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Representations of English Women and their Pilgrimages in Twelfth-Century Miracle Collections

Representations of English Women and their Pilgrimages in Twelfth-Century Miracle Collections

By Anne E. Bailey

Assuming Gender, Volume 3, Issue 1 (2013)

Detail of a miniature of a monk meeting two women riding on the back of another woman.  Harley 4399 f.54 - British Library

Abstract: Miracle collections, compiled by monastic cult centres, record stories of pilgrims visiting miracle-working shrines. Those produced in England in the High Middle Ages have recently received much scholarly attention. Not only do they seem to offer a rare glimpse into the lives of the laity for the period, but they are also remarkable for containing a large number of stories about women. Conventional historical approaches to miracle narratives, which tend to regard them as ‘shrine-side records’, often seek evidence for women’s experiences of pilgrimage in these texts. This essay, however, reappraises such interpretations and explores some of the ways in which the stories of women and their journeys were informed by hagiographical agenda and Christian ideology. Drawing on a survey of sixteen miracle collections compiled in twelfth-century England, the study examines the representation of women as pilgrims, and demonstrates that many modern assumptions about female travel in the Middle Ages are not consistent with the miracle accounts. Far from being creatures of restricted mobility as is commonly assumed, female pilgrims are often presented by hagiographers as intrepid travellers who do not seem especially thwarted by the supposed limitations on their gender.

Introduction: In popular imagination the medieval pilgrim is typically male, often envisaged as a long-distance traveller and identified by his staff, scrip and sandals. Similar gendered assumptions seem to have been shared by many medieval writers. Garnier de Pont-Ste-Maxence’s twelfth-century La Vie de Saint Thomas Becket lists pilgrims visiting St Thomas’ shrine in Canterbury as ‘princes, barons, dukes with their nobles, strangers from foreign countries speaking many languages, prelates, monks, recluses, crowds of foot travellers’. As a visual reality, female pilgrims blur into the background. In Garnier’sdescription, women are presumably to be found – or rather, hidden – among the vague and easily dismissible category of ‘foot travellers’. There is, however, another hagiographical source which not only gives substance to Garnier’s anonymous pilgrim ‘foot travellers’, but which also reveals that not all of them were men.

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