In Our Time - Medieval Pilgrimage

Episode Date: February 18, 2021

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the idea and experience of Christian pilgrimage in Europe from the 12th to the 15th centuries, which figured so strongly in the imagination of the age. For those able and willing to travel, there were countless destinations from Jerusalem, Rome and Santiago de Compostela to the smaller local shrines associated with miracles and relics of the saints. Meanwhile, for those unable or not allowed to travel there were journeys of the mind, inspired by guidebooks that would tell the faithful how many steps they could take around their homes to replicate the walk to the main destinations in Rome and the Holy Land, passing paintings of the places on their route. The image above is of a badge of St Thomas of Canterbury, worn by pilgrims who had journeyed to his shrine.WithMiri Rubin Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary, University of LondonKathryn Rudy Professor of Art History at the University of St AndrewsAndAnthony Bale Professor of Medieval Studies and Dean of the School of Arts at Birkbeck, University of LondonProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programs. Hello, in medieval Europe, the idea and experience of Christian pilgrimage was so intense that it fired the imagination of the age. For those who could travel, there was a constellation of destinations,

from Jerusalem, Rome and Santiago de Compostela to countless local shrines associated with miracles. And those who had to keep home could recreate journeys in their minds, pacing cloisters with guidebooks in hand, replicating the number of steps from the Holy Sepulchre to the Mount of Olives, as if they were really there. With me to discuss medieval Christian pilgrimage are Catherine Rudy,

Professor of Art History at the University of St Andrews, Anthony Bale, Professor of Medieval Studies, and Dean of the School of Arts, at Birkbeck, University of London, and Mary Rumen, Professor of medieval and early modern history at Queen Mary, University of London. Mary, Pyrubin,

pilgrimage is common to all major faiths, but where would you look for the origins of Christian pilgrimage? What's special about Christianity is that God took flesh. He became a human. He lived a life. He lived in a family. He met people.

He ate with them. He stayed in places. He touched people. He left an enormous. number of places and buildings associated with his life. Now, after his crucifixion, his resurrection, there were memories of him. All these places become extremely, extremely important to his followers. And also, whenever his disciples went throughout the Mediterranean to found churches in various places, most famously when Peter went to Rome, so there begins to be a sort of Christian geography.

The thing is that until the early 4th century, this has to be rather underground. It's after Emperor Constantine in the early 4th century allowed Christianity to be celebrated in public, that we find his mother, according to legend, Helena, literally going to the Holy Land in order to mark out the places, the places associated with Christ's life and to build appropriate churches there, Nazareth, Bethleh, and Jerusalem. in a way she contributed to this holy geography of places that ought to be visited in order to participate, to remember, to show reverence. How did the number of sites ripple out from the Holy Land, West to Rome and Spain? When did that ripple effect happen?

Constantine's there. We're in the 4th century. We read about a nun in Portugal taking a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. But when did it really begin to gather strength and where? New places are added because. martyrs are created. So throughout the Roman world, all around the Mediterranean, for example, by the fourth century, if you go to the city of Cologne, you will find that there were already three churches to martyrs. So martyrs, those who in the periods of persecution under Nero,

under Diocletian, were persecuted and burnt, again, their followers took away just remnants from their bodies and buried them in cemeteries that became holy places to visit. But of course, once Christianity is allowed to flourish, churches are built there, hospices are built there. And so there's the infrastructure for a much more evolved cult, we might even call, of these martyrs. And one more thing that's really important here is that for all these bones or remnants to mean something, you really need narrative. You need stories that make sense of them and convey them to future generations. And already from the second century, we have the first account of a martyr's life. Thank you very much. Kate, Kate, Rudy, what was initially motivating people to set out

on these much longer journeys? Your journey to Jerusalem, if you came from Britain or North Germany or whatever it was, would have there and back, would have taken you something up to a year. So what was the power there? Why did Mary's explain where you went, but was there any other motivating force? Three of the four Gospels actually exhort the reader to take up your cross and follow me. And Christians took this to mean that they should go to Jerusalem and walk in Christ's footsteps. And Christians really wanted to develop an empathic relationship with Jesus. But they wanted the fully immersive experience that the pilgrimage afforded. for example, at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, there was a chapel that had a stone basin for

holy water, and pilgrims would put their heads in this hole, and they would hear this great mournful rumbling, and they were told that this was the sound of the wretched souls in purgatory. It's just an example of the kind of sensory experience that they were seeking. And Mary was really, she was said to have been the first pilgrim because she retraced her son's footsteps along the road to Calvary each day until she herself was assumed into heaven. And of course, Christ himself walked to the River Jordan to be baptized. And every subsequent pilgrim wanted to do the same, to plunge into the water and to commune physically and emotionally.

When did the structures around pilgrimage, the pilgrimages itself are not in the Bible. Penitence isn't the purpose. When did these start to have? encrusted the Christian message and become as important as the Christian message itself. In Jerusalem in particular, they were really encrusted by the Franciscans who laid out the infrastructure

and ship captains based in Venice would take groups of pilgrims so that they could arrive in time to walk from Jaffa to Jerusalem and arrive there on the Day of Resurrection on Easter. and thereby turn the journey into a recreation of Christ's final walk to Calvary. And for other pogromages, I'm thinking about the pogromance to Santiago de Compostela. St. James, his body was discovered, as it were, by a shepherd in 813, and immediately a church built on that site.

And from that point, he began to draw pilgrims, including Godosol, from La Pui, who was one of the first recorded pilgrims in 851, to cross the Pyrenees and to gather an entourage and to visit the site of the body of St. James. Anthony Bell, I'd like to have some idea of numbers for the listeners now. When did the numbers become significant? When were the big groups of people beginning to move to Europe, beginning to move east?

In Western Europe, we're talking about pilgrimage in a really major way from the 11th century as something which is encompassing very large numbers of people. And I think one of the big kind of watershed moments is the first crusade in the last years of the 11th century. In the 1090s, the crusaders think of themselves as pilgrims, pilgrims with weapons, and they are given a plenary indulgence by the Pope for going on crusade. So they get this remission of sins. and the crusaders in the Holy Land, they think of their activity as both devotional with a spatial local basis. They want to retake the holy sites.

They want to keep access to the holy sites for Christians. At the same time, you see the popularity of purgatory and this doctrine of the remission of sins becoming widespread in the 11th,000. and 12th centuries, and that really fires the cult of the saints. In the British Isles, I would say that perhaps we're thinking about the 12th century too as the time when you get the building of these great Norman abbeys and pilgrimage shrines, places like Walsingham, Barry St. Edmunds, Canterbury, Glastonbury, that become, for the next three or four hundred years, really important places for healing, for devotion to the particular saint, for giving a votive offering, which might be a candle or it might be a very large gift. And that is something

which spreads across all different parts of society. And then Kate has already mentioned the role of the Franciscans in the Holy Land. From the 1320s, 1330s, the Franciscans become the kind of sole representatives of Western Christendom in the Holy Land. And they were, to some extent in league with the Mamluk Sultanate, which at that point occupies the Holy Land, and they set up a kind of holy travel agency from Venice to the Holy Land running guided tours. Is there a sense, Anthony, that the church seeing this happen, and the centralised church, which was powerful for well over 1,500 years in every aspect of life, saw this as part of its economic structure,

been forcing its power through what it could afford to do, which became increasingly expanded. That's undoubtedly a very significant part of it. And it slightly depends on the individual shrine. In some cases, a shrine could be very local. It could have been a Christianized shrine like a holy well that had already been a site of pre-Christian devotion beforehand, and that then became sacralized and Christianized. And then a good example here is Walsingham in Norfolk. where there's some holy wells. These were probably thought of as healing for many years. And then in the mid-12th century, an abbey is built there to house the holy house, which was a little structure. A local noblewoman called Rochelle de Faversh had a vision that she should build a replica of the house of the Virgin Mary and the infant Christ from Nazareth.

She should build that in Norfolk. and Abbey is built there. The Abbey becomes stupendlessly wealthy through pilgrimage. Similarly, Barry St. Edmonds and Glastonbury. People are paying for things and people are giving things and the church is taking money for their indulgences. And can we talk now, Meru, to you, about the role of religious relics.

What powers were associated with them? And could you give us a few examples, please? From very early on, the very idea of a sacrament means that deep in Christianity, is the belief that although grace is ineffable, grace travels through material things, the water of baptism, the bread of the Eucharist, and so on. And so it was also quite easy to believe that the remnants of meritorious people could do the same. Now, that is really the beginning of relics. Now, when we talked about Christ, who was resurrected in Mary, who was assumed into heaven,

Nonetheless, there are relics of their existence. When Helena went to the Holy Land, she became, in a way, a model for the identification of relics. She went and she found the Holy Cross, the Holy Blood, and so on. So there is a way in which that closeness to, I mean, obviously there's Christ and Mary, but to saintly people, to meritorious people, but also to holy places is absolutely crucial. What powers were associated with these relics, though? What powers did they have? You had a bit of the cross. You had bones. What makes them powerful? The grace that they help mediate, but also the fact that these were people, as it were, chosen by God, beloved of God, and therefore, like the Virgin Mary, they would be good intercessors that is praise to them somehow will open up God's ears. And shrines became sort of specialized. So for example, in Italy, after the Black Death, there was a whole explosion of shrines that were associated with saints, even very minor ones, who could cure the plague,

as it were. But if you go to a shrine like that all-important, truly European shrine at Canterbury, that of St. Thomas Beckett, which developed from the 1170s, you get people coming for absolutely every type of cure. Can I turn to Kate from a moment now? What lengths would people go to to collect or control these relics from or for these shrines? People went to great lengths to acquire them because they were so valuable. In fact, they were often so valuable that they couldn't be bought for regular money because somehow exchanging them for filthy lucre would debase them.

And since the saints to which the body parts belonged still technically were alive and dwelling in heaven, they had opinions about where their physical bodies should be kept. And if they weren't being venerated properly, they would allow themselves to be stolen. And stealing relics was so common that it had a name. It was Fertesacra, the theft of sacred objects. And this happened most famously in the 9th century in Kahnk in France, where Benedictine monks were so desperate to acquire a powerful relic that they resorted to this. Their monastery lay just off the main road to Santiago de Capistella, and they wanted to deflect the route slightly so that the pilgrim traffic would come through their town. And they heard of a relic in Agen that was powerful.

It was the relic of a child saint named Saint Fois, who had been martyred in the 5th century under Diocletian. One of the Benedictine monks, his name is Aranisdisdus. He went from Conch to Agen, posing as a priest, and he asked to join the community there. And he spent 10 years waiting for his moment. And as soon as he was alone with the relics, he grabbed them. ran back to Kank, where his brothers were waiting and enclosed the relics in a glorious reliquary made from golden Roman spolia. Anthony, Anthony Bale, for longer journeys, what would the experiences of pilgrims be? We know about the Canterbury Tales, which is just a lot of fun and laughter.

They're all on horses, and life's good. What was it like for most people? The Canterbury Tales does give us a window onto that, and of course the Tabard in Southwark, the inn from which the Canterbury Pilgrim set out, was actually a pilgrim in on the way to Canterbury. And I think there is an interesting connection with kind of pleasure and recreation, and we still have that in English language where a holy day becomes a holiday, and the two kind of sometimes seem to mix in pilgrimage. But in the longer pilgrimages, particularly to Jerusalem,

I think the experience was actually fairly grueling. One of the things that pilgrimage has bequeathed to us are some very detailed accounts, written accounts, of the pilgrims' experience. And the journey from Venice to Jaffa could take between about 26, 27 days to 60 days at sea. And conditions on the boats were extremely poor, according to the accounts of the time. And pilgrims were actually quite likely to die on these journeys. There are numerous accounts of pilgrims being buried at sea or being buried when they reach the Holy Land.

And also pilgrims frequently complain about their treatment once they get to the Holy Land. The locals throw stones at them. They think the locals are trying to steal things from them. The locals laugh. But what's particularly challenging, I think, to the pilgrims is that they have to pay both their Franciscan guides and the Mamluk Cameliers and Dragoman.

A dragon is a kind of interpreter. They have to pay them for everything. You have to pay to go into the church of the Holy Sepulca. You have to pay to go to the sepulchre itself. You have to pay to come out of the sepulca. You have to pay to go into each chapel. So they feel like they're in this very kind of exploitative relationship with the whole experience, which is supposed to be a spiritual experience.

The lodgings for pilgrims are also extremely Spartan. And the written accounts we have from the 14th and 50s. centuries, they talk in a lot of detail about how you must buy a feather mattress in Venice, you must buy your blankets, you need to buy laxatives and spices to cure your stomach. The pilgrims talk about seasickness a lot, but they don't seem to mean seasickness like we think of it. Seasickness seems to be something fatal, more like kind of dysentery. And actually, one thing we haven't really talked about yet is pilgrimage as punishment that courts could send people on pilgrimage, as a kind of punishment.

And one example that I've done some work on is of a young man called John Maid in Kent in the 1320s. And he admitted to the Bishop of Rochester's court that he had had sex with his married godmother. And as a punishment, he was sent to Santiago de Compostela to make a pilgrimage. And this wasn't supposed to be a holiday or a pleasure trip. This was supposed to be something where he would really suffer as well as curing his soul and atoning for his sin. Mary, Mirri, Rubin, how free were pilgrims to go where they wished when they got there? Anten has given us quite a bleak outline of what was going on. Have you anything to add to that?

We know for a fact that people made very elaborate wills before they went on pilgrimage because exactly it was so very dangerous. And if you look at 14th century sort of notaries, notebooks from Italian cities, about a third of them are sort of people preparing wills. many of them are wills of pilgrims to be. So the dangers were enormous. And the issue of pilgrims on route across Europe was obviously very, very vexing to authorities. So on route between settlements, between cities, people sort of organized themselves into groups on the whole. And they tended to like to travel with people they could understand, that is, in language and even regional groups.

We know that for sure. Now, when they came to. to a city. There is a dilemma for city fathers. We have a lot of documents from the Italian cities that are on the way to, on the pilgrimage to Rome. What do you do with them? On the one hand, yes, you want to feed them, you want to sell them stuff because that's business and that's really, really good business in a city like Siena. That's absolutely clear. But on the other hand, you also have to regulate them. You allow them to pass through certain streets and not others. You expect them to stay in certain hostels rather than others. I mean, in Siena, this was really brought to a very high level because right across from the wonderful Duomo, the cathedral, we have this beautiful

12th century hospital hospice, Santa Maria de la Scala, whose main purpose was indeed to give a hostel to and give beds to these pilgrims passing through. But the thing is, they also quickly developed a sort of fiscal function that is people could transfer monies to be picked up from in Siena to go on to Rome and of course, as in all things, the richer you were, the more comfortable you could make yourself. Well, that's a surprise.

Kate, Katie, what of those who couldn't travel? What options did they have? Most obviously, nuns and some of the orders of months, but quite a few other people, just too poor to travel the long distances as we're talking about at this moment. It was so uncomfortable that there were all kinds of reasons not to go.

So in addition to being too poor to travel or to being an enclosed nun, for example, you might just not be able to afford it. But there's a whole system of taking virtual pilgrimages. And as Mary just pointed out, if you were wealthy, you could have alternatives as well. So you could also take a pilgrimage by proxy. There are records of wealthy people sending. images of themselves or sending a proxy person to stand for them on a journey to Rome and to Jerusalem. But for virtual pilgrimages, some of the early examples of that already come in collections of

stories around 1240 where there was a nun in Offenbach in Germany who had a bad knee. And she desperately wanted to go to Rome on pilgrimage, but she couldn't because her knee was too bad. And so she figured out how many miles it was to roam and how many days it would take to walk there. And so for each day's journey, she read 100 patronasters. And as she was walking in her mind by doing these paternosterousers over and over again, her knee slowly healed itself. But there were also structures for taking pilgrimages that grew up, especially in the later Middle Ages, by using images. And one of the great examples of that was in Augsburg, in 1487, the Dominican nuns there, got papal permission from Pope Innocent, I think it was the 8th, to use a series of giant pictures, about two meters wide each that depicted the seven major churches of Rome.

And they were able to visit Rome simply by performing prayers in front of these images. And also, and this is important, to earn the indulgences that would normally be given to physical pilgrims. Then we had also, Anthony Bayless, I understand it, an eruption of small shrines all over Europe, east moving to the west and up and down, let's call it Europe. Did they have a particular function or they did the same as the big ones only on a much smaller scale? Some of them were very localized, and so they had a nationalist or local element to them. So that's where, you know, we now think about national patron saints. In the Middle Ages, there's a few alternatives.

In England, it can be St. Edward. It can be St. Edmund. It can then in the later period be St. George. And so it can be something to do with, you know, say, a military victory can then lead to the popularity of a particular saint for that reason. And also then the particular facets that a saint's shrine has, some are famous for curing, say, a stomachache or a headache or curing leprosy. And they wax and wane, depending on, I think, on fashion, on reputation, and on the ease of getting there and on the facilities that they provide.

The three great pilgrimages in the later Middle Ages are to Jerusalem, Roman, Santiago, and sometimes Cologne and Aachen are added to that list. And then there are some smaller ones. And then in England, Canterbury is definitely the preeminent one, but also Walsingham and Glastonbury. But then there's some regional ones which are equally important in their locale. There's a flemish town called Udunard where there was a kind of tariff for sending people on pilgrimage, depending on what they'd done wrong. and if you've done something really bad

you had to go to the shrine of St. Nicholas at Bari which is obviously a long way. If you've done something fairly bad, you had to go to the shrine of St. Andrew in Scotland. But if you've done something, you know, if it's only slightly bad, you could go to a local shrine. But then on top of that,

you could pay a different amount of money to get out of going on the pilgrimage, so £20 so you didn't have to go to Bari or £8,000 so you didn't have to go to Scotland. Mirri, can I ask, is there any record of the success rate of people going to be healed of various, as we've heard, leprosy and other things, and being healed?

Very, very high. Because, of course, the sources that tell us about the goings-on in the shrines were collected by the local monks or other priests that were there in a genre, miracle books. And of course, they, and if there is a case when it doesn't work, usually that also is turned into advantage because the person didn't come with good intent or the person got cured but then didn't offer the proper amount of offerings or a large enough candle so it gets reversed and then of course they have to fix it for the cure to last. So the sources that we have are all celebratory and they really could be very, very local shrines. There's a shrine in the late 12th century in Norwich

for a boy who was supposed to have been killed by Jews, little William of Norwich. And you can just see that the peasants who came for cures with their children, with their bad knees, with their sufferings, were literally all those who lived, who were serfs on the estates of the Bishop of Norwich. Because the news of these shrines also traveled through networks that were social networks, were economic networks. It could be supremely local. And when Henry VIII wants a sort of census of all the shrines in England in order indeed to close them down,

it is, we have reports of his commissioners. There are literally thousands of places where you could go, where there might be just a smidgen of a dried out drop of the milk of Mary's breast in a file. And that will attract women who are seeking conception. Kate, we understand that at these shrines, the bigger shrines, of course, there was a great deal of memorabilia on sale, including badges and penny-sized sketches of Christ and so on. How was their power regarded?

More badges, the better, or what was going on? There's an account from La Pui, the church La Pui that had control over the sale of badges. And it was a really lucrative trade. and the idea was that pilgrims could purchase one of these small badges. They were made out of lead tin. They were poured into a mold. And if you bought the official one, you were allowed to touch your badge to the relics, thereby turning your badge into a contact relic.

And therefore, you could take it home and help people who were maybe ailing at home. But if you didn't buy your badge from an official source, you weren't allowed to touch it. And so you couldn't have the added. value of it being a contact relic. Now, I think my favorite contact relic comes from the shrine of Assyrian aesthetic in the 6th century named Simeon. And he lived as a hermit on top of a column in the desert. So he was one of the stymian, yes, precisely. One particularly enterprising person took the clay from the base of the stylight and made little tokens out of the clay. And there are miracle stories like the kind that Mary just mentioned that tell of his supplicants taking these badges and breaking them up into water to turn them into dust and then swallowing the water, thereby swallowing something that's both an image of Simon and also a contact relic of the saint in order to cure indigestion.

One of the hagiographers who wrote the life of Thomas of Beckett gives us a description of what you get from different places. From Jerusalem, you come back with a palm, from Rocca Madur with an image of the Virgin, from St. James of Compostella, you come with a shell, and from Thomas A Beckett with water in an ampul and a little container, water with an infinitesimal amount of the blood of the martyr. Anthony Bale, if there were, what were the arguments against pilgrimage in that period? Well, I'd say the arguments against pilgrimage are almost as old as pilgrimage itself, or certainly the doubts about pilgrimage. And they largely resolve themselves around worries about curiosity or the Latin word curiositas versus the correct kind of pilgrimage. So curiosity indicates some kind of wandering, unfocus. undirected travel, travel of both the body and the mind, whereas the proper pilgrimage should be absolutely focused on the shrine. It should be highly theological. It should get to the shrine,

come back, and no curiosity, no straying into pleasure or desire or, you know, anything interesting outside the goal of the pilgrimage. And actually, these doubts go back very early. St. Augustine calls, it talks about the disease of curiosity. And there's two different strands of this anti-pilgramage narrative. One is the kind of satirical or doubtful strand. We see that in Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales. The pilgrims, of course, don't get to Canterbury. They spend their time chatting and telling stories and falling out with each other

and spending their time en route. And the journey becomes more interesting than the destination in Chaucer's telling, which is a kind of grave sin of curiosity. But that's kind of lighthearted. it's not attacking the institution of pilgrimage. At the same time as Chaucer's writing, you've got John Wickcliffe and then the Lollards raising quite serious theological questions

about the nature of pilgrimage. And this then ultimately becomes the grounds of the Reformation, and one of the main grounds of the Reformation, is that the Lollards, I think it's the eighth conclusion of the Lullards, published in the 1390s, says that pilgrimage is at best ineffective and is at worst, on idolatry, that the relics are similar not to icons but to idols.

And this really then establishes a very, very bitter argument around the nature of pilgrimage. And that's further corroborated by the attack on the institution of purgatory and of indulgences. And then you get someone like Martin Luther in the 1520s really invading against pilgrimage as a sinful practice. Before we say goodbye to pilgrimage, can I just ask, Mary, the active pilgrimage changed the importance of towns and villages all over the place. Anywhere that groups of, big groups of pilgrims passed and passed regularly and had enough money, changed the nature of the town. The towns became richer, they built for the pilgrimage.

Although earlier on in this programme, they were treated in rather bleak circumstances. They still brought to the town wealth that it hadn't enjoyed before. That's very true. And we have to remember, of course, which hasn't been mentioned, but is really important, that pilgrimage and commerce, they used the same roots. So places that had a developed system of roads and hostilries and so on would also attract pilgrims. And of course, Rome did everything to incorporate people, to invite people. From the year 1300, they proclaim every 50 years a jubilee year, a particularly merriac. a rhetorious year in which to do pilgrimage to Rome. But it's true in all these cases. And what's interesting is, after the Reformation, quite a few places in Protestant parts of Europe,

where they could no longer be a pilgrimage site because pilgrimages was frowned upon and was indeed dismantled, they became spas. They often retained that sense of a center for healing through a medical argument, particularly when there were wells and there were springs, there were sources of water. So we have quite a lot of sort of, you know, bathing going on where once probably wholly dipping of heads, as we heard, might have gone on. It's an interesting programme. It's an interesting programme. The way the pilgrimage aligns into tourism. It's another programme, but it did happen on a big scale.

And you do find in the later period a kind of slippage between the properly direct, pilgrim who's trying to go to Rome or Jerusalem, who then becomes something like a forerunner of the grand tourist, a kind of humanist who might hang out at a university for a while, might stop in Padua or Ferrara, or might go to the papal court, or who might come back via circuitous route. And from the mid-15th century, this is quite common in the written accounts, that the pilgrims, they're writing a travel guide, but they're also writing a kind of voyage of discovery, which is about the various curiosities that they saw on their trip. The short scale of the number of pilgrims who are undertaking the pogromage to

Santiago de Campesella, for example, they change the scale and the style of pilgrimage pilgrimage architecture altogether. So we have these great Romanesque churches that have to be multiple times the size of the churches that came before them in order to accommodate the vast quantities of people who are coming through. And it also gives Ibitus to the idea that you have to manage crowd control. And so suddenly, pilgrimage churches need to have an indoor and then swing people around to see relics and have an outdoor so that they don't get crushed in the east end of the church. I think it's really interesting how in the Protestant world, nonetheless, pilgrimage continued not to shrines,

but this notion of the inner pilgrimage. And the best example is that best sense. And the best example is that best seller of all times, which is of course John Bunyan, the way people wrote diaries about their inner progress. It's a very, very interesting sort of transformation of that idea of progression towards virtue through some sort of paste journey. Although I would also say that that's seeded in the period we've been talking about in the 14th and 15th centuries, where there are people who are not invaying against the theology of pilgrimage, but they are saying that one should seek Jesus inside oneself rather than externally. And there's a very popular text in the 15th century, Guillaume de Gileville's Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, which imagines life as a pilgrimage,

which is a very common motif in the literature of the time, and then absolutely cedes that kind of idea that you get in Protestantism of the kind of internal pilgrimage or the soulful pilgrimage. And then Luther comes in and almost eradicates the notion by talking about faith being so much superior to works. Well, and one of Luther's points is that if God is everywhere, how can God be more in Jerusalem or somewhere? If God is in a parish church, there's no reason why God would be more or more concentrated in Jerusalem. But one of the, from slightly parallel to Luther, and a text I use. really hugely recommend and I think is incredibly prescient is Erasmus's text, the Pilgrimage for Religion's sake, which is a kind of light-hearted text and an attack on pilgrimage or a satire on

pilgrimage, which actually very presciently looks forward to what Henry VIII does to pilgrimage. And it's a discussion between two men, someone called Menidemus, who it means stay at home, and his friend Egyzius, which is a place from the Odyssey, and Eidius has been missing for six months and he turns up covered in pilgrim badges and rosaries and he's been on this very long pilgrimage to Santiago and to Walsingham. And really, Ajijius is this kind of foolish character who's going on pilgrimage for his own benefit for wealth and to look after his own health and that of his family. And it's kind of moving into superstition the way that Erasmus describes this. And Erasmus is not in any way like Luther trying to kind of destroy the institution of the church which is

supported by pilgrimage, but Erasmus is kind of teasing the worldliness, the acquisitiveness, the consumerism that we see in the late medieval pilgrimage culture. It really takes some time after Luther in later Protestant writers and definitely the 17th century amongst Puritans to develop this idea of this internal journey and internal. accountability, and indeed, Bunyan belongs to that generation. There is a stream of this internal accountability already in the late Middle Ages, especially in the literature of virtual pilgrimage, which is fed to cloistered women. And they are asked to imagine that their lives are, in fact, taking place in Jerusalem rather

than in a convent, and that every trip they take to go to lunch or to church, as a trip to Caiaphas's house or to Pilate's house. And in one particular copy of a book describing these mini daily journeys, the nun has written the number of times that she paces around the convent in order to equal the number of footsteps that she would have to take in Jerusalem. Finally, Anthony, what would you say remains today of the practice of pilgrimage in the sense that it was followed by medieval Christians? I'd like to answer that with two different strands.

One is that what we've seen very recently is actually a revival of pilgrimage, particularly on the Camino de Santiago. And this has been a feature of the last 15 or 20 years or so. And the idea of this revival is to undertake a kind of authentic pilgrimage, which where one walks the Camino, you don't take a taxi or you don't take a train, and you stay in very simple accommodations. and you follow the root exactly of the medieval Camino. What's different about it is that it's not focused on getting to the shrine,

it's focused on completing the journey. And it kind of turns it into the language of self-improvement, of meditation, of removing oneself from daily life, and to some extent, kind of sportizing it, how long it takes you to do it and that you complete it, that you get to the end. and often it's Protestant people taking these pilgrimages or non-believers or people from different faith group. Yeah, it's absolutely.

So pilgrimage has become kind of, it's become absolutely much more open. The other kind of strand of that, of course, is that there's places like Walsingham and Glastonbury that have been rededicated, often in the 20th century, with Anglican shrines or with New Catholic shrines or even with Orthodox shrines, where the holiness has kind of been reinvigorated or put back in. to it, but according to a slightly different faith tradition. And even though lots of the places that we've talked about today no longer exist as shrines and there's nothing you can see, you know, at Barry St. Edmonds or at Walsingham, really of the original altar, we do in the English language retain something of medieval pilgrimage in words like the word tawdry comes from the lace that people bought at the shrine of St. Audrey in Ely, this cheap lace that people would take away, or the verb to Rome, R-O-A-M, it comes from Romier, someone who went to Rome, or the canter to canter is the pace of

the Canterbury Gallup that you go to Canterbury on as a pilgrim. And so there are relics of pilgrimage still in our own language today. Pilgrimage like the medieval is very recognizable in the world today, just not so much in Europe. It's really in Latin America, in Africa, where there are Marian apparitions. There are new sites being created. I mean, literally in Kegali, in Rwanda, just in the 1990s, the creation of a whole new, very, very powerful pilgrimage, let alone, of course, the Guadalupe always in Mexico. So it's not so much a European phenomenon, except in the way that it's been revived to Compostela, but it's happening in other places where Catholicism is a really growing religion.

Thank you very much. Thanks for Mr. Mayor Rubin, Kate Rudey and Anthony Bale. next week it's the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius celebrated as a philosopher king for his meditations and as the last of the five good emperors. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What did I miss out that you would like to have said? I think I just wanted to slightly qualify the conversation we had about Christ not leaving any material remains on earth because that wasn't necessarily true or a huge obstacle in medieval

pilgrimage. First of all, there was the holy prepose, the holy foreskin, and various versions of it which were venerated around Europe. And one of those in Chirou in northern France became a very important pilgrimage site. But also in the Holy Land itself. He said the Holy Forskin? Yeah. Exactly. You didn't miss hear me. I was giving you the benefit of the data, so the holy foreskin. Yeah, and that's Christ's foreskin. And there would actually several of them around medieval Europe that were venerated as relics. But also in the Holy Land, we talked about the pilgrim seeing themselves being in Christ's footsteps.

And actually the lack of Christ's body then manifests itself in footsteps in the stone in the Holy Land. So at the mosque of the Ascension, the dome of the ascension, which had been a church and then became a mosque on the Mount of Olives, there was an imprint of Christ's footprint, and which was a copy of which or a version of which was actually brought to Westminster. And there were also, so for instance, in the pavement on the Via Dolorosa, you were supposed to be able to see the donkey's hooves where Christ had entered Jerusalem. And so you could get over this kind of the physical absence of Christ's body. Yeah. And that could turn into, you know, this very soft stone. Medieval stone is thought to be kind of quite malleable. and alive and taking all these imprints.

No, those are really good points. And can I just recall the 6th or 7th century box that contains a stone from each of the major sites of the passion that were then put in sort of a concrete aspect. And then the lid of the box shows images of the places those stones came from so that the stones themselves are part of the contact. relic system of Christ's passion. And the stones are kind of similar to the pilgrim badges in a way, aren't they? Because that tradition carries on of bringing earth or soil or stone back with you.

And people chip away at the major shrines. There's a wonderful story from the 15th century of a Flemish pilgrim who tries to steal some of the jewels of St. Edmund's shrine in Barry St. Edmonds by kissing the shrine and hiding the stones in his mouth and his. his mouth gets stuck to the shrine as punishment for the St. Edmund's quite a vengeful saint. And in the Holy Sepulchre, the mamelukes have to put marble slabs around it to protect it from the pilgrims, who are taking so much of it away that it's becoming permanently damaged and diminished. In churches around Germany in particular, there are marks of knives in the stone of the stone of the stone

where pilgrims have tried to scrape away some of the stone that's as close as possible to where the relics would be kept in order to ingest those as well so that you could actually eat the physical church. I thought there's a point we might have made when Melvin asked how did this all explode, is that just there's another way in which pilgrimage was used by the church is for really, really bad, violent elite men. men, they would impose on them these years and years of pilgrimage. It weren't even necessarily to any destination, sometimes they were, but literally to travel the land, a little bit like cane, in chains, barefoot, miserable, without any signs of their office or of their power, and to just do it. And on the way, they would take in shrines because that would obviously improve them and maybe even shorten this sort of penance. And we have examples of them being described,

these figures, these miserable men being described en route, literally, and living off alms. And that has to be just part of the, there weren't many, but they existed. And it must have been a quite shocking sight. And that culture of giving arms for other people's pilgrimages is also very important of paying for a pilgrimage. gives benefit to the person paying for it as well, or building a pilgrim hospice, or doing something to aid pilgrimage, even if you don't go on it yourself.

One thing I was thinking about is how Philip the Good used pilgrimage as a way to consolidate his territory. So he seemed to be on pilgrimage all the time. He was away from his main castles, and he was setting up tents in order to pray remotely. But there were so many shrines in his vast territory, and he would go in and venerate at them regularly. And this brings up a point that Anthony mentioned before,

which is that pilgrimage is available and accessible to both rich and poor. One of the ways that Philip the Good handled this was by collecting pilgrim's tokens at each of these sites and then sowing them into his manuscript at the suffrage to the respective saint. And I think that he was putting on a performance of piety. It goes on and on. The thing that is mysterious to me is that over such a long time, this idea of prayer and of speaking directly to God, Jesus or the Saints at the Shrine, held on and was used so often and believed in so often

and must have failed so often, but still continued. But it was a central plank as well of medieval medicine, and that was one of the things that was, you know, I think we talked about that early on, this was a very common way of people curing. If you're born with an incurable illness, it's one of the key ways of treating that illness. And there were records of the success.

There were records. There were people who managed the system of cures. You could get advice as where to go to, where is most appropriate. And, of course, they recorded the successes, and that news of that successes gave hope. And very often a story of a miracle will open with, after they exhausted and they spent endless money on doctors to no avail, somebody suggested that they go to a shrine.

And that's literally it's people's desperation and hope. You can see their degree of desperation at the shrine of St. Hubert in the Ardennes, where people gathered who had been bitten by a mad dog. So they had rabies, apparently, or something like that. And because St. Hubert was a hunter and had driven. jurisdiction over dogs. And what would happen at the shrine is that people would have an incision placed in their foreheads and then a piece of the contact relic, so a little piece of cloth that had touched the relic of St. Hubert, embedded under the skin and then tied together with a bandage

and had to eat a special diet for a period of 10 days while the relic was communing with their with their flesh inside their head and then had the bandage removed and burned in a special bull. And that just reeks of a kind of desperation, I think. It's extraordinary, isn't it? I mean, the power of that church and the reach of that church over that time,

quite extraordinary. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Hello, I'm Greg Jenna, the host of the You're Dead to Me podcast, and I have some good news. Now that we're all stuck at home, again, we are bringing back homeschool history. And if you missed out the first time, you don't know what it is,

it's our fun, family-friendly and informative show about, well, you can probably guess. Yeah, history. And yes, we're bringing back the obligatory sound effects, of course. This time out, get ready to learn about the Great Fire of London, ancient Egyptian religion, the Scottish Wars of Independence, Mary Seacol, and one of the teenage mutant ninja turtles that you'll have to tune in to find out which one. So that's homeschool history with me, Greg Jenner, on BBC Sounds.