Writing the Jerusalem Pilgrimage in the Late Middle Ages

by: Mary Boyle (Author)

Publisher: D.S. Brewer

Publication Date: 2021/2/19

Language: English

Print Length: 251 pages

ISBN-10: 1843845806

ISBN-13: 9781843845805

Book Description

An examination of four written accounts of medieval pilgrimages to Jerusalem.What do the bursar of Eton College, a canon of Mainz Cathedral, a young knight from near Cologne, and a Kentish nobleman's chaplain have in common? Two Germans, residents of the Holy Roman Empire, and two Englishmen, just as the weste horizons of the known world were beginning to expand. These four men - William Wey, Behard von Breydenbach, Aold von Harff, and Thomas Larke - are amongst the thousands of weste Christians who undertook the arduous jouey to the Holy Land in the decades immediately before the Reformation. More importantly, they are members of a much more select group:those who left written accounts of their travels, for the jouey to Jerusalem in the late Middle Ages took place not only in the physical world, but also in the mind and on the page. Pilgrim authors contended in different ways with the collision between fifteenth-century reality and the static textual Jerusalem, as they encountered the genuinely multi-religious Middle East. This book examines the inteational literary phenomenon of the Jerusalem pilgrimage through the prism of these four writers. It explores the process of collective and individual identity construction, as pilgrims came into contact with members of other religious traditions in the course of the expression of their own; engages with the uneasy relationship between curiosity and pilgrimage; and investigates both the relevance of genre and the advent of print to the development of pilgrimage writing. Ultimately pilgrimage is revealed as a conceptual space with a near-liturgical status, unrestricted by geographical boundaries and accessible both literally and virtually.

About the Author

An examination of four written accounts of medieval pilgrimages to Jerusalem.What do the bursar of Eton College, a canon of Mainz Cathedral, a young knight from near Cologne, and a Kentish nobleman's chaplain have in common? Two Germans, residents of the Holy Roman Empire, and two Englishmen, just as the weste horizons of the known world were beginning to expand. These four men - William Wey, Behard von Breydenbach, Aold von Harff, and Thomas Larke - are amongst the thousands of weste Christians who undertook the arduous jouey to the Holy Land in the decades immediately before the Reformation. More importantly, they are members of a much more select group:those who left written accounts of their travels, for the jouey to Jerusalem in the late Middle Ages took place not only in the physical world, but also in the mind and on the page. Pilgrim authors contended in different ways with the collision between fifteenth-century reality and the static textual Jerusalem, as they encountered the genuinely multi-religious Middle East. This book examines the inteational literary phenomenon of the Jerusalem pilgrimage through the prism of these four writers. It explores the process of collective and individual identity construction, as pilgrims came into contact with members of other religious traditions in the course of the expression of their own; engages with the uneasy relationship between curiosity and pilgrimage; and investigates both the relevance of genre and the advent of print to the development of pilgrimage writing. Ultimately pilgrimage is revealed as a conceptual space with a near-liturgical status, unrestricted by geographical boundaries and accessible both literally and virtually.