The crusaders found themselves confronted not only with foreign cultures and violent armed resistance, but also with an alien natural environment and climatic conditions that could prove to be sometimes just as fatal as the arrows of the enemy.
A Climate for Crusades? Weather, climate and armed pilgrimage to the Holy Land (11th–14th Century)
December 16, 2013 By
Auðun of the West-Fjords and the Saga Tradition: Similarities of Theme and Structural Suitability
August 23, 2013 By
Auðun of the West-Fjords and the Saga Tradition: Similarities of Theme and Structural Suitability Josie Nolan (Trinity College Dublin) Vexillum, Vol.3 (2013) Abstract This paper evaluates the story of Auðun from the West Fjords, a Þáttr dating from the Sturlinga period of medieval Iceland. It compares the short prose narrative to the much longer sagas […]
Holy Meditations and Earthly Curiosities: Understanding Late Medieval Pilgrims to Jerusalem
July 22, 2013 By
There were many worthy sites along the way, destinations in themselves, but Jerusalem in particular was unrivaled. It lured pilgrims to face death just to stand upon Mountjoy, that fabled vantage point overlooking the city.
Ibn Jubayr: The Rihla
July 19, 2013 By
Abu ‘l-Husayn Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Jubayr (1145-1217) was not an exceptional man. As a relatively ordinary, middle-aged Muslim, Ibn Jubayr was neither the first nor the last to leave Al-Andalus to perform the hajj. Admiring kings only from afar, the closest that Ibn Jubayr came to royalty were encounters with imperial tax collectors. Paradoxically though, it is precisely Ibn Jubayr’s lack of distinction that helped earn him repute throughout the Islamic world in his time. It also makes him the ideal subject of the present study.
Representations of English Women and their Pilgrimages in Twelfth-Century Miracle Collections
June 18, 2013 By
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.
The Author and the Hierosolimitanus: Reading the Gesta Francorum as a Pilgrim Narrative
June 4, 2013 By
Often cited as the only crusade which succeeded in its purpose, this groundswell of fervor throughout all ranks of Christendom’s population, and the subsequent military campaign which placed the holy city in Christian hands and established the Latin Crusader States in the Levant, has raised quite a few historiographical and even ethical questions for historians.
‘Fromm thennes faste he gan avyse/This litel spot of erthe’: GIS and the General Prologue
May 2, 2013 By
This paper was given at the Canada Chaucer Seminar on April 27, 2013.
The Legend of the Purgatory of Saint Patrick: From Ireland to Dante and Beyond
March 17, 2013 By
“Yes by Saint Patrick …. Touching this vision here It is an honest ghost, that let me tell you” (Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5)
Bawdy badges and the Black Death : late medieval apotropaic devices against the spread of the plague
January 27, 2013 By
Owing to the fact that historians generally view the late medieval period as an “age of faith,” the existence ofthese remarkable objects raises some fundamental questions about the exact socio-religious nature ofmedieval culture. The primary questions, however, that need answering are: when, where, and for whom were the badges produced, and perhaps most importantly, why.
Scottish saints cults and pilgrimage from the Black Death to the Reformation, c.1349-1560
January 15, 2013 By
This thesis will question this premise and provide the first indepth study of the cults of St Andrew, Columba of Iona/Dunkeld, Kentigern of Glasgow and Ninian of Whithorn in a late medieval Scottish context, as well as the lesser known northern saint, Duthac of Tain.
Russian Pilgrims in Constantinople
December 30, 2012 By
If one compares the Russian Anthony text with the original Mercati Anonymus text, the longest and most detailed of the three extant contemporary Western descriptions of the shrines of Constantinople, one finds that the Latin text includes only twenty of the seventy-six religious shrines mentioned by the Russian enumeration.
Pilgrimage and Embodiment: Captives and the Cult of Saintsin Late Medieval Bavaria
December 24, 2012 By
Chief among the stories contained in these miracle stories are tales of escapes from captivity. Almost forty percent of the reports in the two Munich Latin miracle collections deal with liberations from imprisonment and escapes from captivity of various sorts.
Holy Land, Holy Bones, Holy Image: Byzantine Pilgrimage Art
November 26, 2012 By
In Christianity that’s when pilgrimage, sacred bones, holy people and holy places were defined. That’s when the rules were set, and the rules that were sent in those three centuries are the same rules that apply now, and that is same crucible of time and location out of which emerged the icon
Salutare Animas Nostras: The Ideologies Behind the Foundation of the Templars
November 18, 2012 By
The meteoric rise of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon (more commonly known as the Knights Templar) and their equally swift fall has fueled fanciful tales and scholarly research. The order promoted their mythological origins and the extreme charges leveled against them by Philip IV of France (1285-1314) created an atmosphere of speculation.
Chaucer’s costume rhetoric in his portrait of the Prioress
October 10, 2012 By
No critic has ever discussed costume signs in order to reveal to what extent the Prioress does or does not conform in her costume to the fourteenth century norm, with consideration given, simultaneously, to the historical records, literature and visual arts of the period that form and inform the signs from the many traditions Chaucer in corporates in his portrait of the Prioress.
Mandeville’s Intolerance: The Contest for Souls and Sacred Sites in The Travels of Sir John Mandeville
October 3, 2012 By
While Chaucer‟s knight has traveled to and fought in Spain, North Africa, Eastern Europe, and Asia Minor, Sir John claims to have visited the entire known world from Constantinople and the Holy Land to the farthest reaches of Asia.
On the Making of Holy Places Along the Sea Routes of the Eastern Mediterranean
September 1, 2012 By
The connection with the Holy Land was frequently made visible by the dissemination of both site-relics (such as stones from the holy sites) and body-parts of saints being especially worshipped by Holy Land pilgrims, such as Saint Catherine and Saint Barbara.
Comparing Pilgrim Souvenirs and Trinity Chapel Windows at Canterbury Cathedral
August 5, 2012 By
The story begins with two tin pilgrim ampullae2 made before 1220 in Canterbury, England, that were found centuries later, one in France (now in the Cluny Museum) and one in Norway (now in the Historical Museum in Bergen, Norway).
Martyrs on the Move: The Spread of the Cults of Thomas of Canterbury and Peter of Verona
July 22, 2012 By
No matter how one viewed Peter‟s and Thomas‟s personalities, the glaring fact of their instant and enduring cults forces the conclusion that their contemporaries all over Europe saw in them, and especially in their martyrdoms, desirable and compelling prototypes for Christian perfection. The spread and extent of these cults is the subject of this study.
Pervenimus Edessam: The Origins of a Great Christian Centre Outside the Familiar Mediaeval World
July 17, 2012 By
This is the meeting place of the western and eastern worlds, for near here passed the movements between Palestine and Mesopotamia associated with Abraham, near here the Assyrians made their last stand after their capital fell in 610 B.C., and near here Crassus ill-advised attempt to press eastwards came to an end.
Pilgrimage to Chartres: The Visual Evidence
June 24, 2012 By
References to Chartres Cathedral as the most important Marian shrine in Europe during the Middle Ages still abound. The historiography of this interpretation leads back to local chartrain histori- ans of the nineteenth century, among whom Lépinois was one of the most respected.
Planning for Pilgrims: St Andrews as the Second Rome
June 5, 2012 By
The burgh of St Andrews was laid out in the mid-twelfth century, on a grandiose scale, and to a different plan from the majority of contemporary burghs in Scotland, including Edinburgh. The lecture argues that it was deliberately modelled on the Vatican Borgo, the area between St Peter’s and the Tiber in Rome, which had been fortified in the ninth century AD.
Tourists and Tabulae in Late Medieval London
May 4, 2012 By
‘Stronger than men and braver than knights’: women and the pilgrimages to Jerusalem and Rome in the later middle ages
April 17, 2012 By
Pilgrimage, like any other form of travel in the later middle ages, was time-consuming, expensive, and dangerous.
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