Virtual Pilgrimages in the Convent: Imagining Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages

Description

'Walking in Christ's footsteps' was a devotional ideal in the late Middle Ages. However, few nuns and religious women had the freedom or the funding to take the journey in the flesh. Instead they invented and adjusted devotional exercises to visit the sites virtually. These exercises, largely based on real pilgrims' accounts, made use of images and objects that helped the beholder to imagine walking alongside Christ during his torturous march to Calvary. Some provided scripts whereby votaries could animate paintings and sculptures. Others required the nun to imagine her convent as a miniature model of Jerusalem. This volume is grounded in more than a dozen texts from manuscripts written by medieval nuns and religious women, which appear here transcribed and translated for the first time, and a multiplicity of (occasionally three-dimensional) images. They attest to the ubiquity and variety of virtual pilgrimages among religious women and help to reveal the functions of certain late medieval devotional images. Black and white plates 7 Colour plates 11 Abbreviations 13 Acknowledgments 15 INTRODUCTION 1. Physical and Religious Geography 19 2. Virtual Pilgrimage among the Orders 23 3. Motives for Virtual Travel 35 CHAPTER I. SOUVENIRS RECONTEXTUALIZED 1. Travelogues owned by Religious Women 41 A. A Dominican’s Travelogue and the Spiritual Care of Nuns 45 B. A Canoness’s Copy of Thietmar’s 'Iter ad terram sanctam' ('Vanden berg Synay') 49 C. Franciscan Guides to Indulgences 58 D. A Travel Guide for the Augustinian Abbess at Maaseik 92 2. The Recontextualization of Relics 97 A. Metric relics 97 B. Earth relics 107 CHAPTER II. INTERIORITY: STATIONARY PILGRIMAGE DEVOTIONS 1. Devotionalists, Virtual Pilgrimage, and Indulgences for Rome 120 2. The Virtual Pilgrimage of Maaseik 130 A. The Content of the Prayer Text 132 B. The Development of the Prayer Text 143 3. Textual Descriptions of Jerusalem Panoramas 146 4. Memory Houses of the Passion 150 A. The Lisbon Passion and Eerhaert Rewich’s Map 151 B. The Leuven Passion 162 CHAPTER III. EXTERIORITY: SOMATIC PILGRIMAGE DEVOTIONS 1. The Portiuncula 173 2. Birgittine Virtual Pilgrimage Compilation 175 A. Birgittine Virtual Pilgrimage to the Holy Land 184 B. Going to Lunch with the Virgin 185 3. Praying in the Garden of Gethsemane 192 A. Heer Bethlem’s Printed Guide to Virtual Pilgrimage 195 B. The Users’ Notes 209 C. The Nine Sufferings and the Seven Falls 218 4. Visiting the Holy Sepulcher 221 A. The Rotterdam Prayer Text 223 B. Other Versions of the Text 228 CHAPTER IV. A WIDER VIEW 1. Across Europe 231 2. Lay Audiences 240 3. A Wider Distribution through Printing 245 4. Metaphoric vs. Literalist Virtual Pilgrimage 252 5. Virtual Travel in Mind and Body 255 APPENDICES I. Brussels, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, MS 3402-03 263 II. Darmstadt, Hessische Landes- und Hochschulbibliothek, MS 982 275 III. The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, MS 73 F 23 303 IV. Comparison of two of the texts of 'Den aflaet der heilige steden van Jherusalem' 371 V. Rotterdam Gemeentebibliotheek, MS 96 E 12 395 VI. London, British Library, Add. MS 31001 (Birgittine Virtual Pilgrimage Compilation) 399 VII. Brussels, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, MS II 3688 411 VIII. The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, post-incunable 231 G 22 417 IX. Ghent, Universiteitsbibliotheek, MS 1734 421 X. The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, MS 133 F 1 (The Windesheim Virtual Pilgrimage Compilation) 425 XI. The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, MS 132 G 38 447 Bibliography 449 Photo Credits 469 Index of Manuscripts 471 General Index 473