Ibn Jubayr: The Rihla
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
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
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
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
“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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
Planning for Pilgrims: St Andrews as the Second Rome
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
Michael Van Dussen examines a late-medieval Czech account of St Paul’s Cathedral in London
Personal Piety or Priestly Persuasion: Evidence of Pilgrimage Bequests in the Wills of the Archdeaconry of Sudbury, 1439-1474
However, when we consider the number of individuals, particularly from the lower orders, who actually undertook a pilgrimage at some point in their lives, we find that we actually know remarkably little about them.
‘Stronger than men and braver than knights’: women and the pilgrimages to Jerusalem and Rome in the later middle ages
Pilgrimage, like any other form of travel in the later middle ages, was time-consuming, expensive, and dangerous.
Making ‘Sense’ of the Pilgrimage Experience of the Medieval Church
This paper will explore the importance of sensory experience throughout the late twelfth to the early fifteenth-century, with a particular focus on the act of bodily participation with the divine, and how this was reflected in the architectural and visual structure of a saintly site
Convents, Courts and Colleges: The Prioress and the Second Nun
Pilgrimage, after Whitby, and before Vatican II, was a secular activity, a performance of piety by the laity, not by the clergy; although there were a few exceptions.7 Chaucer’s Monk, Friar, Prioress, Nun, Priest, Summoner, Pardoner and Parson ought not to be here. Their presence is outrageous comedy. Inns were forbidden to the cloistered clergy who, if they had to travel, were enjoined to stay in other monastic establishments along their route.
Englishwomen as Pilgrims to Jerusalem: Isolda Parewastell, 1365
Isolda Parewastell from Somerset, who was in Jerusalem in 1365, fitted into this fourteenth-century pattern. Despite the risks involved, women pilgrims were inspired by an instinct for travel and change, as well as by a sense of religious obligation and the hope of spiritual reward.