Pilgrimage and Cultural Communication

We tend to take for granted how easy it is to communicate with people living a distance from us. All we have to do is pick up the phone or turn on the computer. For people living in a world before trains, planes, radios, TVs, phones, and internet, communication with others from different lands or even different regions of the same country was far from easy. It could take hours to travel mere miles and weeks or months to traverse countries and continents.

Yet many people did travel to far-off places. The most popular reason for common people was

• pilgrimage -- to worship at the shrine of a holy personage.

These pilgrimages performed a pious act and served as atonement.
People sought:

• To be Healed
• To do Penance for sins and crimes
• To earn blessings for later life in heaven
• To make money by establishing contacts abroad

Pilgrimages consisted of a journey to a major shrine. The 3 most popular were

• Rome
  • Rome, because it was the seat of Western Christendom where St. Peter and St. Paul were buried,
• Santiago de Compostella
  • the burial place of St. James
• Jerusalem
  • where Jesus lived and died
  • For centuries the people had been going to Jerusalem on pilgrimages -- the only pilgrimage site outside Europe.

There were also small local shrines to favorite saints and larger pilgrim sites within England such as

• Canterbury, the site to which Chaucer's pilgrims are traveling
  • shrine of St. Thomas a Becket

Imagine how odd it must have been for pilgrims to encounter strange people of different colors who spoke different, non-European languages, and who worshipped in a different way. Surely they would have felt some of the same racial and ethnic devisiveness which we feel today, but perhaps more extremely.

How can we know how medieval people viewed the world outside their own experience?

• Personal accounts
  • Personal accounts form an interesting body of reading testifying to how their authors felt about each other. But as we know, no two people share exactly the same experience of culture and culture shock. A good example is The Book of Margery Kempe.
• Travel literature
  • Guides and accounts of travel in far-off lands provided cultural information, although certainly not accurate information; a good example is Mandeville's Travels).
• Maps
  • Like Mandeville's Travels, maps were vehicles for conveying all sorts of information (see Medieval Maps).

Return to Travel in the Medieval World

Return to Chaucer--The Canterbury Tales
Return to Medieval English Drama
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