Soul Travel: Spiritual Journeys in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Description

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. Dedication Contents List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction: Soul Travel: Spiritual Journeys in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe • Jennifer Hillman and Elizabeth Tingle Part I: Modes of Spiritual Journeying 1 Reading as a Spiritual Journey: St Bridget of Sweden • Mark Edwin Peterson 2 Performing Pilgrimage in Late Medieval Wales • Kathryn Hurlock 3 Participatory Passions: Spiritual Landscapes of Fifteenth-Century Ferrara • Claudia Wardle 4 The Camino de Santiago and the Via dell’Angelo: Historical and Anthropological Contexts of their Routes • Antonella Palumbo 5 Pilgrimage Confraternities and Spiritual Travel in Catholic Reformation France • Elizabeth Tingle Part II: Life Writing and Spiritual Travel 6 Seeing the Saviour in the Mind’s Eye: Burchard of Mount Sion’s Physical and Spiritual Travels to the Holy Land, c. 1274–1284 • Philip Booth 7 Spiritual Experiences in Portuguese Hagiographies and Sacred Biographies in the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries • Paula Almeida Mendes 8 The ‘Contagiousness of the Sacred’: Writing Spiritual Biographies in Seventeenth-Century Le Puy-en-Vélay • Jennifer Hillman Postscript: Spiritual Travel in the Twenty-First Century: Pilgrims or Tourists? • Tom Wilson Notes on Contributors Index