the exchange of ideas, and much food for thought. Professor Bale and Dr Ritsema van Eck also kindly helped me when libraries were shut during the Covid-19 pandemic and I was unable to access some of their publications. My work would have been a great deal harder without the help of the Bodleian Library’s Special Collections staff at the University of Oxford. I also thank the Bodleian for permission to include images from MS Bod. 972 and Arch. B c.25; the Bodleian Library Record for permission to include Table 1, an updated version of a table that initially appeared in my article ‘William Wey’s Itinerary to the Holy Land: Bodleian Library, MS. Bod]. 565 (c.1470); which they published in 2015; and Cath D’Alton for producing the maps of the pilgrims’ routes.
The research for this project was primarily funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and some revisions were completed during a period of Irish Research Council funding. Support from Maynooth University’s Publication Fund allowed me to include images. Finally, thanks must go to the rest of my friends and family for entirely different kinds of support, and for asking questions that enriched the way I thought about the project, in particular Anne Miles, Marie Winther Sall, Emily Lord-Kambitsch, Anna Boeles Rowland, Gustav Zamore, Mike, Liz, and Nick Harlow, Rosemary, Michael, Doran, and Angela Boyle, and last, but by no means least, my husband, Antony Harlow, who has lived with these four pilgrims as long as I have, and who was the first person to read the book from start to finish.
Introduction: To Be A Pilgrim
he Jerusalem pilgrimage was no small undertaking in the fifteenth
century. Pilgrims could spend the best part of a year or more travelling, and yet not even manage two weeks in the Holy Land. They faced dangers to their pocket - the Jerusalem pilgrimage could cost them more than a year’s wages - and to their bodies - death was a constant risk, and pilgrims routinely made their wills before departing.! Thousands, though, were drawn to make the journey each year.? Although only a minority of these travellers chose to document their pilgrimages in writing, textual representations of pilgrimage increased sharply in the second half of the fifteenth century.’ It is therefore worth considering these representations as a literary phenomenon and, more importantly, an international literary phenomenon, drawing on a shared international religious culture about to undergo earth-shattering change. While late-medieval pilgrim authors were writing in an essentially pre-national world, we see an emerging understanding of what might now be termed national difference, and certainly a growing awareness of cultural differences between and amongst western pilgrims themselves, even as they frequently sought to define themselves against an external other. This book therefore looks at four pilgrimages created in writing at the close of the Middle Ages by two writers from each of two cultural sub-contexts that would now be regarded as separate nations, but which were, in their own time, part of a continent-spanning culture: two Englishmen - William Wey and Thomas Larke - and two Germans - Bernhard von Breydenbach and Arnold von Harff.4 The journeys undertaken by our writers provide them with an opportunity to attempt to define that shared culture, frequently by encountering what it is not. Meanwhile, the cracks indicating the impending Reformation are well established. Between Wey’s account in around 1470 and Larke’s in 1511, the horizons of the known world expanded dramatically; the new technology of print - familiar to both Breydenbach and Harff - also became established in England, if somewhat later than in Germany; and the potential audience for written accounts of pilgrimage was greatly increased. It is true, as we shall see, that the writing of pilgrimage was influenced at least as much by how other pilgrims described their travels as by any one pilgrim’s actual experience. But no matter how these four men’s written pilgrimages may have deviated from reality, they had their basis in a risky and time-consuming physical activity, a spiritual practice rooted in earthly travel, which was then removed from the world and placed on the page. Behind the textual persona that each pilgrim author presents to his audience stands a man who lived and breathed and worshipped in the decades immediately before the Reformation began to alter for ever European perceptions of the nature and value of pilgrimage.
The first of our four pilgrims to travel was William Wey. Born in 1405 or 1406, Wey was bursar of Eton, as well as a fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, having held this latter position since at least 1430. He embarked on his first pilgrimage in 1456, travelling to Compostela, and subsequently journeying twice to Jerusalem: once in 1458 and once in 1462. It is likely that Wey was a Lancastrian, although - perhaps wisely, given the instability of English politics during the Wars of the Roses — he says little of his own views. Around 1467, Wey retired to the Augustinian Bonshommes priory at Edington in Wiltshire, where he had a replica of the Holy Sepulchre built adjoining the church. Nothing of it now remains, except an access door. Wey died at Edington in November 1476, leaving many of his possessions to the priory, including his pilgrimage account.® He had compiled this during his retirement, and it survives in only one manuscript, a probable autograph: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodl. 565.
The text begins in Middle English, and continues in Latin, the language of the majority of the work. It does not follow the chronological order of Wey’s journeys, as it focuses primarily on his two pilgrimages to Jerusalem, continues with a summary of the indulgences to be obtained in Rome, and concludes with Compostela, his earliest pilgrimage. Within the text, Wey repeatedly addresses an audience, but there is no conclusive evidence that the work was circulated at or around the time of writing - and an intended audience does not necessarily equate to a real one.’ Nonetheless, some circulation is possible, even probable: sections of the Itineraries, which do not appear in any other surviving works, appear in the anonymous Information for Pilgrims, which was first printed by Wynkyn de Worde around 1498.° Wey’s manuscript was edited by Bulkeley Bandinel for the Roxburghe Club in 1857 and published in translation in 2010 by Francis Davey, along with a commentary.!°
Next to depart was Bernhard von Breydenbach, the son of a noble family in what is now Marburg-Biedenkopf. Probably born in 1434,!! Breydenbach was sent to Mainz in 1450, where he became a cathedral canon. He embarked on his pilgrimage to the Holy Land and St Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai in 1483. Breydenbach lived for another thirteen years after his return, ultimately dying in 1497.!? In early 1486, he published a printed Latin edition of his pilgrimage, and a High German edition followed four months later, that June.!? Both versions are often referred to by their Latin name as Peregrinatio in terram sanctam (hereafter, frequently Peregrinatio). Despite Peregrinatio’s importance in the late Middle Ages, the Latin text has not been edited," and Isolde Mozer produced the first full edition and translation of the Early New High German version only in 2011.'5
It seems that Breydenbach’s intention was always to document his journey, for he brought with him ‘a good artist.!° This man, Erhard Reuwich, is also credited as the printer of Peregrinatio,'” and his woodcuts form an integral part of the resultant work, particularly its earlier printings - later editions often reduced or eliminated them. The Latin - but not the German - text makes reference to a learned man who was appointed to work on both the Latin and the vernacular versions of the text.!8 Though Breydenbach does not name his collaborator, Felix Fabri, one of his fellow travellers, and a pilgrim author himself, identifies the man in question as a Martin Rath or Roth. Both Fabri and Breydenbach credit Rath with much of the labour involved in actually writing the book. Frederike Timm ascribes to him the roles of translator (into Latin) of Breydenbach’s travel notes, and of compiler. According to her reading, Rath’s work was essentially clerical, while Breydenbach was not just the editor and financer of the project, but also the visionary behind it, who discussed each phase with Rath in minute detail.2° Whatever the extent of Rath’s input, Breydenbach certainly characterises Peregrinatio as his own work, casting himself immediately as narrator (‘I, Bernhard von Breydenbach’);?! he omits Rath’s name (unlike Reuwich’s) and reduces credit to a single line in the Latin text, while emphasising his own role in selecting Rath.
Peregrinatio was a late-medieval bestseller, repeatedly reprinted before the end of the fifteenth century and translated into several European vernaculars, namely Flemish,” French, and Spanish,”? while the Latin edition transcended linguistic boundaries and was popular across Europe, including in England. The translations into other languages (including the Flemish edition) were based on the Latin, making the High German edition, which is of most interest here, a separate tradition.24 While much of it is a direct translation from the Latin, at times the two versions diverge in both structure and content.”> The German version can be understood as a revised and updated text, with its audience slightly reconsidered. Breydenbach speaks of his desire to reach the ‘uneducated laity’ as much as ‘nobles; ‘prelates, and other ‘educated people.6
While he does make reference to these groups in both languages, the Latin version includes moralising sections specifically aimed at the clergy,” which do not appear in the German version, so we can deduce that prelates were expected primarily to consult the Latin version. The existence of vernacular pamphlets based on Erasmus’s Latin works has been understood as evidence that they reached the ‘simple folk,?8 and similarly the German Peregrinatio seems to have been primarily directed towards a broad lay audience, who were not to be troubled with an extended criticism of their spiritual leaders.
Our third pilgrim writer, and only layman, was Arnold von Harff, a knight and the middle son of a nobleman, Adam von Harff. Born around 1471 at the family seat of Schloss Harff in Bedburg, he set out from Cologne at the age of twenty-five on an ambitious pilgrimage, which was intended to take him to Rome, Sinai, Jerusalem, Santiago de Compostela, St Patrick’s Purgatory (Lough Derg), and Wilsnack. He apparently reached the first four of these destinations, as well as, if his account is to be believed, various further-flung locations. He did not, however, make it as far as Ireland, and Wilsnack also eluded him. He returned from his journey in 1499 and, in 1504, married Margarethe von dem Bongart and followed his uncle in the post of hereditary chamberlain at the court of Guelders. He died only a year later, in 1505, leaving his wife pregnant.
Their daughter died in early childhood, and was buried with him.”? Harff wrote, in Middle Low German, an account of his journeys that was fairly popular amongst members of his own social class in the Rhineland and Westphalia,* though it was not printed. The text continued to be circulated in manuscript into the seventeenth century, with fifteen manuscripts, of which a number are now missing, known to have survived into the modern period.*! The text first appeared in print in 1860, when it was edited by E. von Groote from three manuscripts in the Harff family archives, including one that, while unlikely to be an autograph, dates from shortly after Harff’s journey.** On the basis of Groote’s edition, Harff’s account has been translated into both modern German and English, in 2007 by Helmut BrallTuchel and Folker Reichert, and 1946 by Malcolm Letts, respectively.
The identity of our fourth pilgrim author, the only figure to write entirely in English, remained obscure until 2013, when Rob Lutton identified the anonymous writer of the Pylgrymage of Sir Richard Guylforde as one Thomas Larke, chaplain to Sir Richard Guylforde from 1495, and later longstanding personal confessor to Cardinal Wolsey, whose mistress was Larke’s sister. Partly thanks to his professional association with Wolsey, Larke moved in influential circles, administered various significant royal building projects, not least King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, and developed a friendship with Erasmus. He died, shortly before Wolsey, in 1530, by which point he was probably in his mid-seventies.*4 Guylforde himself was a relatively senior figure in the government of Henry VII, having spent the years after 1483 in exile with the future king. Despite being well rewarded for his service, Guylforde frequently found himself seriously in debt, most disastrously in the first few years of the sixteenth century, when the king was finally forced to agree to his removal from office. To avoid prosecution, Guylforde set off on pilgrimage for the Holy Land in April 1506.
Later that year, he fell ill on the road between Jaffa and Jerusalem and died, along with a fellow pilgrim, John Whitby, the prior of Gisborough. The rest of the group continued the pilgrimage without them,** returning home in March 1507,3° the year in which Larke first appeared at court.*” The circumstances surrounding the composition and publication of the account of the pilgrimage are not entirely clear; it was not printed until 1511, four years after the pilgrims’ return, when it was issued from the press of the King’s Printer, Richard Pynson.’* It could, therefore, have been written at any point in the intervening period. Only a single copy has survived to the present day, first as part of the library of Thomas Grenville, and now in the British Library (shelfmark: G6719), and this copy was the basis for Henry Ellis’s edition of the text in 1851. The existence of a sole surviving copy does not indicate a lack of circulation, as the Pylgrymage of Sir Richard Guylforde, itself heavily dependent on Breydenbach’s Peregrinatio, exerted its own influence on English pilgrimage writing in the years immediately following its publication, becoming a source text for other pre-Reformation pilgrim authors.*°
Given that there are surviving accounts from over one hundred and fifty pilgrims in this period, what distinguishes these four? Between them, our authors provide a cross-section of the kinds of writers who were engaging with this type of representation of the Jerusalem pilgrimage at the close of the Middle Ages, and they thus allow us to draw conclusions relevant beyond their own writings. Two of them travelled from the heart of the Holy Roman Empire, and from the centre of late-medieval pilgrimage writing, two from near the geographical edge of Europe, when awareness of a world beyond was only beginning to dawn, albeit that late-medieval England was hardly isolated from the rest of Christendom. They are clergy and lay; two accounts remained in manuscript form; two were printed. One manuscript pre-dates print culture (at least in England); one draws on it. One printed work was intended for both a domestic and an international audience; one anticipated only anglophone reception. Pilgrimage writing was far less common a practice in England than in the German-speaking lands, and the accounts of Wey and Larke, as well as being two of the most extensive surviving Jerusalem pilgrimage accounts of English origin, essentially bookend the period in question. Both men’s work, moreover, appears to have directly influenced later pilgrim writing, even if the transmission path from Wey’s words to de Worde’s press is unclear.
Although there is far more material available from German pilgrim authors,“ any internationally comparative study of pilgrimage writing with any relevance to Germany must give a central position to Breydenbach’s hugely influential Peregrinatio, while Harff’s account, also popular, though much less widely circulated, taps directly into general contemporary understanding of the world beyond western Europe through his use of sources like Mandeville and Marco Polo - and Breydenbach himself. These four men are all thoroughly absorbed in the literary context of pilgrimage writing, the Englishmen as much as the Germans, despite the fact that they were engaged in a much less popular pursuit in their country of origin. Further, although the four did not encounter one another in person, their writings make use of a combination of the same sources - and, in some cases, are dependent on one another. They also provide different solutions to many of the same questions.
To take just one example, Wey’s account, written largely in Latin, but with its first sections in English, engages with the thorny question of language choice, grappling with some of the same issues that faced Breydenbach. Breydenbach came up with his own solution, deciding to publish his work in different German and Latin versions. Where Wey allowed a kind of combination of Latin and vernacular, Breydenbach elected to separate the two - and their respective audiences - entirely. Harff and Larke, closer to the end of the period, issued their accounts only in the vernacular, yet, as Chapter 4 will reveal, tensions between Latin and English were also at play in Larke’s mind - perhaps all the more so, given that he used Breydenbach’s Latin text as his major source. Harff, meanwhile, took Breydenbach’s High German text and incorporated sections of it, translated into his own Low German dialect. Other pilgrimage writings, as we shall see, certainly provide helpful contextualisation here and in other areas, but these four accounts, considered in detail, shed a valuable mutual light on the thought and composition processes of their authors and the wider literary context in which they were constructed.
Each account is at least as indebted to the pilgrim - and other - writings that preceded it as it is to the literal pilgrimage experience of its writers. But all four are also identified as the descriptions of real pilgrimages, and, if we are to understand the blurred lines between the historical practice of pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the literary pilgrimages created in writing, we must first ask what the Jerusalem pilgrimage entailed in the second half of the fifteenth century. Much of the experience was standardised. Pilgrim itineraries tended to join up at Venice. The land route through Europe could vary (see Maps 1-6), although courses tended to converge as pilgrims approached Italy. This portion of the journey is often represented in pilgrimage writing as little more than a list of places and the distances between them, often with comments about places of interest en route, both sacred and secular: Arnold von Harff, for example, was particularly keen to note castles, while Bernhard von Breydenbach found the European route to be so well known and so generic as not to be worth describing at all.4! At Venice, the procedure was standard essentially a package deal. Pilgrims would sign a contract with a ship’s patron and purchase supplies for the sea journey to Jaffa.
These contracts and related lists of supplies make frequent appearances in written pilgrimage accounts, and while they tend to cover much of the same ground they provide vivid insight into the realities and dangers of the sea voyage, as well as some individual details. Although the ship’s patron was to provide the pilgrims with two hot meals a day, other food (including live chickens), utensils, changes of money, and bedding were necessities that they were to provide for themselves. Wey also advises his readers to bring laxatives, and to ensure that they pack enough wine - beyond Venice, its quality and availability might vary, but it would be uniformly expensive. Breydenbach includes a contract clause stating that the ship’s patron is not to appropriate the possessions of dead pilgrims, and Harff lists all the clothing purchased for his travels.
The ensuing sea route exhibited even less variety than the land journey through Europe. Harff was alone amongst our four pilgrims in sailing to Alexandria, in order to visit Sinai before Jerusalem, but even so his journey followed the standard pilgrim route through the Mediterranean, via Pore¢, Dubrovnik, Corfu, and Crete. When his ship then aimed for Egypt, it was blown off course by a storm, and ended up in Rhodes, from where it set out again for Alexandria, this time successfully.44 From Rhodes, other Jerusalem pilgrims would sail via Cyprus and disembark at Jaffa, where there might be bureaucratic delays: Thomas Larke's party was made to wait on board their ship for a week before receiving permission to land, and when they disembarked they were held for more than a day in a stinking cave.** When the time came to proceed, there would be a scramble to hire a mule or donkey, as the worst animal cost just as much as the best,*° and was the only means of transport onwards via Ramla to Jerusalem, where the pilgrimage itself really began.
We do not see much trace of the realities of fifteenth-century Jerusalem in pilgrimage accounts. It was a city of contradictions: as a centre of pilgrimage, it was a sacred city of the utmost importance to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but in worldly terms it was ‘a peripheral city of little political and administrative importance; a provincial town,” part of the Mamluk Sultanate (from 1263), and ruled from Cairo.*® Pilgrims therefore routinely came into contact with individual Mamluks, and sometimes reported on these experiences — at least as far as they occurred separately from actual visits to the holy places. Mamluks were high-ranking - though unfree - soldiers, generally enslaved at a young age. If, when they were enslaved, they were non-Muslims, they were converted.
By the late fourteenth century, most Mamluks were Circassians, from the Caucasus,” but both Harff and Breydenbach encountered Mamluks of German origin during their travels,*° and made much of Mamluks’ status as ‘renegade Christians.>! Unsurprisingly, therefore, late-medieval Jerusalem was overwhelmingly Muslim - amongst its six thousand early-fifteenth-century inhabitants were just one hundred Christian families and two hundred Jewish families.** The architecture surrounding them was a mishmash of styles erected by the Crusaders, Saladin, and the Mamluks themselves. Despite the surviving older buildings, enough distinctively Mamluk architecture was constructed in Jerusalem to give an appearance consistent with other cities in the Sultanate,°* yet pilgrims do not tend to comment on the foreignness of contemporary Jerusalem or, indeed, on the fact that, after a Bedouin attack in 1480, the city was partially ruined.*4 Afterwards, it nonetheless remained under Mamluk rule for a further thirty-seven years, until the Ottoman takeover in 1517.°°
That Christianity’s holiest city was under Muslim control caused a certain amount of anguish amongst pilgrims, not least to Bernhard von Breydenbach, who devoted a great deal of his account to the perceived errors of the inhabitants of the Holy Land,°*¢ but the Mamluk rulers of Jerusalem were well aware of the economic advantages brought by Christian and Jewish pilgrims, and tended not to interfere with them.°” While all four of our pilgrim authors do make at least passing reference to the Mamluk governance of the Holy Land, the descriptions of their pilgrimages are shaped far more by the Franciscan custodians of the holy places, who had, by this point, developed a regimented pattern of pilgrimage, ensuring that the thousands of European pilgrims who descended on Jerusalem each year were met with a uniform experience - an experience that they could take back home with them.
The Franciscans had been granted the role of official custodians of the holy places in Jerusalem by Pope Clement VI in 1342.58 The pilgrimage, as they developed it, endured for almost two hundred years (c.1350-1530), and the sites to be visited, the order in which they were seen, the way in which they were described, the relevant liturgy in each place, and the routes between them were common to western pilgrims.®® This is why William Wey could inform his readers with great certainty ‘of the different holy places to be visited by pilgrims, and their names’ (my italics).® Pilgrimage sites were organised into different groups on Mount Sion, in the Valley of Josaphat, or within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, for example.
Pilgrims would generally first visit holy places on Mount Sion near to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and then spend a night locked within the church itself, following their Franciscan guides around the relevant sites within, all concerned with the crucifixion (including Golgotha itself), the resurrection, and its immediate aftermath.*' The next day, these guides took them out through Jerusalem, following Christ’s steps in reverse to Pilate’s house, sometimes passing sites they had already seen, and then going on to the Valley of Josaphat, where they were shown the site of St Stephen's martyrdom, a site said to be the location of a bridge crossed by the Queen of Sheba, which was made from the wood of the cross, and the tomb of the Virgin Mary, and finally the place where Christ prayed on the night of the Last Supper, which brought them to the various pilgrimage sites at the Mount of Olives.
Here the pilgrims visited further sites associated with Gethsemane, Mary’s Assumption into Heaven, and Christ's Ascension - and witnessed from a distance places they were not allowed to visit, including the Dome of the Rock, which they knew as the Temple of Solomon. The itinerary was legitimised by the assertion that it was the route taken daily by the Virgin Mary after Christ’s death and resurrection — a fifteenth-century formalisation of a tradition that had existed in some form since the fifth century. Pilgrims tended also to travel the short distance to Bethlehem, in order to visit the holy sites there. Some - like Bernhard von Breydenbach and Arnold von Harff chose to visit St Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai as well. This required the signing of an additional contract and, naturally, further payment - twentythree extra ducats, to be paid in half-instalments in Jerusalem and Gaza, and two ducats for the contract itself. Visiting Sinai was risky as well as expensive: Harff’s party left two members to die in the desert en route, while Cristoforo Pallavicino, a Milanese nobleman and a kinsman of Guylforde’s, dared go no further than Cairo in his attempt to reach Sinai, because he was unable to find safe conduct for the ‘dangerous’ journey across the desert.® He subsequently joined Larke’s pilgrim group in Jerusalem.
For those pilgrims whose visit to Sinai followed their visit to Jerusalem, the route home led them onwards from St Catherine's Monastery through the desert to Cairo, and ultimately to Alexandria, where they would board a ship and return to Venice. Most pilgrims, however, would go back the way they came, travelling from Jerusalem via Ramla to Jaffa, and then by sea to Venice. The return journey was often more difficult than the outward voyage, as it tended to take place during the autumn, when the weather turned. Breydenbach’s party, for example, encountered storms that hindered their passage around Cape Maleas. The sailors blamed the pilgrims, accusing them of having caused the bad weather by stealing an unspecified object from the Holy Land, or taking water from the Jordan.
Larke and his fellow travellers also endured rough seas on their return journey, which they endeavoured to calm by vowing a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Loreto. The experience of the return journey had evidently put them off any further travels of their own, as the vow was to be fulfilled by collecting enough money to send another pilgrim in their names.® Inclement weather of the kind faced by Breydenbach and Larke could easily extend the homeward voyage: Larke’s party left Jaffa on 18 September, and arrived in Venice on 25 January,® with a long overland journey still ahead of them. The outward voyage, by contrast, had been much shorter in duration (4 July to 18 August). By the time they reached Dover, on 9 March 1507, they had been out of England for 336 days.
Some returning travellers sought to bring their pilgrimage experience back with them to their home countries, and this was increasingly encouraged by the Franciscans who had guided them through the Holy Land. Bringing Jerusalem home could take a physical and visual form, such as a relic or a reconstructed shrine, or a textual form, such as a (quasi-) personal account. Both contributed to the cultural institution of the Franciscan Jerusalem pilgrimage by encouraging participation in it and contemplation of it, but they also allowed the faithful to participate in it without actually having to leave their homes - to become pilgrims in what we would now call a virtual sense. At its core, a virtual pilgrimage is a pilgrimage made imaginatively, which allows pilgrims to access the pilgrimage space and experience, without physically going to the pilgrimage destination in question. It does not require literal travel, or even any kind of movement but, under the right circumstances (such as the receipt of a papal privilege), could provide the same spiritual advantages as a literal pilgrimage, indulgences included. This broad heading of ‘virtual pilgrimage’ encompasses a range of practices.
Kathryn M. Rudy, in her foundational study of the topic, usefully divides virtual pilgrimages into ‘stationary pilgrimage devotions, under the heading of ‘interiority, and ‘somatic pilgrimage devotions, under the heading of ‘exteriority.”° The former are performed with the help of text and image, but occur entirely within the pilgrim’s head; the latter involve some kind of bodily action and may also be text- or image-dependent. It may be helpful to build on Rudy’s categorisation by creating a tripartite distinction between forms of virtual pilgrimage: virtual place pilgrimage; physical virtual pilgrimage; and mental virtual pilgrimage. As with many human activities, categories imposed later are inevitably not a perfect fit, and the boundaries between them can be discussed, renegotiated, or blurred. The first two types here might be seen as sub-sections of Rudy’s ‘somatic pilgrimage devotions, but are distinct enough to be usefully considered separately, the level of interiority increasing steadily as we move towards the third category.
Virtual place pilgrimage was a possibility for those who did not have formal restrictions on their movement, but lacked the wherewithal, whether financial or otherwise, to travel to far-flung destinations like Jerusalem. Certainly local pilgrimages could fill that gap, and, in this sense, pilgrimage to a site of local devotional significance could overlap with virtual pilgrimage. As the Middle Ages drew on, parish churches increasingly functioned as sites for pilgrimage, in a kind of ‘democratisation of shrine promotion, which may be attributable to an increase in pilgrimages to images.”! More obviously, however, virtual place pilgrimage can refer to large-scale replicas, or other re-creations, such as the churches and chapels based on the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem that were constructed across Europe - a practice that in fact pre-dated the Franciscan custody of the Holy Land shrines.
The buildings that make up the church complex of Santo Stefano in Bologna, for example, date from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and the charola at the Convento de Cristo in Tomar was also constructed in the twelfth century, as was Cambridge’s Round Church or Church of the Holy Sepulchre.” But while the Franciscans did not invent the desire to bring Jerusalem home, they sought to influence and regulate it, just as they took control of the pilgrim experience in Jerusalem itself by building on and formalising past tradition. Later reconstructions of Jerusalem in Europe were regularly based on the Franciscan pilgrim experience. This was the case in San Vivaldo in Tuscany, which was entrusted to the Franciscan order in 1500, and where a site of devotion to a local saint was deliberately developed into an international site of devotion to the Jerusalem pilgrimage (according to its specifically Franciscan pattern) through the construction of various chapels to represent sites in Jerusalem.”* Physical re-creation of pilgrimage could, like this, take place in a replica Jerusalem, though it did not have to happen in such developed surroundings.
In our second category, physical virtual pilgrimage, we see a greater imaginative involvement. At one extreme, virtual pilgrims could aim to represent the physical movement of pilgrimage fairly directly, should they choose. This might take the form of walking the full distance to Jerusalem around a cloister, just as people in the twenty-first century might cross the Atlantic on a rowing machine, or climb Everest on a stepper. This approach to virtual pilgrimage, with something approximating the physical exertion of the literal practice, gives us an indication of one of the key groups of people who became virtual pilgrims: devout and with time, but without the ability to travel anywhere at all, let alone to Jerusalem, namely the members of cloistered religious orders, often nuns.
Equally, though, a convent-bound virtual pilgrimage did not require its participants to walk the full distance of the real thing - covering a small number of steps could stand in for long-distance travel, just as, in the previous category, a replica Jerusalem can stand in for the real thing. In either case, a virtual pilgrimage was frequently aided by external stimuli, such as texts, images, or other re-creations or representations of the pilgrimage destination. For members of religious orders, this would be within the monastic complex, for the laity or those who were not enclosed, perhaps in a local church.” At St Katherine’s Convent in Augsburg, for example, the nuns commissioned images of the main pilgrim churches in Rome at various locations within the convent. By means of a papal privilege, they were able to obtain the indulgences associated with these churches by walking between the images and meditating upon them.”
Perhaps the most enduring practice within the category of physical virtual pilgrimage is what would become the Stations of the Cross. While it shares features in common with virtual place pilgrimage, and while there are particular installations that exist in specific locations, the Stations of the Cross ultimately lacks ties to a single place, and can be performed anywhere. By the late-medieval period, again at the instigation of the Franciscans, protoversions of this devotion were becoming popular in Europe, clearly related to the kind of experience available in San Vivaldo or somewhere similar, but far more widely available. Movement, aided by visual stimuli, is an integral part of this virtual pilgrimage practice, though it can require very few steps to be actually taken. It involves walking between and meditating upon images or shrines representing events on Christ's journey from Pilate’s house to Calvary as pilgrims had been doing in Jerusalem itself for centuries and as enclosed orders were doing in their convents.”” A small amount of movement stands in for something greater, but is an integral part of the experience - even stationary participants are watching movement in real time.
Lastly we have mental virtual pilgrimage, Rudy’s interior, stationary category. This is a largely text-based practice, in which the pilgrim author becomes a kind of idealised guide to the pilgrimage he or she has literally made himself or herself, comparable with the group leaders who have always chaperoned pilgrims, past and contemporary, on their physical journeys.”§ A surprisingly broad range of texts could be used for this purpose. Ordinary personal accounts of pilgrimage were an obvious resource,”? but even works like Mandeville’s Book, which only partially engaged with pilgrimage, were taken up by virtual pilgrims.
There were also works written specifically in order to facilitate a virtual pilgrimage. Felix Fabri, for example, wrote a German-language description of his own pilgrimage, Die Sionpilger, specifically for use in mental virtual pilgrimage by religious sisters. While cloistered members of religious orders, such as those for whom Fabri was writing, are the most obvious candidates for mental virtual pilgrims, the members of this category do not form a homogenous group. We can exclude those audience members whose interest was simply in tales of foreign lands - a nonetheless important audience for pilgrimage accounts - but we should include those armchair travellers whose interest in pilgrimage writings was devotional but not all-encompassing. They might have meditated prayerfully on the holy places, but not have envisioned themselves as participants in a full-scale imagined pilgrimage, or sought to obtain indulgences. In this group were the kinds of virtual pilgrims described by Kathryn Hurlock, those unable to read themselves, but who listened to pilgrimage accounts being recounted aloud. In Hurlock’s Welsh context, virtual pilgrimage could be a family or community affair, as people gathered to hear performances of poetic accounts of pilgrimage given by returned pilgrims known to them. This oral transmission of virtual pilgrimage might even form a framework for subsequent generations.
This group of mental virtual pilgrims would typically be lay people.*! Virtual pilgrims in religious orders were more likely to approach the activity with the utmost commitment, both in terms of time and concentration. Rudy gives the example of Sister Truyde Schutten of Diepenveen, who proposed a virtual pilgrimage to Rome. The logistics of the pilgrimage were given intense consideration, including the number of days to be spent - virtually - in Rome.*? Entirely mental substitutes for physical movement were needed here, and Sister Truyde’s means of travel was to be fifty Ave Marias recited per day. Mental virtual pilgrimage at its most intense was understood to have an almost literal capacity to remove pilgrims from their environment, and to facilitate a real access to other places, spaces, and times.> In other words, it could be no less serious a commitment than any other type of pilgrimage.
The Franciscan influence was felt in every shade of virtual pilgrimage. Once the Custody of the Holy Land was well established, pilgrimage to a nearby Jerusalem chapel, participation in the Stations of the Cross, or in any kind of virtual pilgrimage conducted with the aid of an account written by a recent traveller to the Holy Land all admit the virtual pilgrim to a Franciscan Jerusalem brought home.** William Wey engaged with all three categories of virtual pilgrimage on his return to England and, naturally, it was the Franciscan pilgrimage that he brought back, firstly in the form of the Holy Sepulchre chapel that he built in Edington, and that he filled with souvenirs of his journeys to Jerusalem. Many of these emphasised another kind of physicality of the pilgrimage beyond movement - aspects of Jerusalem literally relocated to Wiltshire. Amongst them were relics Wey had gathered himself (mostly stones from holy sites); a map of the Holy Land; and replicas of places around Jerusalem made out of boards. But Wey was not content with a simple physical re-creation of Jerusalem.
Under the heading ‘other goods belonging to the sepulchre; he lists a book - his own pilgrimage account — and it, like the other items in his bequests, must ‘not be removed from the Chapel of the Sepulchre’** Inside the physical manifestation of Jerusalem brought back to England, a virtual place pilgrimage, Wey places a detailed textual manifestation of the Franciscan pilgrimage that provided all the information necessary, either for a physical virtual pilgrimage, perhaps indicated by his interest in precise distances and measurements, or for a mental virtual pilgrimage. With his belt and braces approach, he provides for all virtual pilgrims. Wey’s replica Jerusalem notwithstanding, however, the virtual pilgrimages treated from here onwards will be text-driven. These belong to the second and third categories of virtual pilgrimage, which tend to be more developed than virtual place pilgrimage, minimising the potential for external distraction, and requiring more mental and imaginative commitment.
Wey was hardly the first pilgrim author. He, Breydenbach, Harff, and Larke were participating in a long tradition of pilgrimage writing beginning with the earliest known account of pilgrimage to the Holy Land, which was written by Egeria, a female pilgrim, in the fourth century. During the period of interest here (c.1450-1520),°” as pilgrimage writing became a much more common practice,** pilgrimage accounts themselves became complex texts,*? which were far more than guidebooks, and which collectively formed a hybrid literary genre. Between 1480 and 1522, barely a year passed for which we do not have a surviving account of the Jerusalem pilgrimage,”! but the increase in production of pilgrimage writing did not occur equally across Europe. By far the greatest number of extant late-medieval Jerusalem pilgrimage accounts are of German origin. About ninety such accounts survive from the period 1460-1530, in comparison to around fifteen by French authors, and even fewer of English origin. While we will never know how many English pilgrimage accounts have been irretrievably lost, it has been suggested that the comparatively small amount of English pilgrimage writing is a result of both a relative lack of interest in the genre (especially once the Reformation got under way) and of Crown policy restricting longdistance travel by noble subjects.”
Pilgrimage writing depended on works that had gone before. Although Breydenbach and Harff were operating within a geographically specific literary context in which pilgrimage writing was a more popular practice than was familiar to Wey and Larke, these latter two were not the only English people engaged in it. Indeed, it was an Englishman named Saewulf who, around 1102, produced one of the first European accounts of the Palestine pilgrimage after the First Crusade conquest of Jerusalem.” Furthermore, in addition to the relatively small number of pilgrimage accounts produced by other English pilgrims, Wey and Larke had access to many of the same widely circulated Latin texts as Harff and Breydenbach.
While Larke was able to make use of the mass-produced works that flooded into England via the Europe-wide trade in printed Latin books, it is also clear that Wey made use of a variety of manuscript sources when writing his account, many of which may have been in the library at Mount Sion in Jerusalem, but plenty of which are equally likely to have been available to him at home in England, perhaps through his connections with Syon Abbey, where there was a substantial library. Reflecting the increasing complexity of pilgrimage writing, pilgrims made use of a wide range of theological texts, including, but not limited to, works by Bridget of Sweden, Jerome,°® Pope Leo the Great,°” Robert Holcot,°* Bede,” Paul of Burgos,! Peter Alfonsi,!°! Ambrose,!” and Vincent of Beauvais.
Texts specifically relating to travel were, naturally, key sources for pilgrims but, just as with theological writings, pilgrim writers did not limit themselves to contemporary material. The Italian friar Odoric of Pordenone (1286-1331) wrote a description of his travels in China, parts of which found their way into various late-medieval pilgrimage accounts, including those of Wey and Harff. Harff, whose account strays far from the pilgrimage beaten track, was particularly dependent on other travel and geographical writing, also making use of Marco Polo’s late-thirteenth-century Book of the Marvels of the World and Ptolemy’s second-century Geography, which had experienced a surge of interest in Europe after its translation into Latin in 1406.!% By far the most influential text of this kind, however, was John Mandeville’s Book, or Mandeville’s Travels.
The Book is not only relevant to Harff, Wey, and Larke, all of whom made significant use of the work,!> but is integral to late-medieval pilgrimage writing as a whole - and not simply in terms of the number of accounts that drew on Mandeville, but also for what the use of this work tells us about perceptions of the Holy Land as a textual and conceptual space. Mandeville’s Book is purportedly the first-person description of a knight's pilgrimage to the Holy Land and his further travels in the East. By the 1360s, only a few years after its first appearance, the text, in manuscript, ‘was being read widely, by secular and religious audiences, in England, France, and the Low Countries.
It therefore circulated initially in French, Anglo-French, and English, but was rapidly translated into various vernaculars and transmitted widely in manuscript - there are around three hundred surviving manuscripts and fragments of the text, including, by 1415, two separate German translations, those of Otto von Diemeringen and Michael Velser. When Mandeville’s Book began to appear in print, around 1470 (first in Dutch), therefore, its popularity was already longstanding. The first German-language prints appeared almost simultaneously: Velser’s translation was printed in Augsburg by Anton Sorg in 1480, and an edition based on Otto von Diemeringen’s translation was printed by Bernhard Richel in Basel either that year or the following, with the first English printed edition appearing, somewhat belatedly, around 1496.
Mandeville’s depiction of the Holy Land was therefore enormously influential — despite the fact that it was also long out of date by the time of its first appearance, being largely dependent on crusader-era sources, and without reference to the Franciscan pilgrimage.'°” Mandeville’s version of Jerusalem thus contributed significantly to the development of virtual pilgrimage to the idea of pilgrimage as a conceptual, rather than a physical, space.10% The point was not (usually) to use Mandeville as a source for information about the reality of fifteenth-century Jerusalem, for this was not the point of pilgrimage writing in general. By mingling Mandeville’s already multi-era, multi-source version of Jerusalem with the experiences of later pilgrims, the textual Jerusalem of the later Middle Ages becomes, as Anthony Bale puts it, ‘a multi-layered account of Christian perspectives on sacred space ...
the Jerusalem we find in western European textual and visual imagery became the perfect simulacrum, a copy whose original had long since vanished, if it had ever existed’! Just as the physical representations of Jerusalem across Europe did not attempt precisely to replicate what was literally in the Holy Land, so the textual Jerusalem did not attempt to describe it. Pilgrims were not primarily interested in the holy places as ‘authentic, validated historical object[s]> but in what collective memory had made of them.'!° While there was a certain overlap between the conceptual space and the physical space of Jerusalem, the former was what pilgrims were aiming to describe when they copied from or drew on Mandeville’s description of Jerusalem — not least among them, Wey, Harff, and Larke. And the textual Jerusalem they created, while it owed much to Mandeville, was so widespread that it is also evident in the writings of pilgrims who, like Breydenbach, do not appear to have drawn on him, but on other widely available sources.
The textual Jerusalem of late-fifteenth-century pilgrimage accounts was, indeed, not simply the result of each pilgrim using his or her individual experiences to update Mandeville, nor even of their drawing on texts available during their stay in Jerusalem. It was more complex than that. Pilgrims frequently made use of other contemporary pilgrimage accounts when writing their own, particularly once print made these accounts more widely available. Wey’s work, as we have seen, appears to have been reused in Wynkyn de Worde’s Information for Pilgrims, while parts of Breydenbach’s Peregrinatio resurface in both Arnold von Harff’s and Thomas Larke’s accounts. Breydenbach was himself indebted to numerous other authors, including recent pilgrims, such as Hans Tucher, whose account was printed in 1482,'!! while Larke’s account was soon reused by at least two other English pilgrims: Richard Torkington and Robert Langton.!!* There was also potential to draw on the work of one’s own travelling companions, especially if a party contained more than one pilgrim author.
There were, for example, at least four on Breydenbach’s 1483 pilgrimage: Breydenbach himself, Felix Fabri, Konrad Beck, Georg von Gumppenberg, and Paul Walther von Guglingen. Breydenbach made use of Guglingen’s work, and Fabri, in turn, made use of Breydenbachs. Late-medieval pilgrimage writing, therefore, was dependent on a complex literary backdrop, influenced by both utterly up-to-date and long-established indeed by this point, outmoded - writings, in order to create a textual and conceptual Jerusalem informed by the contemporary Franciscan pilgrimage, and yet removed from the historical time and physical space in which that pilgrimage actually operated. This ‘meme’ Jerusalem enabled virtual pilgrims to participate in the Holy Land pilgrimage in a way that was at least as real and true as being physically present - for a pilgrim travelling imaginatively can be quite as present in a conceptual space as a pilgrim travelling literally, if not more so.!!3 And as the ‘meme’ Jerusalem existed in textual form far more comprehensively than in any physical reconstruction, pilgrimage accounts were an essential tool for the practice of virtual pilgrimage.
As we have heard, it was not necessary for an account to be specifically written for virtual pilgrims in order for it to be of use to them. A virtual pilgrim could make use of the most basic pilgrim guide in order to visualise the journey. Neither Wey nor Breydenbach, Harff, nor Larke, primarily had virtual pilgrims in mind, and yet each of them, to differing degrees, makes provision for the non-literal traveller seeking to enter the unreal, consistent Jerusalem. This is clearest in Wey’s Itineraries, the only account to describe more than one visit to the Holy Land. On his second pilgrimage, rather than serve up a rewritten version of his account of his 1458 visits to the holy places, Wey states simply that events were exactly as in the previous itinerary.'! This does not mean, though, that the 1458 visits to the holy places appear only once - in fact they are repeated on several occasions.
Firstly, in English rhyming verse and then in Latin hexameters, Wey demonstrates that the pilgrim itinerary will always be the same when it comes to the places visited, and the order in which they are encountered. The order is so significant that Wey uses the hexameters as mnemonics to remember it.!!5 Even more significantly, his full Latin account of the visits is repeated in personalised and depersonalised forms, in the past and in the future. By using the same words, and simply changing the tense, Wey makes clear that what future pilgrims will do is precisely what his own pilgrim group did do - and more than that, Wey includes himself in the group of future pilgrims by using the first-person plural. Through repetition, the pilgrimage is thus represented in Wey’s text as an unchanging reality, permanently accessible to himself and all future pilgrims, including his readers. The Jerusalem pilgrimage is presented essentially as a form of liturgy, housed inside his Jerusalem chapel.
By participating in pilgrimage, whether literal or virtual, therefore, one enters into a single, shared experience. A parallel can be found in the theology of the sacrifice of the Mass: from Christianity’s early days, the Eucharist has been understood as a continuation of Christ’s sacrifice, rather than simply an imitation of it. It is not a new sacrifice each time, but an entrance into one sacrifice.'!® Without suggesting a parity between pilgrimage and the Eucharist, this provides a background and a precedent for an understanding of an event that is not bound by time and space, but is available outside those limits. There is far more to both pilgrimage sites and to the Eucharist than what is believed to have happened in the first century. In this sense, pilgrims are not interacting with different levels of time,"” but are participating in a communal and unified liturgical event, dissociated from linear time. Wey, through repetition within his text, emphasises this essential unity of experience. The unchanging ‘meme’ Jerusalem, though, the liturgical pilgrimage space detached from physical reality, is not unique to Wey, but shared across late-medieval pilgrimage writing, and clearly visible in the writings of Breydenbach, Harff, and Larke.
These four men, strangers to one another, clearly understood themselves as participating in the shared religious culture of the Jerusalem pilgrimage — both physical and written. Yet a thematic analysis of the works, in each case taking one pilgrim author as an exemplum, will reveal divergences between approaches that can be linked as much to their individual situations as to historical changes, as well as the fact that none of these negate a fundamental consensus about the nature of their task as pilgrim writers. Considering William Wey’s complex, at first sight disjointed, Itineraries within the context of genre reveals, in Chapter 1, that late-medieval pilgrimage writing is best understood as a hybrid genre. In his use of repetition, Wey gives us a particularly clear example of the unified understanding of pilgrimage as outlined above, but his work also bears witness to the numerous other intersecting genres that inflect pilgrimage writing.
Scrutiny of the other three texts in this light shows us that Wey does not stand alone, but that this understanding can be more broadly applied, despite our writers’ wholly different uses of form, style, and language. A writer’s choice of genre is inherently linked with his or her purpose, and so has a bearing on further thematic analysis of the work in question. Bernhard von Breydenbach’s treatment of non-Latin religious groups, and his deliberate strategy of othering, goes far beyond that of the other three pilgrims, and foregrounding this demonstrates, in Chapter 2, not only his purpose in writing, but also the necessity of situating late-medieval pilgrimage writing within its literary context. Breydenbach could not have produced his Peregrinatio without recourse to other writers, both pilgrims and theologians.
We might expect his extensive discussion of other religious communities to lead to a greater engagement with the realities of fifteenthcentury Jerusalem and to a lesser engagement with the conceptual Jerusalem but, in his use of textual space, Breydenbach overtly separates the real world and the constructed literary pilgrimage. Arnold von Harff, our only lay pilgrim, also brings complex intersecting priorities to the pilgrimage, both in its physical and in its textual forms. Medieval pilgrims have been accused, both by their contemporaries and in modern scholarship, of using pilgrimage more as an opportunity for an adventure than as a devotional practice.!!
While our clergy authors certainly dabble in secular interests, Harff shows us conclusively that curiosity and religiosity are not mutually exclusive, and that he is as capable as Breydenbach of delineating the pilgrimage space as separate from his other concerns, though Chapter 3 demonstrates that his reasons and strategies for doing so are entirely different. Harff is conscious of those audience members who were primarily interested in his adventures, and yet he assumes also that they share his religious worldview. Harff was able to make certain assumptions about his audience because, despite making use of printed sources, he did not intend to have his work printed, and therefore presumably anticipated that it would be circulated only amongst his peers. At the same time, though, the spread of print culture was making pilgrimage writing available to a much larger and more diverse audience. This then fed back into the writing process, allowing pilgrim writers to ensure that they were not only drawing on long-established images of Jerusalem, but that they were also maintaining consistency with the accounts of their near contemporaries.
Having obtained access to Breydenbach’s Peregrinatio through the Latin book trade, Thomas Larke, as we shall see in Chapter 4, rendered large parts of the text from Latin into English, ensuring that his depiction of the holy places was, in many instances, a word-for-word translation of Breydenbach’s, while leaving out what to him was extraneous material, such as the excurses on members of other religions. Larke did not know of the other works that had fed into Breydenbach’s descriptions, nor of the fact that his own printed account would be put to similar use in future - though perhaps he suspected the possibility. Through the written and printed word, at least as much as through actually visiting the same places, the conceptual space of Jerusalem remained consistent. The textual representation of the experience across all four texts, which are collectively illustrative of late-medieval pilgrimage writing on a larger scale, is so similar as to represent a single event in which any pilgrim to the Holy Land, whether literal or virtual, can participate.
It is, therefore, by reading these four works together that we are able to see an illustration of the shared religious culture of the late Middle Ages, expressed through the particular prism of the Jerusalem pilgrimage. By analysing these accounts in their literary and historical context, we can understand the full scope of that pilgrimage as unconstrained by time or geography, and accessible to far more people than even those many thousands who were able to make the physical journey to the Holy Land in the decades before the Reformation. And while there were many different aides to assist virtual pilgrims in conducting their pilgrimages, written accounts by those who had made the journey in the earthly world were some of the most important tools in the development of the unchanging conceptual Jerusalem, which was, ultimately, the goal of every pilgrimage. The construction of the textual Jerusalem by pilgrims who had been to the earthly Jerusalem, but who remembered the virtual one in writing, is at the heart of this book.
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