Download PDF | Diana Webb - Pilgrims and Pilgrimage in the Medieval West (International Library of Historical Studies)-I. B. Tauris (2001).
300 Pages
Editorial Board: Professor David N. Cannadine, Director, Institute of Historical Research, University of London; Wm. Roger Louis, Distinguished Teaching Professor and Kerr Chair in English History and Culture, University of Texas, Austin; Gene R. Garthwaite, Jane and Raphael Bernstein Professor of Asian Studies, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire; Andrew N. Porter, Rhodes Professor of Imperial History, King’s College London; Professor James Piscatori, Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies and Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford; Professor Dr Erik J. Ziircher, Chair, Turkish Studies, University of Leiden Series Editors: Andrew Ayton, University of Hull (medieval history); Christopher J. Wrigley, Professor of Modern British History, University of Nottingham
The International Library of Historical Studies (ILHS) brings together the work of leading historians from universities in the English-speaking world and beyond. It constitutes a forum for original scholarship from the United Kingdom, continental Europe, the USA, the Commonwealth and the Developing World. The books are the fruit of original research and thinking and they contribute to the most advanced historiographical debate and are exhaustively assessed by the authors’ academic peers. The Library consists of a numbered series, covers a wide subject range and is truly international in its geographical scope. It provides a unique and authoritative resource for libraries and scholars and for student reference.
Introduction
When I first planned this book, I thought of it as a ‘source-book’. Since, I have come to think of it more as an anthology. It would be quite possible to compile another one, drawing on a rather different range of texts, or emphasising certain types of text to a greater extent than they have been emphasised here. I have used miracle stories, for example, more selectively than might be expected, given that they can be seen (with some cautions) as the record of pilgrim experience. What follows is a brief explanation of what will and will not be found here.
The processes of preparing for and going on pilgrimage formed multiple strands in the life of medieval European societies, as they have done and continue to do in other societies. Pilgrimage generated some more or less specific types of source material: miracle collections, as mentioned, and also narratives of actual journeys, a category which overlaps with the ‘guide-book’ for pilgrims, of which the twelfth-century Compostela Pilgrim’s Guide is perhaps the most celebrated. Pilgrimage aroused relatively little theological or theoretical concern, although there was a persistent current of low-key criticism which sometimes became more vocal, as with the Lollards in fifteenthcentury England. Broadly, it was accepted as a meritorious, though not obligatory, Christian practice; the bona fide pilgrim was entitled to the protection of the law and the support of the faithful. These rights were articulated by popes, councils and secular rulers alike, and as secular law-courts developed, they incorporated into their practice provisions such as the right to stays of action while absent on pilgrimage. Many of these legal and quasi-legal rights, however, were not peculiar to the pilgrim, but shared by him with the merchant and other legitimate and peaceful travellers.
The pilgrim fitted into the surrounding social and institutional landscape, and left traces of himself in a wide variety of records. There are the incidental mentions of chroniclers, especially when the great and good (and not so good) ventured on pilgrimage; the records of court proceedings; the interventions of popes, bishops and secular rulers to extend assistance to prospective pilgrims. The pilgrim was sent on his way at a ceremony of blessing in his local church and perhaps also with the good wishes and modest contributions of his fellows in a guild; he needed food and accommodation and sometimes, unfortunately, burial along the way; if he survived, he took souvenirs home with him, and these began to be manufactured and marketed in the west in the twelfth century. It is on the very miscellaneous sources for all these and other activities that this book concentrates, in the hope of illustrating how a religious practice implicated a wide range of supporting services and institutions. For all my good intentions, I know that not every conceivable aspect of pilgrimage, still less every possible type of source, is represented in the book that has resulted. As already intimated, types of text which are, so to speak, specific to pilgrimage, such as guide-books and the personal narratives of pilgrims, have been used only sparingly. Many are accessible in English translation, and are best, if possible, read as a whole.
Time, space and my own competence have restricted the book’s scope in a number of other ways. I hope that the reader is aware that pilgrimage did not originate with Christianity and that it has never been, nor is it now, an exclusively or peculiarly Christian phenomenon, but I have not attempted to treat the comparative dimension. I do not trace the history of Christian pilgrimage from its late antique beginnings, and pilgrimage in Orthodox Christendom is also missing. My chronological focus is on the period after c. 700, more especially after c. 1100, and my geographical focus is on western Europe. This was a period in which a common Christian culture, born in the Mediterranean, which included among other practices journeys to sacred sites and the tombs of the venerated dead, had taken root in northern and western Europe and produced local offshoots. In the sixteenth century that culture resolved itself into something rather different, still to a large extent united by the possession of a distinctively European and Christian heritage, but displaying regional variants, some of which dispensed with pilgrimage along with other old beliefs and practices.
The book is divided into four parts, of which the first two are devoted to pilgrimage in western Europe generally. The first treats the period from the eighth century down to the twelfth as formative. There are difficulties with any choice of dividing line, and to separate the twelfth century from the thirteenth would be as problematic as separating it from the eleventh. For the purposes of this subject, the First Crusade is as much a link in a chain as it is a boundary marker. It can be regarded as the culmination of a century of intensified western pilgrimage to the Holy Land, while for many years after 1100 the ‘crusader’ (as we would now call him) remained terminologically indistinguishable from (what we would call) the ‘pilgrim’. A generalised belief in the salvific value of pilgrimage was probably as old as the custom itself, and grants of indulgences which gave it a more exact quantitative value are found before 1100. The clustering of commercial interests around shrines had certainly begun earlier. The pace quickened thereafter, as in virtually every aspect of European life. The purpose of Part One is to show how western pilgrimage took shape in the period down to the twelfth century; an introduction tries to identify some salient themes. Part Two is internally subdivided into broad topics each with its own introduction, and covers the period from the twelfth century down to approximately 1500. Both include some English as well as European material.
Part Three is devoted to the practice of pilgrimage as reflected primarily, though not solely, in the published records of English royal government from the thirteenth to the early sixteenth century. These riches have perhaps best been exploited to date by Constance Storrs, in her study of English medieval pilgrims to Compostela. She made extensive use of the published Calendars of Patent Rolls, Close Rolls, Inquisitions Post Mortem and Entries in the Papal Registers concerning Great Britain and Ireland, which so conveniently make available (even if usually only in summary form) a vast quantity of material from the later medieval period. Storrs also drew on the monumental volumes of Thomas Rymer’s Foedera, an eighteenth-century compilation from governmental records which focused primarily on what might be termed public policy, especially the external relations of the English kings. Rymer gave extended texts, in Latin or less frequently French, where the modern Calendars usually give only English summaries, and drew on classes of record which have not yet been calendared in print. Precisely because of his major concerns, the student turning his pages cannot but be made aware of the frequently fraught context, of war or at least tension between the kings of England and the French and the Scots, in which pilgrimage by natives of the British Isles took place for much of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.’
The Patent Rolls, Close Rolls, Rolls of Parliament and Statutes of the Realm reveal royal preoccupations with ‘public order’ and ‘public interest’ issues, such as the regulation of the movements of subjects and exports of valuables and horses, especially in wartime and the generally troubled days of the later fourteenth century. For their part, the higher-ranking inhabitants of this much-governed country utilised the machinery of state to protect their interests, obtaining licences to travel abroad and safe-conducts and registering the appointment of attorneys for the expected term of their absence. Most such entries are brief and stereotyped, but more picturesque detail is by no means absent. Even the most routine entries convey information, such as (usually) the destinations of pilgrims and the duration of the protection extended by the king, which, it is to be presumed, is related, even if only loosely, to the expected length of the journey. It is also possible to identify individuals who went on pilgrimage more than once (or, at least, made repeated preparations to go on pilgrimage). The influence of ties of friendship and lordship, or the existence of a family tradition of pilgrimage, can sometimes be detected.
The records of the royal courts sometimes take us nearer to the lives and voices of the pilgrims. The Inquisitions Post Mortem, which begin in the later thirteenth century, have a special value. These enquiries were held for a number of purposes, notably to establish whether the heir of a deceased person was now of full age and able to enter into possession of his or her inheritance. This involved receiving testimony from local men who claimed to remember the year, and most often also the day, of the heir’s birth and baptism. Abundant detail often accompanies these testimonies. The witnesses sometimes claimed to remember that the birth occurred in the year of a pilgrimage undertaken either by themselves or by a kinsman or by other folk known to them. Sometimes they said they had departed on the very day of the birth, that they had been informed of it while on pilgrimage, indeed, in a few instances, that they had been on pilgrimage with the father when news of the birth reached him (does this suggest that one motive for going on pilgrimage was to pray for a safe delivery?). The entries often enable us to glimpse parties of neighbours setting out together to Compostela or to Canterbury; one man setting out to Santiago and another from the same village to the Holy Land in the same year; returning pilgrims being welcomed by their neighbours. Reference was occasionally made to death abroad on pilgrimage, in which case the testimony of witnesses to the death and burial might also be recorded. As their approximate ages are recorded, we also get an impression of the average age at which pilgrimages were undertaken: respondents, typically in their fifties and early sixties, but sometimes younger, remember going on their travels twenty-one or more years previously.
The English official material which forms the substance of this section is supplemented by some material of other kinds, including relevant entries in the papal registers. These become more abundant after 1300, mostly having to do (as elsewhere in Christendom) with the commutation of pilgrimage vows, but occasionally shedding light on unusual personal predicaments. The emphasis, though not the sole emphasis, of Part Three is therefore on pilgrimage seen as it were from the top down, by people in authority. As already noted, English material is to be found elsewhere in the book, some of it (such as wills, or extracts from The Book of Margery Kempe) affording a different, less ‘official’ perspective, some of it (like episcopal sentences of penitential pilgrimage) illustrating general themes. There would be no justification for subtracting England from a comparative view of medieval pilgrimage; but the concentrated richness of the archival material makes it possible to scrutinise the ways in which one relatively powerful and well-recorded medieval government accommodated the practice of pilgrimage by its subjects in times of peace, war and domestic discontent, and how those subjects participated in a common Christian culture. It cannot be too strongly stressed that this is only a selection from a much larger potential range.
Obviously the same has to be said with even greater emphasis of Parts One and Two. It would be beyond my capacity, or that of any one scholar, to convey the remotest notion of the enormous quantity of material, archival and non-archival, much of it surely not yet brought to light, which exists all over Europe for the study of this subject. My own Italian interests and especially my recent work on a unique source in the Archivio di Stato of Pistoia have led me to include in Part Two a section devoted to that city; this is, as it were, a sampler, an indicator of possibilities.
Part Four deals briefly with the theme of ‘Criticism and Evaluation’ of pilgrimage from the twelfth century to the eve of the Reformation. The story of European pilgrimage does not, of course, end in the sixteenth century. If it suffered a dramatic and prolonged interruption in Protestant Europe, it flourished, with some regional and chronological variation, where Catholicism proved both resistant and resurgent, and of course where it was effectively undisturbed.’ No attempt has been made here to follow these varied fortunes, in England or elsewhere. The limited purpose of Part Four is to indicate that criticism of pilgrimage, or at least the expression of reservations about its religious value, were ancient, and displayed some remarkable elements of consistency over the centuries.
The over-riding purpose of this book, then, is to give some impression of the rich variety of the sources available and to invite the reader to look further, both into the texts translated or summarised here and into others like them. The vast majority are in print. Pressures of space have inevitably meant that summary and abbreviation have often been necessary, but every effort has been made to ensure that the result is not misleading. Where calendared records have been used, the sources have already been translated and summarised; sometimes further abbreviation has taken place here.
Each of the introductions to the various sections of the book attempts to survey major themes, and includes some numerical crossreferences drawing attention to relevant items in the following selection of sources. Not every one of the documents is thus signposted. To attempt to do this, especially in Part Three, would have risked being fussy and visually intrusive. The introductions, it is hoped, will provide a background against which the sources can be understood.
There are several levels of resource available here to the reader. There are the translated sources themselves, with all the limitations and caveats that have been uttered; there are others quoted or referred to in the sectional introductions; and there are the works cited in the bibliography (and their bibliographies). A comprehensive bibliography of pilgrimage, even of medieval European pilgrimage, would be a book-length enterprise in itself. My list of sources is particularly selective, concentrating chiefly on those which have been used or referred to in the book itself. Obviously the entire area covered by sanctity and hagiogaphy, relic and miracle, is related to the subject of pilgrimage; a few recent and accessible works in those fields have been included, but this cannot be a bibliography of sanctity. It aims simply to be useful to the student and to furnish possibilities of onward progress. Where a work that is included in the bibliography is cited in the notes, it is referred to there only by the author's surname and (if necessary) date of publication.
I have of course several debts to acknowledge. Perhaps the most profound is to all those writers whose references and footnotes have helped me to identify the sources I have used. Having identified them, I had to find them, and here my thanks have to go to the neverfailing sources of supply of the London-based historian: the British Library, the Institute of Historical Research, the Warburg Institute, and once again the London Library, that treasure-house of the unexpected. I must not forget also to mention the staff at the Archivio di Stato of Pistoia, who patiently brought me, day after day, the rather large volumes of the registers of the Opera di San Jacopo. The book was completed during a period of sabbatical leave kindly granted to me by my employers, King’s College London. I have to thank Dr Lester Crook of I.B.Tauris for enthusiastically taking up the idea for the book and Ewan Smith for all his work on its production; Professor David d’Avray for commenting on the project at several stages, with his usual mixture of penetrating criticism and kindly encouragement; and my husband Tony for what can only be described, in a hackneyed but indisputably accurate phrase, as his never-failing support.
A Note on Terminology
The majority of the sources included here have been translated from Latin, and it was from classical Latin that the terminology used to describe pilgrimages and pilgrims derived. The word peregrinus was familiar to Cicero and other Roman writers as an adjective meaning foreign or alien. The same word as a noun and its derivatives peregrinatio (denoting the activity or behaviour of wandering around away from one’s place of origin), and peregrinari (the corresponding verb) were also used. The adverb peregre, also known to classical authors, was much used in medieval sources, almost invariably to denote pilgrimage; the very common phrase peregre iter arripuit or peregre profectus est effectively means ‘he set out on pilgrimage’.
For a contemporary of Cicero, a peregrinus was in an uncomfortable and legally disadvantaged position; the medieval peregrinus was expected to experience privation and even danger, but he also hoped to acquire merit. It took time, however, for peregrinus and its derivatives to shed completely their original, more general, connotations of simple ‘foreignness’ , which lingered for centuries not only in Latin but in the Latinate vernaculars. In the earlier medieval period especially, careful attention to context is necessary before one can be sure that one’s peregrinus is a ‘pilgrim’ and not just a stranger or a foreigner. Even if he is, the journey he is engaged on is not necessarily described as a peregrinatio, which continued often to mean ‘wandering about’ or simply ‘travelling’. What we would call pilgrimages may well be described as journeys undertaken ‘with the purpose of prayer’ (orationis causa or studio) or ‘to the shrines of the apostles/saints’ (ad limina apostolorum/sanctorum) or ‘to holy places’ (ad loca sancta). A journey ad Sanctum Jacobum or ad Sanctum Sepulcrum similarly did not have to be labelled a peregrinatio to be identifiable.
The expedition to the Holy Land which took place in response to Urban Il’s call to arms at Clermont in 1095 was called by contemporaries a peregrinatio (or sometimes simply a ‘journey’, iter) and the participants (who after all included non-military personnel) were peregrini. From the beginning, however, the cross, affixed to the pilgrim’s garments, was the distinctive emblem of the Holy Land journey, and the term crucesignatus (‘one signed with the cross’) was by the later twelfth century being more commonly used to describe what we would call a ‘crusader’. The word took on additional usefulness with the launching of ‘crusades’ against enemies other than the Muslims in the Holy Land: for example the ‘crusaders’ against the Cathar heretics of southern France were so described (in Latin and French) early in the thirteenth century. The differentiation of vocabulary continued through the thirteenth century, and the phrase ‘a general passage’ (generale passagium) came into use to describe a full ‘crusading’ expedition.
For well after a century after 1100, therefore, a peregrinus to Jerusalem might be going with or without a sword in his hand, and only the context will inform us. A peregrinus elsewhere is increasingly likely to be a pilgrim rather than just a foreigner, although the adjective was still sometimes used just to mean ‘strange’ or ‘foreign’. Similarly, a peregrinatio is increasingly likely to be a pilgrimage. In addition, terms deriving from the names of particularly celebrated shrines came into being: a Jacobipeta was going to Compostela, a Thomipeta to Canterbury. A Romipeta might well be going to Rome, but the word was occasionally used generically to mean ‘pilgrim’, as the similar romeus frequently was. A ‘palmer’ was originally one who had been to the Holy Land and brought back with him a branch of palm. Raimondo ‘Palmario’ of Piacenza bore this name already in the late twelfth century, and the Oxford English Dictionary records its occurrence in the English language by about 1300. ‘Palmer’ became a not uncommon surname, and like romeus tended sometimes to be used generically.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق