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This volume is an edited collection of original essays on spiritual travel in medieval and early modern Europe. Pilgrimage was a central feature of medieval and early modern Christianity. But holy travel was not only a physical act, it was also an interior disposition and a spiritual process. From at least the late Antique period, the life of a Christian was understood allegorically as a journey towards heaven. Also, many people could not travel: enclosed orders of monks and nuns, men and women with responsibilities tying them to localities, the sick and frail. Virtual travel was instead their recourse to the sacred sites. Thus spiritual pilgrimage, instead of or alongside physical pilgrimage, became prominent in medieval Europe and survived the Reformation in both Protestant and Catholic traditions.
These essays show that this experience took many forms: a lively imagining of a journey with holy people or to holy places; an «out-of-body» experience such as the revelations of St Bridget of Sweden; guided journeys; meditations upon holy places such as Jerusalem; and travel in reconstructed landscapes, from the Monti Sacri reconstitutions to convent churches. The volume includes an historiographical introduction by the editors and nine case studies of spiritual journeys, drawn from across the late medieval and early modern periods and from different regions of Europe.
List of contents
CONTENTS: Mark Edwin Peterson: Reading as a Spiritual Journey: St Bridget of Sweden - Kathryn Hurlock: Performing Pilgrimage in Late Medieval Wales - Claudia Wardle: Participatory Passions: Spiritual Landscapes of Fifteenth-Century Ferrara - Antonella Palumbo: The Camino de Santiago and the Via dell'Angelo: Historical and Anthropological Contexts of their Routes - Elizabeth Tingle: Pilgrimage Confraternities and Spiritual Travel in Catholic Reformation France - Philip Booth: Seeing the Saviour in the Mind's Eye: Burchard of Mount Sion's Physical and Spiritual Travels to the Holy Land, c. 1274-1284 - Paula Almeida Mendes: Spiritual Experiences in Portuguese Hagiographies and Sacred Biographies in the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries - Jennifer Hillman: The «Contagiousness of the Sacred»: Writing Spiritual Biographies in Seventeenth-Century Le Puy-en-Vélay -Tom Wilson: Postscript: Spiritual Travel in the Twenty-First Century: Pilgrims or Tourists?
About the author
Jennifer Hillman is a Visiting Research Fellow and Tutor in History in the Department of History and Archaeology at the University of Chester, UK. She is an historian of early modern Europe, with particular interests in the religious and cultural history of seventeenth-century France.
Elizabeth Tingle is Professor of History at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK where she is also Head of the School of Humanities. She is an historian of the French Wars of Religion and the Catholic Reformation in Europe.
Summary
This volume is an edited collection of original essays on spiritual travel in medieval and early modern Europe. Pilgrimage was a central feature of medieval and early modern Christianity. But holy travel was not only a physical act, it was also an interior disposition and a spiritual process.
