Sacred Journeys in the Counter-Reformation: Long-Distance Pilgrimage in Northwest Europe 9781501514388, 9781501518515

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Elizabeth C. Tingle Sacred Journeys in the Counter-Reformation

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture XXVII Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Culture LXXIII

Elizabeth C. Tingle

Sacred Journeys in the Counter-Reformation

Long-Distance Pilgrimage in Northwest Europe

ISBN 978-1-5015-1851-5 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-1-5015-1438-8 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-1-5015-1413-5 Library of Congress Control Number: 2020937625 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: photograph by © Martin Tingle Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

For Katharine Tingle and William Davis m. July 27, 2019

Acknowledgements This work has been long in gestation and many debts of gratitude have been accumulated along the way. Ideas were refined during three conferences on pilgrimage. Two took place at the University of Chester in 2016 and 2017, the former kindly assisted by the Society for Renaissance Studies and the latter, sponsored by the Royal Historical Society. A third conference, in 2017, was sponsored by De Montfort University, Leicester. Thanks are due to Professor Philip Soergel for chairing the Leicester conference and adding his insight to the project. A major debt of gratitude is due to the Huntington Library in California for a research fellowship in December 2017, which allowed for the use of the wonderful resources of the library, particularly the Irish printed sources, and the space to think. Thanks are also due to Professor Soergel and Professor Virginia Reinburg, for useful comments on the work and to Erika Gaffney at MIP, for overseeing the publication. I owe thanks to the staff of the British Library, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and the Archive-Library of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, for their helpful assistance. I am particularly indebted to the staff of the French regional archives where I undertook much research for the book, especially the Archives Départementales of Aube, Aude, Calvados, Finistère, Gironde, HauteGaronne, Loire-Atlantique, Manche, Rhône, Sarthe, Seine-Maritime, Vienne, and others. I was received with warmth, courtesy, and help everywhere, which greatly aided the project. It is my family to whom I have the greatest debt. My husband, Martin, and our children, Katie and William, accompanied me at various times on my travels, in person and in spirit. Martin took most of the photographs for this book. I dedicate this book to my daughter and new son-in-law, Will, in the year of their marriage, a different sort of life journey. Wymeswold, September 2019

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501514388-001

Contents List of Illustrations Abbreviations

XI

XIII

Chapter 1 Introduction: Long-Distance Pilgrimage in Early Modern Europe 1 Chapter 2 Pilgrims and Their Purposes: The Motives of Holy Travelers Chapter 3 The Journey: Landscapes and Travel to Shrines Chapter 4 The Shrine: Experience of Sacred Time and Space

76 114

Chapter 5 The Life-Long Pilgrim: Continuing the Journey at Home Chapter 6 Conclusions

214

Bibliography of Printed Works Index

242

222

163

33

List of Illustrations Figures Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure

1.1: 3.1: 3.2: 3.3: 3.4: 4.1: 4.2:

Figure 4.3: Figure 4.4:

Figure 5.1: Figure 5.2: Figure 5.3:

Map of Europe showing pilgrimage sites (© Martin Tingle) Pons hospital. Chapel doorway (© Martin Tingle) Pons hospital. Interior of hospital (© Martin Tingle) Pons hospital. Exterior from the south (© Martin Tingle) Hospital Real, Santiago de Compostela (© Martin Tingle) Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. West Front (© Martin Tingle) Shrine of St. James, Santiago de Compostela. Nineteenth-century reliquary (© Martin Tingle) The Mont Saint-Michel, Normandy (© Martin Tingle) Plan of Station Island, Lough Derg, by Thomas Carve, 1666 (Source: Print from Thomas Carve, Lyra sive Anacephalaeosis Hibernica (Sulzbach, 1666). Copy in the Huntington Library, California) Image of St. Michael, Parish Church of Pleyber Christ, Finistère, seventeenth century? (© Martin Tingle) Pilgrim badge from Santiago de Compostela in the shape of a cockleshell (© Trustees of the British Museum) Jet statuette of St. James, from Santiago de Compostela, seventeenth century? (© Trustees of the British Museum)

Tables Table 2.1: Receptions of pilgrims in Santissima Trinità hostel of Rome during jubilee years. Table 5.1: St. Michael Confraternity membership of Notre-Dame de Vire, 1652–1691.

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Abbreviations A.D. B.N.F. Bonnecaze

Archives Départementales. Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Nicolas de Caumont, Guillaume Manier, and Jean Bonnecaze, Chemins de Compostelle: Trois récits de pèlerins 1417 – 1726 – 1748, ed. Valérie Dumeige (Paris: Cosmopole, 2009). Ferreiro Antonio López Ferreiro, Historia de la Santa A. M. Iglesia de Santiago de Compostela, 11 vols. (Santiago: Seminario Conciliar Central, 1898 – 1911). Huynes Jean Huynes, Histoire générale de l’abbaye du Mont Saint-Michel au péril de la mer, ed. E. de Robillard de Beaurepaire, 2 vols. (Rouen: C. Métérie, 1873). Laffi Domenico Laffi, A Journey to the West: The Diary of a Seventeenth-Century Pilgrim from Bologna to Santiago de Compostela, trans. James Hall (Leiden: Primavera, 1997). Le Roy Thomas Le Roy, Le livre de curieuses recherches du Mont Saint-Michel: Histoire du sanctuaire normand de l’Archange, de sa fondation à l’époque moderne, ed. Vincent Juhel (Caen: Société des Antiquaires de Normandie, 2008). Leslie ed. Shane Leslie, ed., St. Patrick’s Purgatory: A Record from History and Literature (London: Burns Oates and Washbourne, 1932). Manier Guillaume Manier, Pèlerinage d’un paysan picard à Saint-Jacques de Compostelle au commencement du XVIIIe siècle, ed. Baron Bonnault d’Houet (1890) (Le Mesnil sur l’Estrées: La Vague Verte, 2002). Parga et al. Luis Vázquez de Parga, José M. Lacarra, Juan Uría Ríu, Las peregrinaciones a Santiago de Compostela, 3 vols. (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investagaciones Científicas, 1948 – 1949).

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Chapter 1 Introduction: Long-Distance Pilgrimage in Early Modern Europe I thought the age of pilgrimages had been at an end in all European nations, and that devotion contented itself with venerating its saints at home—but will you believe it, when I assure you, the number of pilgrims who come annually to pay their vows to Saint Michael at this Mount, are between 8 and 10,000? They are mostly peasants and men of mean occupations; but even among the noblesse there are … those who are induced to make this journey from principles of piety.¹

When the English traveler William Wraxall visited the Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy in 1775, its status as a popular pilgrimage site was apparent even if visitors were fewer than at the beginning of the eighteenth century. He was witness to the final phase of a great upsurge in Counter-Reformation pilgrimage activity that occurred across Catholic Europe. Much of this pilgrimage was to local and regional shrines, often newly created.² Another great destination was Rome, particularly during its Holy Years. Much less well known is the post-Reformation survival and refashioning of ancient, long-distance pilgrimages to shrines dedicated to early evangelists and confessor saints in northwestern Europe, such as Santiago de Compostela, the Mont Saint-Michel, and Lough Derg in Ireland. The focus of this book is on the revival of religious journeying to distant shrines dedicated to early medieval saints’ cults in the eastern Atlantic regions, that is, northern Spain, northern France, and the British Isles. The evolution of these spiritual journeys over time, the experiences of individual pilgrims, the relationship of pilgrimage to the formation of religious identity, and the role played by “heroic voyages” in reformed Catholicism, are central to this work. Pilgrimage—a journey to a sacred place as an act of religious devotion—was one of the great traditions of medieval Christianity.³ Pilgrims ranging from King Louis IX of France and St. Francis of Assisi, to Margery Kempe the housewife from Norfolk, traveled to the holy places of Christendom for physical healing, spiritual salve, and simple curiosity.⁴ Historians of the Middle Ages such as Diana Webb, Denise Péricard-Méa, Jean Chelini, André Vauchez, and Robert Bar-

 Wraxall, Tour, 32.  French examples include: Boutry and Julia, Sainte-Reine au Mont Auxois; Maës, Le Roi, la Vierge et la nation; Martin, Chemins du sacré; Provost, La fête et le sacré.  OED definition.  Kempe, Booke of Margery Kempe. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501514388-004

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tlett among many others have provided detailed studies of saints’ cults, the motives of pilgrims, and the developed infrastructure of local and distant shrines.⁵ Less has been written about traditional, long-distance pilgrimages to saints’ shrines outside of Rome and the larger Marian shrines after the Middle Ages, partly because they were assumed to have diminished greatly after the Reformation. In reality, whilst the practice did decline across Europe in the first half of the sixteenth century, thereafter it expanded greatly along with local and regional forms of pilgrimage, seen in the historiographical record for southern Germany, Burgundy, and for the Mediterranean regions of France, Spain, and Italy. In this book we turn northwards, to examine the post-Reformation development of long-distance pilgrimage to ancient saints’ shrines in a part of Europe that was far from the center of spiritual authority in Rome. From the early Middle Ages, local and then apostolic saints’ cults had arisen, which attracted longdistance pilgrimage. The sites of internationally important early medieval cults were often still frequented in 1500, although their fortunes varied: St. James at Compostela, St. Michael at the Mont Saint-Michel, St. Martin at Tours, and St. Patrick at Lough Derg in the northwest of Ireland, for example. Regionally important cult centers of the earlier Middle Ages had shrunk in scope, although there was still long-distance movement at least at some times of the year: St. Hubert in the Ardennnes, St. Reine in Burgundy, St. Fiacre in Brie, and St. Méen near to Rennes, St. Olaf at Nidaros, and St. Columba or Columcille on Iona off the Scottish west coast, are just some examples. There were many such saints in northwest Europe. The Reformation affected these shrines far more directly than it did those of the Mediterranean world. It was in northern Europe that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, saints’ cults and pilgrimage were frequently contested. France, the Low Countries, and the British Isles were places of disputation and hostility between Protestant and Catholic; sacred landscapes and journeys came under attack and in some regions were outlawed by the state. The main question of investigation of this work is therefore what happened to the tradition of international pilgrimage in the Atlantic regions of Europe, so visible in the later Middle Ages, in this period of religious contestation? How did ancient, geographically remote religious shines reinvent themselves in the early modern period to attract pilgrims; how did they make themselves relevant to the changing priorities of post-Tridentine Catholicism and assist in its dissemination? The

 Webb, Pilgrims and Pilgrimage; Péricard-Méa, Compostelle; Chelini and Branthomme, Chemins de Dieu; Vauchez, Lieux sacrés; Bartlett, Why Can the Dead.

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study is one of agency: what did such sites offer the pilgrim that local religious traditions did not, and how did this evolve over time? In this study, focus is on ancient shrines which first emerged in the early or central Middle Ages and which persisted across the Reformation era. The cult centers examined here were all dedicated to saints other than to the Virgin Mary—the patron of the most prominent Counter-Reformation shrines after Rome—in order to consider the importance of traditional saints in changing confessional practices. Three major shrines are examined, St. James of Compostela in northern Spain, the Mont Saint-Michel in France, and St. Patrick’s Purgatory at Lough Derg in Ireland. In addition, a number of smaller-scale shrines are considered as comparisons, where evidence allows: of St. Méen in Brittany, St. Martin of Tours, St. Hubert in the Ardennes, and others from northern France and the Low Countries. To investigate the role of such institutions in lived practices, the central methodological enquiry of this work is the experience of pilgrims visiting these shrines, individually and in groups. Pilgrims originating mainly from France and the British Isles will be the center of the study, inhabitants of regions where pilgrimage was contested but where the practice re-emerged as a visible statement of confessional identity in the later sixteenth century. In addition, the experiences of pilgrims to these shrines from Spain, Italy, the Low Countries, and the German territories will be considered where there is evidence, choices of emphasis dictated largely by the survival of documentary sources, which has a French bias. Through an examination of religious journeys, the book offers new perspectives on the role of long-distance pilgrimage in northwest Europe in the establishment of Counter-Reformation spirituality in regions of religious conflict, as well as the role played by “ordinary” devotees in the perpetuation and popularity of new forms of piety.

Pilgrimage after Luther: The Fall and Rise of Sacred Journeying in Catholic Europe An historiography of post-Reformation pilgrimage in Europe has emerged in recent years, largely through studies of individual shrines or as part of histories of cities and bishoprics where such cult centers lay.⁶ From these, it is possible to identify a number of common themes. The clearest of these is the chronology

 For France, an inventory of shrines for all periods is being prepared by Catherine Vincent and her team and can be consulted at Inventaire des sanctuaires et lieux de pèlerinages chrétiens en France http://sanctuaires.aibl.fr/.

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of post-Reformation pilgrimage. It was apparent to contemporaries that from the early sixteenth century there was a great decline in the practice of pilgrimage in northern and western Europe. This was a result of criticism by evangelical reformers, abolition by Protestant regimes, and because of wars and instability in many regions. Disapproval of pilgrimage was not novel, it was found even in the early Church for “it was difficult to reconcile sacrally charged space with the universality and spirituality of Jesus’s teachings and Pauline doctrine,” and “a thin line of principled objection” ran through the Middle Ages, from Gregory of Nyssa to Bernard of Clairvaux.⁷ But this was not a commonplace contemporary viewpoint and the majority of western Christians supported pilgrimage. By the turn of the sixteenth century, however, humanist criticism became prominent and more widespread. In the Devotio moderna tradition, devotion was increasingly focused on the eucharist and the interior life of the Christian was a pilgrimage towards eternal life, preferred to setting out physically on the road.⁸ Erasmus exemplified this viewpoint with his 1526 colloquy “The Religious Pilgrimage” in which Ogygius travels to Compostela “for the sake of religion” and returns home “full of superstition.”⁹ Discretion and interiority were advocated rather than the outward manifestations of piety. Protestant reformers were even more critical of pilgrimage. They denied the efficacy of saintly intercession, the existence of sacred space, and the need for good works to achieve salvation. The Word of Scripture rather than bodily presence in a physical space, brought contact with God through the intermediary of the Holy Spirit.¹⁰ Martin Luther’s To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation of 1520 attacked pilgrimages and called for their elimination, for they provided many opportunities for sin and they involved useless expenditure of resources which could be better used at home.¹¹ Luther even criticized the pilgrimage to Compostela directly. In a sermon on the Pentateuch in November 1528, he asked his audience to reflect on whether a vow to visit St. James was in contravention of the First Commandment, and reminded them that God was nearer to them at home than at Santiago, for to believe that a vow to a saint could help when God could not, was wrong.¹² For John Calvin, saints’ cults, relics, and im-

 Bartlett, Why Can the Dead, 411.  Julia, “Pour une géographie européenne,” 6.  Erasmus, The Colloquies, 2:1– 36, online version http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/erasmus-thecolloquies-vol-2.  For a discussion of Protestant responses to saints and sanctity see Cameron, “Saints, Martyrs and the Reformation.”  Luther, Christian Nobility.  Extract reproduced in Almazán, “Lutero y Santiago de Compostela,” 540.

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ages on which pilgrimage was based led to idolatry and therefore came from the devil.¹³ Reformed Protestants responded to the veneration of saints with iconoclasm: in France and the Netherlands, in the 1560s, violence was directed at major shrines such as St. Martin of Tours, Notre Dame of Rocamadour, Notre Dame of Liesse, and in the Beeldenstorm or “statue storm” of 1566 in the Low Countries, many churches suffered losses.¹⁴ Where Protestant regimes took power, as in England, Scotland, and Ireland, shrines were closed and destroyed, such as Canterbury, Walsingham, and Iona. Across France, the Low Countries, and the British Isles, political censure, warfare, brigandage, and piracy further reduced travel to holy sites both local and distant. Protestant attacks on saints and their rejection of intercession also seems to have reduced Catholic confidence in holy people and places. There were few canonizations in the sixteenth century; between 1523 and 1588, there were none at all.¹⁵ Numbers visiting shrines fell. Yet from the 1570s onwards, pilgrimage revived, slowly at first then more rapidly after 1600. The work of Dominique Julia, Philippe Boutry, Philippe Martin, and others have shown that the period between 1650 and 1750 was, perhaps, the apogee of pre-modern movements.¹⁶ This was a result of the Council of Trent’s confirmation of the validity of saints’ cults and relics in 1563, the great Roman jubilee of 1575, and the re-adoption of traditional devotional activities by an increasingly confident and militant Catholic Church eager to revive the faith and to thwart Protestantism. In Session XXV of December 3 – 4, 1563, the Council of Trent ruled “On Invocation, Veneration, and Relics of Saints, and on Sacred Images” and stated that while “Christ is our sole redeemer and savior,” it was good and useful to invoke the saints and to honor their relics because they had been “living members of Christ and temples of the Holy Spirit”; images also required respect, because of the sanctity of what they portrayed.¹⁷ This confirmation of the veneration of relics and images and of the role of indulgences in soteriology, animated a new interest in pilgrimages and jubilees. At the same time, an important part of the resurgent cult of the saints was its authentication through new tests and proofs of sainthood. Joseph Bergin argues that the attempt to reorient the cult of the saints meant that some were more suited than others for the purpose,

 Calvin, “Traitté des reliques.”  See Holt, French Wars; Nelson, Legacy of Iconoclasm; Geyl, Revolt of the Netherlands; Lottin and Deyon, Casseurs d’été 1566.  Burke, “Counter-Reformation Saint,” 46; Ditchfield “Tridentine Worship.”  An important collection of essays on pilgrimage to mark the jubilee year of 2000 is Boutry and Julia, Pèlerins et pèlerinages. See also Martin, Pèlerins XVe–XXIe siècle.  “Decrees of the Council of Trent” in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2:796 – 97.

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such that some were promoted and others, neglected.¹⁸ A concern with potential abuses also led the ecclesiastical authorities to be alert to superstitions in the veneration of saints and relics. But the Church was enthusiastic about veneration, provided it was appropriately reverent and properly supervised. Resurgent Catholicism’s concern with traditional saints’ devotions favored a renewal of pilgrimage. Shrines contributed to the building of confessional identity in regions where religious conflict occurred.¹⁹ In the German territories in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Catholic leaders, bishops, and members of religious orders promoted pilgrimage as an anti-Protestant act. For example, at Altötting, a medieval Marian shrine in Bavaria, pilgrim numbers declined after the Protestant Reformation. However, in 1570, the Jesuit Peter Canisius drew attention to the shrine when he performed a highly publicized exorcism of Anna Bernhausen of Augsburg, which became the subject of heated controversy between Catholics and Protestants.²⁰ In 1579, on his accession, Duke William of Bavaria founded a confraternity there and in 1591 established the Jesuits at the site. Initially revived as part of an anti-heresy movement, pilgrimage to the shrine took off enormously in the seventeenth century.²¹ In France and the Low Countries, visits to shrines revived with the onset of religious conflict in the 1560s, when Protestant attacks on saints’ cults and holy places spurred a strong Catholic defense. The difficult decades of the 1580s and 1590s witnessed large-scale penitential processions to sanctuaries like Liesse and Chartres in northern France that were on a size unseen anywhere else in Europe, while damaged shrines like Scherpenheuvel in Brabant were renewed in what Anne Bonzon calls a process of “retaking possession of sacred space.”²² However, it was not simply a matter of the revival of old practices; historians have shown that many of the “medieval” features of pilgrimage changed in the Catholic Reformation.²³ Firstly, as Robert Sauzet, Eric Nelson, Georges Provost, Philippe Martin, and others demonstrate, there was an apparent decline in long-distance pilgrimage and instead, a greater localization of shrines and religious life in general, based on the parish or neighboring sites.²⁴ Much of the his-

 Bergin, Church, Society and Religious Change, 232– 33, 236 – 37.  See the collection of essays in Vincent, Identités pèlerines.  Levack, Devil Within, 88.  Bireley, Refashioning of Catholicism, 111.  Bonzon, L’esprit du clocher, 391; Bergin, Church, Society and Religious Change, 243.  An important new work is Reinburg, Storied Places.  Sauzet, Visites pastorales, 249 – 50, 260; Nelson, “Parish in Its Landscape,” 337– 38; Provost, La fête et le sacré; see also Castelao, “Chemin de Saint-Jacques”; Martin, Pèlerins XVe–XXIe siècle.

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toriography of the last twenty years has been focused on tracing the histories of local sanctuaries and regional networks of shrines.²⁵ Bishops and their clergy sought to regulate pilgrimages more closely and as with other devotional activities, to focus religious life more closely on the parish.²⁶ Philip Soergel argues that sacred journeying “had been transformed from a liminal to a liminoid process. That is, it was no longer a practice requiring the faithful to divorce themselves utterly from urban or village surroundings and peers”; its purpose was “not to disrupt the believers’ lives, but to provide a release … [to] allow the faithful the opportunity to begin to conquer mind and body, enumerate and expunge sins, and to wean life from earthly desires to the embracing of eternal ones.”²⁷ Thus, Robert Sauzet’s study of the visitation records for the rural parishes of the archdeaconries of Dunois, Chartres, and Dreux in the bishopric of Chartres reveal an active campaign to implement and enforce statutes concerning processions and pilgrimages, particularly to rein in overnight journeys.²⁸ Bishop Lescot of Blois similarly enacted a statute in 1660 that prohibited all processions that could not be accomplished between sunrise and sunset on a single day. This regulation arose from fears that overnight stays provided opportunities for sinful behavior.²⁹ In Provence, Marie-Hélène Froeschlé-Chopard argues that long-distant romerages (literally “to Rome”) shrank in scope over the later Middle Ages and early modern period even without episcopal intervention, to become processions to outlying chapels in parishes.³⁰ Georges Provost also argues that in Brittany, group pilgrimages, on pardon days, gained at the expense of individual journeys, which declined.³¹ The medieval Tro-Breiz pilgrimage, visiting seven saints in seven bishoprics, had disappeared by 1650, replaced by the burgeoning shrine of St. Anne of Auray and myriad annual indulgenced pardons in local churches and chapels.³² Local shrines sprang up everywhere: Louis Pérouas found over forty documented in the diocese of La Rochelle alone.³³ Further, as H. C. Lea shows, some international pilgrimage sites were “franchised” throughout Europe well before the Reformations, to increase access for those who could not travel and to augment revenue for the “home” institutions.

        

For example Froeschlé-Chopard, Espace et sacré; Martin, Chemins du sacré. See Luria, Territories of Grace, 14– 15, 30. Soergel, Wondrous in His Saints, 167. Sauzet, Visites pastorales, 249 – 50, 260. Nelson, “Parish in its Landscape,” 337. Froeschlé-Chopard, Espace et sacré, 78 – 79. Provost, “Dévotion de groupe,” 475. Provost, La fête et le sacré, 134, 164. Chelini and Branthomme, Chemins de Dieu, 254.

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The Holy Sepulcher church in Jerusalem was an early example.³⁴ The plenary indulgence available by the fourteenth century to pilgrims who visited the Franciscan chapel of the Portiuncula outside of Assisi, rebuilt by St. Francis, was gradually extended to all the churches of the order and its affiliates. In 1622, Gregory XV granted the pardon to the Observantines and Recollects and in 1643, Urban VIII extended it to the churches of the Tertiary Order.³⁵ It was thus available in many towns and cities of Catholic Europe. Similarly, the devotions of the Stations of Rome and the Scala Sancta had a long history of being granted to provincial churches. In the seventeenth century, the Holy House of Loreto acquired imitators, often full-sized replicas as well as models, such that there were 158 copies north of the Alps by 1800.³⁶ There was a real demand for this localization of religious access, which reduced the need for long-distance travel. Secondly, there was growing stress on interior pilgrimage, a spiritual rather than a physical activity.³⁷ Much of the devotional literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries presented the life of the Christian as an interior journey. It was by prayer and meditation on the mysteries of the life of Christ that salvation would be gained, much more than through interaction with the world.³⁸ Its origins seem to lie in the pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the central Middle Ages and it was propagated by “guide” books about the holy journey. As Lucy Donkin and Hannah Vorvolt observe, “the central importance of Jerusalem for the history of salvation made it the object of intense study and devotion throughout the Middle Ages” such that interior contemplation of the sites “involved a process of imagination … as a way of gaining a closer understanding of distant realities.”³⁹ Added to this, an augmented late-medieval practice of meditation and contemplation, encouraged the practice of mental pilgrimage to witness biblical events.⁴⁰ The “virtual” travel of the later medieval Holy Land pilgrim was continued by his or her early modern counterparts, illustrated by Wes Williams’s study of travel narratives to Jerusalem.⁴¹ Spiritual pilgrimage was also encouraged to Rome, Loreto, and a host of other sites, encouraged by

       

See Kühnel, “Virtual Pilgrimages.” Lea, Auricular Confession, 3:245. Bercé, Lorette aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles, 263 – 66. For a detailed historiography and case studies, see Hillman and Tingle, Soul Travel. Julia, Voyage aux saints, 177. Donkin and Vorholt, Imagining Jerusalem, 1. See for example Lutton, “Richard Guldeford’s Pilgrimage.” Williams, Pilgrimage and Narrative.

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Jesuit and other mendicant writers, who published “guidebooks” for emotional travel.⁴² Thirdly, as Trevor Johnson’s work on Bavaria and Joe Bergin’s on France illustrate, an increasing role was played at shrines by the new religious orders and reformed mendicants, as a part of their missionary agenda.⁴³ Bergin observes that the seventeenth-century Church’s skepticism about miracles combined with its pedagogical mission led to its deployment of religious orders such as the Jesuits, the Capuchins, or even the Oratorians in charge of shrines, to instruct pilgrims through preaching, catechism, confession, and other exercises. He argues that they were “chosen for this task partly because of their ability to counter the Protestant presence in the regions where many of the sanctuaries were located, and also because they could counteract popular superstitions about saints and miracles, these orders contributed to the diffusion of particular devotions, especially those of the Marian type so favored by Jesuits.”⁴⁴ This was part of a wider Counter-Reformation development, the increased supervision of clergy over religious life within and without parishes. Clerics sought to purify and moralize pilgrimage, to rid it of secular influences and practices. The rendering of pilgrimage as a devotional experience, rather than a response to an “emergency,” whether illness or accident and subsequent vow, and the ridding pilgrimage of “superstitions” were characteristics of the clerical approach. Further, the use of pilgrimage as a site or occasion for pedagogy, was important, even miracles becoming instruments of instruction.⁴⁵ Administration of the sacraments and preaching were accompanied by writing and selling of devotional tracts, which have been studied in detail by Philip Soergel, Bruno Maës, Philippe Martin, and Virginia Reinburg.⁴⁶ These studies have shown that pamphlet literature served to defend pilgrimage against Protestant attacks, advertise the attractions of the shrine, and also to encourage interiorized devotions during and after the pilgrimage itself. But Marc Foster argues also that despite clericalization, popular resistance to or at least attenuation of control, was frequent. He finds that in Germany, shrines were revived, created, and maintained through popular enthusiasm and argues that local officials and clergymen, rather than promoting pilgrimage, worried about the enthusiasm for the new shrines.⁴⁷

     

The best known is Richeome, Pèlerin de Lorète. Johnson, Magistrates; Bergin, Church, Society and Religious Change. Bergin, Church, Society and Religious Change, 251. Chelini and Branthomme, Chemins de Dieu, 255. See Maës, Livrets de pèlerinage; Reinburg, Storied Places. Forster, Catholic Revival, 92.

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Johnson argues for Germany that the devotional influences of the religious orders contributed to a fourth change in pilgrimage practice, that dedications of shrines to universal saints—principally Mary—expanded at the expense of older cults.⁴⁸ Bruno Maës has shown that in France and other regions of Counter-Reformation Europe, Marian shrines were refurbished, re/discovered, and documented in “sacred topographies” which allowed for the narration of the triumph of Mary over heresy.⁴⁹ The Jesuits were particularly engaged in this exercise: Wilhelm Gumppenberg’s Atlas Marianus of 1657 was an attempt to show the Marian topography of the whole world.⁵⁰ A French example is that of the Dominican Vincent Laudun, who described apparitions, the working of statues and images and other cult sites, miracles which proved the sanctity of particular places and refuted the challenges of Protestantism.⁵¹ Some French historians have argued against this and for a resurgence of the attractiveness of local saints. Alain Croix argues that Brittany witnessed an upsurge in interest in its distinctive Celtic saints and Bonzon argues that the sanctuaries attracting crowds in the Beauvais region of northern France were those dedicated to the Virgin or to local saints.⁵² In practice, old saints’ shrines were revived and new Marian ones were created: Froeschlé-Chopard comments for Provence that most new shrines created in the seventeenth century concerned the Virgin Mary and were a result of apparitions or miracles at the site. However, existing pilgrimage sites continued to be associated with ancient saints’ cults, linked to the first evangelization of the region.⁵³ Elsewhere in Europe, the pattern of a revival of older, particularist shrines as statements of local and regional identity, combined with the creation of new ones based on universal intercessors especially Mary, can also be seen. In Ireland, at Lough Derg, the traditional attribution of the Purgatory pilgrimage to St. Patrick was augmented by association with Brigid and Columba for a particularly effective cultural statement.⁵⁴ However, there was also a less well-known Our Lady’s Island in County Wexford, in use at the same time.⁵⁵ Even in Protestant England, the northern Welsh shrine of Holywell,

       

Johnson, Magistrates, 273 – 75, 290 – 91. Maës, “Topographies mariales,” 17. Gumppenberg, Atlas Marianus. Laudun, Pèlerinages et sanctuaires mariaux. Croix, Bretagne; Bonzon, L’esprit du clocher, 392. Froeschlé-Chopard, Espace et sacré, 151– 52, 315. Cunningham and Gillespie, “Lough Derg Pilgrimage,” 170. McNally, introduction to “Evolution of Pilgrimage Practice.”

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with its curative waters and dedication to St. Winifred, was revived in this period and resorted to by local Catholics.⁵⁶ In sum, historians have found a greater localization and collectivization of religious life and devotional activity, under closer control of clergy. Yet despite emphasis on the localization of religious experience, it is clear that long-distance pilgrimage to the classic sites revived in the Counter-Reformation. Jerusalem, the premier destination of the Middle Ages, was less frequented after 1550 because of conflict between Hapsburgs and Ottomans. Instead, Rome emerged as the most important destination following investment in its urban and spiritual fabric by Pope Gregory XIII and his successors. Its sacred sites were refurbished and garnished with new indulgences, for example the Scala Santa was renovated by Sixtus V in 1590.⁵⁷ Ofelia Castelao argues that Rome became the destination for long-distance pilgrimage, together with its satellite Marian shrines, that “pilgrimage became romeria.”⁵⁸ Records of the pilgrim hostel of the Santissima Trinità dei Pellegrini show that maximum visitors arrived during jubilees held between 1575 and 1650.⁵⁹ Rome’s outpost shrine of the Holy House at Loreto also benefited from this resurgence. In 1554, the Jesuits were appointed as confessors and there was a sustained program of urban development. Later sixteenth-century popes improved the roads and bridges between Rome and Loreto while in 1586, Sixtus V created the college of the knights of Loreto who were charged with making safe the routes leading to the city.⁶⁰ Recent work on hospitals in France, Germany, and Spain has also revealed the importance of longer-distance journeys to individuals’ devotional experiences.⁶¹ For example, in his study of the pilgrims passing through eighteenth-century Nuremberg and its hostel for poor travelers, Christophe Duhamel estimates that perhaps one in three hundred inhabitants of the region undertook long-distance journeys.⁶² Whilst not commonplace, such voyages were far from exceptional. Long-distance pilgrimage continued to attract good numbers of pilgrims until the middle of the eighteenth century, when religious cultures changed and political attitudes to internal and international travel shifted to greater control. Indeed, from the seventeenth century, France and other states began to im-

 Walsham, Reformation of the Landscape, 144– 45, 196 – 99.  Lea, Auricular Confession, 3:456.  Castelao, “Chemin de Saint-Jacques,” 114.  Julia, “Gagner son jubilé.”  Bercé, Lorette aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles.  To cite a few examples, Boutry and Julia, Pèlerins et pèlerinages; Soergel, Wondrous in His Saints; Forster, Catholic Revival; Christian, Local Religion.  Duhamelle, “Pèlerins de passage,” 48.

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pose greater restrictions on travelers. Changing attitudes to vagrancy and begging, fears of “masterless men,” combined with security concerns during periods of war, led to greater attempts to regulate movement. In Spain in 1590, Philip II issued a Pragmatic against false pilgrims who disguised themselves in order to rob the innocent; henceforth, a license was necessary to journey as a pilgrim within Spain signed by the judicial officer of the region. Foreign pilgrims traveling in Spain needed a document from their own bishop which needed to be presented to a Spanish judicial officer when the border was crossed, who would then issue another license.⁶³ In France, similar laws were created under Louis XIV. In 1665, a royal ordonnance ruled that pilgrims wishing to travel outside the French kingdom needed three documents, a letter from their bishop explaining the motive of the journey, a license from the town council stating their name, age, residence, destination, and other details, and another similar document from the local judicial officer. These were to be presented to the authorities in each town they traveled through. Pilgrims without documents could be arrested, pilloried, and sent home. In 1686, there came a requirement that a license was to be signed by a secretary of state.⁶⁴ The effectiveness of such legislation can be questioned, but it was reissued four times between 1724 and 1771. Indirectly, the late seventeenth-century reform of city hospitals under Louis XIV’s minister Louvois, particularly the conversion of Hotels-Dieu into hôpitaux-généraux for the enclosure of the poor, began to reduce the hospitality infrastructure relied upon by pilgrims. Further, Bruno Maës argues that elite attitudes changed and that fewer nobles visited shrines: interiority of religion, a privileging of work as the chief means of well-being, a skepticism regarding miracles, all downplayed pilgrimage.⁶⁵ But numbers of holy travelers from more humble social groups remained high. For example, Maës shows that at Notre-Dame de Liesse, the 1740s to later 1760s saw visitors decline, but thereafter, until the Revolution, numbers regained the levels of the early eighteenth century.⁶⁶ In the holy year of 1779 in Santiago de Compostela, Julia estimates that 1.51 million pilgrims took communion in the cathedral, without counting those who communicated in the city’s parish churches.⁶⁷ Long-distance pilgrimage remained an important practice despite the disparages of Enlightenment writers. This book comprises an examination of the evolution of long-distance pilgrimage in northwest Europe through testing the historiographical models out    

Pragmatic of Philip II 1590 reproduced in Parga et al., 3:115 – 16. La Coste-Messelière, “Édits et autres actes royaux.” Maës, Notre-Dame de Liesse, 133 – 35. Maës, Notre-Dame de Liesse, 137. Julia, “Pour une géographie européenne,” 51.

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lined above. There is the apparent paradox of the localization of sacred place alongside a growing universality of cults; of a clericalization of shrines alongside the perpetuation of popular devotions. Further, as the pilgrimages under examination here took place on a trans-regional level, cross-cultural influences on local religious practice—including the growing influence of Roman spirituality on provincial religion—are also examined. The heroic journey continued to have a place in the devotional repertoire of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Catholics in northwest Europe, despite if not because of, confessional conflict in the region and changes in the priorities of the Church.

To Be a Pilgrim: Sacred Space, Materiality and the Constructed Self While it is possible to draw a broad sketch of the development of European pilgrimage over time in the centuries after the Reformation, its significance needs to be understood through the experience of the individual pilgrim. It is the encounter of the individual with the sacred, whether alone or in a group, how personal and collective experiences inter-related, and how this changed over time, that is the core of this study. The pilgrim had his or her own motives for traveling; she or he moved in space and time; he or she constructed identities through the experience of travel and acted as agents in moving around new ideas. For this reason, the theoretical concepts of sacred space, materiality of object and body, and the constructed self, are central to this study. They are the lenses through which early modern pilgrimage will be examined.

Sacred Space In his work The Sacred and the Profane of 1959, Mircea Eliade argued that the sacred was defined by space and time.⁶⁸ From the 1960s, historians developed this model to define sacred space “as an essential category of human experience” which “emerge[s] and persist[s] as both an experienced physical location and an imagined set of cognitive associations.”⁶⁹ Pilgrimage can be understood as a reaction of an individual to material and mental constructions of sacred

 Eliade, Sacred and the Profane.  Nelson, “Parish in its Landscape,” 320; see the collection of essays in Coster and Spicer, Sacred Space.

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space. Anthropological studies were the first to explore this paradigm, for present and past societies, with a particular interest in the concepts of liminality and ritual. Victor and Edith Turner, in their work Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives of 1978, used three ideas to explore the experience of the pilgrim: liminality, communitas, and anti-structure. They argued that pilgrimage took place outside of normal social structures, spaces, and time, freeing individuals from their normal constraints.⁷⁰ Pilgrims are liminars, on the threshold of society and therefore of ambiguous status.⁷¹ While the Turners’ work has been criticized for its homogenous and over-deterministic interpretation of pilgrimage, it did spark further work and debate. John Eade and Michael Sallnow argue that sacred space is not a passive environment, but a site of tension and conflict, as a realm of competing discourses.⁷² For the historians Alphonse Dupront and his students who studied crusading and pilgrimage in the medieval world, such journeys meant the abandonment of the ordinary life, an adventure into the unknown, spiritually and geographically.⁷³ In the last decade or so, moving on from site-based studies, the modes and experience of human movement through space have emerged as important areas of enquiry. Judith Adler posited that “travel undertaken and executed with a primary concern for the meanings discovered, created, and communicated as persons move through geographical space in stylistically specified ways”—such as pilgrimage—can be “distinguished from travel in which geographical movement is merely incidental to the accomplishment of other goals.”⁷⁴ Study of landscape “as an historical text and an arena for embodied experience and practice” and the ways in which “particular mobility practices can shape the dynamic place-temporalities that constitute particular landscapes” as well as research into emotional geographies, have been important here.⁷⁵ Sean Slavin uses the concept of liminality to explore walking, movement, and inner experience in the modern pilgrimage to Compostela.⁷⁶ Simon Coleman focuses on movement as a feature of pilgrimage to draw cross-cultural comparisons.⁷⁷ While Eamon Duffy has questioned the usefulness of liminality to understand pilgrimage in the late medieval period, when most

 Turner and Turner, Image and Pilgrimage; Candy, Archaeology of Pilgrimage, 11.  Encyclopedia of Medieval Pilgrimage, 752.  Eade and Sallnow, Contesting the Sacred.  Dupront, Du sacré; Dupront, Saint-Jacques de Compostelle.  Adler, “Travel as Performed Art,” 1368.  Maddrell et al., Christian Pilgrimage, 6 – 7. Virginia Reinburg’s recent work examines the relationship between concepts of the natural world and shrine building. Reinburg, Storied Places.  Slavin, “Walking as Spiritual Practice.”  Coleman and Eade, Reframing Pilgrimage, 12.

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shrines were local in scope, it is clear that holy journeys of whatever length occurred in sacred space. The challenge for historians is to appreciate what this meant to the early modern pilgrim.⁷⁸ An understanding of the sacral nature of place is particularly important for comprehending the religious practices of post-Reformation Europe, where in the period after 1580, the emergent Catholic and Counter-Reformations propagated new ideas about the uses of sacred space. Andrew Spicer, Will Coster, and Sarah Hamilton explored this in a series of publications in the mid-2000s. They maintained that, the ways in which space was created and re-created, are an obvious means of investigating how [religious] change was achieved, or, just as importantly, how limited was its extent. Space is also much more than a physical issue; what is of chief concern to most of the historians currently working in this field is not the purely architectural utilization of space, but what that can tell us about the mentalité of the people of Reformation Europe: how it reflected and reinforced their understanding of sanctity, divinity, and themselves.⁷⁹

Holy places were contested during the religious wars of the sixteenth century such that many sites, especially shrines, had to be reclaimed and rebuilt by Catholics after the military conflict ended. Olivier Christin’s work on iconoclasm in the religious wars examines how church rebuilding and redecoration served to reappropriate sacred space for and by Catholics in France.⁸⁰ Andrew Spicer’s work on Orleans, occupied by Huguenots in 1562 and 1568, shows how church rebuilding, the use of processions and liturgies, the replacement of statues and relics, and the creation of new traditions—in this case, about Joan of Arc —resacralized the damaged Catholic landscape of the city in the last three decades of the sixteenth century.⁸¹ Eric Nelson shows how the “relic landscape” of the central Loire Valley, Tours, Blois, and Vendôme, was restored in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, after severe damage by Protestants in 1562 and 1568.⁸² In Ireland and parts of the Netherlands where Protestant damage was permanent, clandestine reconstruction of sites and migration of people, temporary or permanent, to more appropriate confessional spaces, were important results of the religious conflicts. There was a strongly ritualized and physical, as well as site-centered, element to Catholic belief, heightened by a Counter-Reformation encouragement     

Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 190 – 99. Coster and Spicer, Sacred Space, 3. Christin, Révolution symbolique. Spicer, “(Re)building the Sacred Landscape.” Nelson, Legacy of Iconoclasm.

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of the separation of the sacred from the profane. Cultural anthropologists have emphasized the centrality of behavior, gesture, performance, and ritual in defining sacred space and the significance of personal as well as public experiences of place.⁸³ As Boute and Småberg state, this is based on the view that “human cultural practices need to be performed … seen and witnessed as public presentation” for performance is interpreted as an active agent in the construction of social reality, “an agent that uses the human body to give meaning and to make sense.”⁸⁴ In recent decades, historians have been interested in performance and performative practice as a means of theorizing and understanding ritual actions. In the early modern period, new attitudes to body and place emerged. Reverent behavior in religious space, the church and its cemetery, was a Tridentine preoccupation and there was a campaign to eliminate profane activities from these areas. Ceremonies were to be orderly, disciplined, and subject to clerical control. Festivities were to be banished from the sacraments, such as after baptisms; there was to be orderly and quiet behavior during mass; cleanliness of altars and ritual vessels was expected. Thus, there was a heightened and on-going demarcation of holy place and time.⁸⁵ It is clear from the life writings of contemporaries that religious experience was dependent on being in such places at specific times. Special sites “allowed individuals to find a deeper level of spirituality by reminding them of elements of the divine.”⁸⁶ Pilgrimage provided a direct route to grace, physically and spiritually, through prayer and ritual participation, located in place and time, which made the experience of saintly intercession more tangible. While individualization and internalization were key developments across the Counter-Reformation period, there remained a strongly ceremonial and site-centered element to post-Reformation Catholicism. Pilgrimage gave access to grace directly, in a specific place and time.

Materiality Linked to the concept of sacred space, a second key component in understanding the religious life of the Catholic Reformation is that of materiality. The longstanding engagement of anthropologists, archaeologists, and art historians with material culture has been influential in studies of pre-modern Christianity, lead-

   

Spicer and Hamilton, Defining the Holy, 4. Boute and Småberg, Devising Order, 3. Tingle, “Catholic Reformation.” Coster and Spicer, Sacred Space, 16.

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ing to explorations of the relationship of people, places, objects, and divine power. Of interest is how religion “is implemented in concrete, material domains, such as the body and senses, objects and exchange relations, or things and spaces.”⁸⁷ Both sites and objects could be linked to heavenly power, for as Caroline Walker Bynum has written of the former, they “refer to, provide signs of, or gesture toward the divine. They lift matter toward God and reveal God through matter.”⁸⁸ Personal interaction between the individual and the material environment was part of the understanding and experience of divine grace. Further, concepts of materiality and sacred space have interacted with that of embodiment in scholarly explorations of individual experiences of religion. Material culture studies offer a methodological insight into the relationship between God, people, and objects which can help to understand how pilgrimages operated. Its theorists see culture as “something created and lived through object,” which establishes and gives meaning to behavior. Structuralist studies of the 1970s interpreted “things” as a form of non-verbal language, like texts, providing structured signs whose meaning needed to be decoded. This was developed in post-structuralist work, which retained the language of discourse and text in its methodology and proposed that objects and symbols could be “read,” and their meaning deconstructed in many ways, according to audience. Thus, Chris Tilley writes, “artefacts perform active, metaphorical work in the world in a manner that words cannot. They have their own form of communicative agency.”⁸⁹ Cultural anthropologists saw objects as having agency, the ability to signify and to establish identity, meaning, and emotion; to perform and construct power relations and even selfhood. As Ryan Perry writes, “the self is invariably shaped in complex relation to the objects that surround it … Interactions with materials testify to who we are, and according to some anthropologists, the belongings we accrue might even be understood as extensions of our personhood … in a much more obvious sense than our names or our fleetingly spoken words.”⁹⁰ In the domain of religious life, objects can be signs of identity and also of divinity. They can be used to identify space for prayer; they can be a stimulus for private devotion; they can be used performatively; they can be symbols of prestige; they can act as outward manifestations of piety; they can give talismanic protection and they bring remembrance of the person who gave it as a gift. Henrik von Achen argues that material “instruments” allow piety to become “ac-

   

Houtman and Meyer, Things, 6. Bynum, Christian Materiality, 35. Tilley, “Metaphor, Materiality and Interpretation,” 25. Perry, “Objectification,” 309.

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cessible, describable, and tangible, both as an historical and a religious phenomenon. Some instruments of devotion themselves actually articulated this access, visualizing the invisible and materializing the immaterial in a way which made it possible to render and describe spiritual processes which were otherwise inaccessible.”⁹¹ Shrines, relics, contact objects, and souvenirs—the material objects of pilgrimage—could all work in this way. The category of material object which has received most historiographical attention in Reformation studies is that of images. At the turn of the sixteenth century, humanist critics and then Protestants questioned the theology and the practice of the use of images in devotion, based on differences of ideas about the immanence of God in physical objects and their interpretation of the first (or second) commandment of the Decalogue.⁹² Reformers judged images to be idolatrous, for there was conflation between the image itself and the materiality of what it was supposed to represent. Miracles wrought by saintly images, the apotropaic use of statues, the veneration of saints through their representations, were condemned as superstitious and excessive.⁹³ In reaction to iconoclasm, Catholics affirmed their use of images, although in a reconsidered form, encapsulated in Session XXV of the Council of Trent in 1563 which proscribed images that would inspire false doctrine, instructed artists to avoid impurities, and exhorted them to instruct and move the faithful to devotion through straightforward and accurate representations of Christian doctrine, a message internalized by many artists and their patrons.⁹⁴ Holy relics received similar responses.⁹⁵ Relics are, of course, ontologically different from representations or images, as Alexandra Walsham reminds us; they are “not mere symbol or indicator of divine presence” but rather “actual, physical embodiments of it.”⁹⁶ A third category of objects, portable personal items—rosaries, beads, medals, crosses, and similar artifacts—could combine elements of image and sacred remains in their mode of operation. The later Middle Ages were rich in such material culture of devotion: small reliquaries worn as jewelry by the wealthy, modified clothing items—principally scapulars of the religious orders—the rosary, shrine souvenirs such as flasks of holy water, and pilgrim badges, were ways in which people carried saintly protection across Europe. The sixteenth century witnessed changes in the perceptions and use of such objects, a greater formalization of their relation-

     

Achen, “Piety, Practise and Process,” 29. D’Andrea, “Miracles,” 68. See for example Eire, War against the Idols. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2:774– 76. See the important collection of essays by Boutry, Fabre, and Julia, Reliques modernes. Walsham, “Introduction,” 12.

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ship to clerical authority and their bestowal with enhanced spiritual power through indulgences. Attitudes to and uses of material objects associated with pilgrimage permit inquiry into both interior belief and external practice. This is because it is clear the relationship between individuals and material objects was central to the effect of pilgrimage. Late medieval and early modern Christians expected to find the sacred “manifest itself in material objects that could be seen, touched, smelled, tasted, and ingested.”⁹⁷ The sacraments themselves, especially the eucharist, worked on the premise that that holy beings would make themselves present materially in response to the petitions of the faithful. Images and relics were artifacts imbued with divine power. They were vectors and symbols of a direct relationship between the person, the Church and the divine presence, for they channeled piety directly to God and gave grace directly to the penitent, creating “a meeting point between the devotee and heaven.”⁹⁸ As Henning Laugerud states for images, so for artifacts, “significance … lay in their spiritual importance, not only as instruments of piety but also in the transference of grace. Images seem to have had a quasi-sacramental character … due to the significance of sight and vision in gaining knowledge of God.”⁹⁹ There was also the tactile aspect of physicality. The touch of an object was used to elicit and recall emotional responses and prayers. Robert Swanson argues that this response makes an image/object “a manifestation of the particular kind of participatory devotion which has been labelled ‘the mysticism of the historical event’ in which the devout Christian projects him- or her-self into the events to participate in a ‘devotional present.’”¹⁰⁰ For this reason, pilgrimage to sacred places, to see and touch holy objects and to take souvenirs home, remained central to early modern Catholic belief.

The Constructed Self It is the individual experience of sacred space, physical place, and material object that made pilgrimage a powerful devotional activity. The focus here on personal experience is an exploration of one of the most prominent historiographical debates for the Reformation era, the “rise” of the individual as an autonomous, consciously expressed self and more particularly, linked to this, the relationship between personal identity, interiorized spirituality, and external  Muir, Ritual, 165.  Skinnebach, “‘Solace of His Image,’” 206.  Laugerud, “Visuality and Devotion,” 180.  Swanson, “Two Texts,” 239.

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actions. John Bossy’s interpretation of the transformation of early modern Catholicism from a communitarian to an individual and personal faith, has been enormously influential on studies of the period. In his words, “the effect of the Counter-Reformation … was … to shift the emphasis away from the field of objective social relations and into a field of interiorized discipline for the individual,” the purpose of devotion becoming reconciliation to God rather than obligation to the community.¹⁰¹ Historians saw structural causes behind this spiritual change. Alan Galpern argued that the Reformation period witnessed demographic and economic stresses which led to social tensions. One result was that religious forms based on associative activity and social solidarity became less meaningful. He cites the decline in confraternity membership in cities such as Troyes in northern France as evidence for “a softening in the drive towards solidarity” and a growth of individual piety.¹⁰² Already in the fifteenth century, Franciscan and Carthusian practices and Devotio moderna traditions encouraged withdrawal, self-examination, and mental prayer. Advice to clerical and lay elites recommended private meditation and routine reflection upon personal unworthiness and sinfulness.¹⁰³ The growth of interiority, it is argued, augmented further, during and after the Reformation. The novelty of Catholic reform in this paradigm was the attempt to spread the movement out from elites to all social groups. For example, for the Spanish diocese of Cuenca, Sara Nalle argues that during the sixteenth century, spiritual life turned inwards; religious persons “adopted wholeheartedly the practice of mental prayer and the faith underwent a process of internalization and turning towards Christ.”¹⁰⁴ This is seen throughout Europe for instance in sacramental penance, where the practice of individual confession was ideally to became more regular and administered in the discretion of the confessional box. Introduced by Archbishop Carlo Borromeo in Milan diocese, the booth “facilitated a private conversation between priest and penitent and encouraged the use of the sacrament for individual spiritual direction.”¹⁰⁵ Also, general confession became widespread, to evoke deeper contrition and more profound self-knowledge. The individualization of spirituality is also seen in the new devotional societies such rosary and holy sacrament confraternities, where again the Church worked to develop the interior life of members, through advocating daily examination of

 Bossy, “Social History,” 21.  Galpern, Religions of the People, 103.  Heal, Reformation in Britain and Ireland, 97– 98; Bireley, “Early Modern Catholicism,” 238 – 39.  Nalle, God in La Mancha, 135.  Bireley, “Early Modern Catholicism,” 239.

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conscience and mental prayer.¹⁰⁶ Post-mortem practices also changed. Philip Hoffman in his study of the Lyonnais argues that in funerals and mortuary foundations of masses there was a shift during the seventeenth century from rituals which harnessed group prayer and corporate action for souls, to simpler funerals and masses for individuals. He states that late medieval testators had, of course, commissioned numerous individual masses and the Counter-Reformation saw continued collective prayer, but corporate ritual identity assumed a smaller role and “in the new piety, salvation was more the business of individuals than of associations.”¹⁰⁷ Further, a number of historians have observed that elites withdrew physically from communal devotions. Colin Richmond has argued that late medieval English gentry withdrew from parish spaces into private pews and chapels, screened off from the lower sort.¹⁰⁸ The private pew and burial vault became more common in France and Spain as well, as Vanessa Harding has observed for Paris and Carlos Eire for Madrid.¹⁰⁹ Strategies for salvation became increasingly private, individual, and interior. But revisionist historians argue that it is difficult to separate individual and community religion. Eamon Duffy states for England in the later Middle Ages that Christianity was “resolutely and enthusiastically oriented towards the public and the corporate … [with] a continuing sense of the value of co-operation and mutuality in seeking salvation.”¹¹⁰ This view is shared by some historians of early modern Europe. In sixteenth-century Spain, William Christian argues that joint religious devotions probably helped to hold local communities together in the face of great disparity of wealth and opportunity.¹¹¹ Further, Eire points out for Madrid that “concerns for one’s own salvation included concern for the salvation of others, because no-one could hope to enter heaven without such works of mercy.”¹¹² For France, as Nicole Lemaitre writes of the Rouergue region, “the rise of individual egoism is evident, but still Rouergat Christianity seems to have continued to live out a profound ideal of solidarity … the ideal that one does not achieve salvation alone, that it is necessary to be able to count on the solidarity of others.”¹¹³ Mutual aid was essential to individual salvation in this model; ritual and outward devotion remained a key part of religious under-

       

Ellington, Sacred Body, 246. Hoffman, Church and Community, 123. Richmond, “Fifteenth-Century Gentleman,” 199. Harding, Dead and the Living; Eire, Madrid to Purgatory. Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 131. Christian, Local Religion, 147. Eire, Madrid to Purgatory, 210. Lemaitre, Rouergue flamboyant, 363.

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Chapter 1: Introduction: Long-Distance Pilgrimage in Early Modern Europe

standing, identity, and experience. Pilgrimage offers a useful activity to observe the relationship between group devotion and personal piety, for it was practiced by individuals and collective groups. In order to examine the motives of individuals in the past, scholars have turned to autobiographical and other forms of self-writing, works which are central to this study of pilgrimage. There is now a large corpus of scholarly writing, from literary criticism to historical study, in which the central question is the nature and timing of the emergence of the autonomous self as a psychological and cultural construct in Western Europe. Under discussion is how far the “postRousseau vocabulary of interiority” can be used to describe and understand the consciousness of people in the pre-modern period, and exactly when interiority and self-reflectivity as key features of writing and expression emerged as a precursor to modernity?¹¹⁴ The Renaissance was posited by Jacob Burkhardt as the origin of subjective individuality in the West, a feature of human consciousness that he considered to be natural, needing the correct political circumstances of the Rinascimento to blossom.¹¹⁵ Others are more cautious. Ronald Bedford and colleagues argue that in life writing, “individual experiences are defined by a strong sense of social expectation and obligation. Such definition is rarely … in the service of revealing one’s own, or another’s, psychology or of setting out to explore one’s unique individuality; indeed the texts in question are often underwritten by a patchwork of formalized spiritual and secular commonplaces that remark on the un-uniqueness of the individual’s sensation or experience.”¹¹⁶ Mark Mascuch links consciousness and text together, asserting that “the origins of the individualist self lies in the advent of modern autobiographical practice,” which he places in the mid-eighteenth century.¹¹⁷ He argues that individualism and its textual product are a “cultural practice, autobiography is a performance, a public display of self-identity, even when composed secretly for an audience of one.”¹¹⁸ For the present study, just how far contemporary men and women had a perception of an independent and highly individualized self and how far they conceived of themselves in terms of community, region, or social group has implications for understanding the experience of pilgrimage: “early modern society was structured around a network of beliefs pertaining to the events of the temporal realm and their impact on the other eternal realm that superseded it … Self-

 Bedford, Davis, and Kelly, Early Modern English Lives, see introduction for a summary of these debates. See also Mayer and Woolf, Rhetorics.  Jacob Burkardt summarized in Mascuch, Origins, 16.  Bedford, Davis, and Kelly, Early Modern Autobiography, 6.  Mascuch, Origins, 19.  Mascuch, Origins, 9.

To Be a Pilgrim: Sacred Space, Materiality and the Constructed Self

23

description therefore referred to understandings of oneself within a wider framework and more often than not, individuality was marked less by how one stood out than by how effectively one fitted in.”¹¹⁹ The sense of “I” determined the mechanisms of an individual soul’s relationship with God. For religious history, the advantage of “self-” or “life-” writing literature, whether autobiography or first-hand pilgrimage account, is that it gives an “immediate connection with the individual as the center of everyday life which … enhances our understanding of the place of religion in the attitudes, actions and experiences of individuals.”¹²⁰ The challenges of reconstructing spirituality from such writings are manifold, however. Memoirs tend to look outwards, to chronicle events of wider society, and rarely contain introspective detail. There are few writings by women and the lack of female voices is a limitation of this present study.¹²¹ Such texts are also constructions, involving “an intentional and creative positioning of oneself in history, geography, and culture,” a point developed by Stephen Greenblatt in his seminal work on self-fashioning in the Renaissance and also by Jaume Aurel, who argues that autobiography is “a more or less deliberate, rhetorical construction of a ‘self’ for public, not private purposes: the displayed self is a strategically fabricated performance, one which stages a useful identity, an identity which can be put to work.”¹²² The main limitations for religious history lie, however, in the lack of detailed reference to personal belief. Early modern life writing—with the exception of spiritual autobiographies—focuses on “externalities … the balance of content lies more in circumstance rather than self, with the outer rather than the inner life.”¹²³ James Amelang argues that such writings were written “for communicative rather than introspective ends. The self provides less the subject of writing than its point of view.”¹²⁴ Thus, few writers beyond the spiritual elite elaborated on their inner souls. Yet as Bedford comments, “the incessant pressure of spiritual beliefs on secular life means that access to ‘real’ selves is granted not through one pole (the spiritual) or the other (the secular and everyday) but rather through a complex personal, spiritual and social interweaving of these perspectives.”¹²⁵ Pilgrimages are described by a number of authors and it is evident that for these individuals they

      

Bedford, Davis, and Kelly, Early Modern Autobiography, 14. Greyerz, “German and Swiss Autobiographers,” 225. See discussion of life-writing sources in Amelang, Flight of Icarus, 29 ff. Aurel, “Autobiography as Unconventional History,” 439. Amelang, Flight of Icarus, 123. Amelang, Flight of Icarus, 124. Bedford, Davis, and Kelly, Early Modern Autobiography, 2.

24

Chapter 1: Introduction: Long-Distance Pilgrimage in Early Modern Europe

formed an integral part of a wider spiritual experience. The record is of gesture or action rather than interiority, but this is important in itself as a marker of spirituality. To help understand the motives of individuals, it also helps to appreciate the interior and exterior life of early modern people through consideration of the emotions and the senses, the focus of much recent historical writing such as by Wietse de Boer on the sensuousness of Italian Counter-Reformation practices.¹²⁶ This is of particular importance to religious sensibilities, which were felt in material and non-material ways, through all the five senses, as a recent archaeological Ph.D. study of medieval pilgrimage churches in England by Emma Jane Wells has shown.¹²⁷ Finally, recent literary and historical interest in travel writing as a genre— which can have a strongly autobiographical element—has also led to some reassessment of pilgrimage accounts, particularly their authorship and influences upon them. Thomas Noonan argues that in the Middle Ages, travel and pilgrimage were culturally synonymous, even if political and economic motives for journeying were apparent.¹²⁸ Travel literature was overwhelmingly accounts of pilgrimage and predominantly to Jerusalem: between 1100 and 1500 some 526 Christian pilgrims produced accounts of their journeys. Authors’ motives in writing were to share experiences, guide others, act as a souvenir, and above all to illuminate the Bible.¹²⁹ In the post-Columbus era and with the advent of print, Noonan argues that purposes of and representations of travel changed, with curiosity and economic motives predominating. Pilgrimage continued to take place and be documented, but there was a shift away from the predominance of religion in the cultural construction of long-distance movement.¹³⁰ Joan-Pau Rubiés argues similarly that “pilgrimage [was] a cultural model which was central in Europe at the beginning of its overseas expansion. It can be said that pilgrims to holy places—real or fictitious—provide a primary type of traveler.”¹³¹ He also proposes change over time, that late medieval narratives of pilgrimage to the Holy Land often seem more interested in miraculous stories and in depicting exotic customs than in interpreting the spiritual significance of the journey while mer-

 De Boer and Göttler, Religion and the Senses. The most influential work on this to date is Karant-Nunn, Reformation of Feeling. A useful introduction to current topics, methods, and sources is Broomhall, Early Modern Emotions.  Wells, “Archaeology of Sensory Experience.”  Noonan, Road to Jerusalem, especially the introductory chapter. For a discussion of medieval attitudes to travel see Zacher, Curiosity and Pilgrimage.  Weber, Travelling through Text, 46, 100.  Noonan, The Road to Jerusalem, 237– 43, for summary of arguments.  Rubiés, Travellers and Cosmographers, 1, 19.

Structure of the Book

25

chants, missionaries, political agents as travelers and observers, increased across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as secular heroes and motifs came to dominate.¹³² Nonetheless, Palmira Brummett argues that regardless of differences, there were certain formula common to all forms of travel narrative: “the experience of witnessing, the stages of travel and visitation, the dangers of (or least obstacles to) the journey, the ways in which travel challenges paradigms of identity and the frames of reference available which either facilitate or impede making sense of the foreign encounter.”¹³³ Wes Williams also argues for interdependence between genres, that pilgrimage accounts were greatly influenced by narratives of New World travel and trade, works of secular wonders, and natural history, adapted so that pilgrims’ “travels, and experience, could be told, assigned confessional value, and given collective meaning.”¹³⁴ What was different in pilgrimage accounts as opposed to other travel literature was motive and the grammar of testimony changed across the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, as the Counter-Reformation ethos made it important to “define the subjectivity of the true Christian pilgrim.”¹³⁵ Such accounts were, however, strongly influenced by other literary forms and frequently used previously published guides as their main sources of information and structure.¹³⁶ They could also be out of time, conflating several journeys into one single narrative, as with the work of Domenico Laffi who we will meet later. They were ultimately a means of imitating Christ’s life and works, “the printed text is therefore a product which has been remodeled to conform to spiritual and pastoral objectives as well as editorial motives.”¹³⁷ Motive, for journeying and writing about it, is central to this present study.

Structure of the Book The current study follows pilgrims to a number of sacred sites in the eastern Atlantic region of northwestern Europe (figure 1.1). Three primary case studies were chosen for their antiquity, dedication to saints and for their importance as international pilgrimage destinations before 1500. All three had origins, mythic and real, in the early Middle Ages. All three were, in some way, associated with strug-

     

Rubiés, Travellers and Cosmographers, 20. Brummett, “Genre, Witness and Time,” 5. Williams, “Mirrour of Mis-Haps,” 205. Williams, “Mirrour of Mis-Haps,” 224. Julia, Voyage aux saints, 219. Julia, Voyage aux saints, 344– 45.

26

Chapter 1: Introduction: Long-Distance Pilgrimage in Early Modern Europe

Lough Derg Dublin

London

Paris Mont Saint-Michel Tours Lyons

Vienna

Bordeaux Compostela Madrid Rome Seville

Figure 1.1: Map of Europe showing main pilgrimage sites in this study (© Martin Tingle)

Structure of the Book

27

gle against enemies of Catholicism, latterly in the form of Protestantism. All three remained famous through literary accounts of various forms, across the early modern period. The most prestigious of these shrines was St. James—Santiago in Spanish— at Compostela in Galicia in northern Spain, a relic shrine which claimed to house the remains of an apostle and relative of Jesus Christ himself.¹³⁸ By tradition, after the death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ, St. James traveled to northern Spain to evangelize the country. He had limited success and returned to Jerusalem, where he was executed. However, his body was transported miraculously back to Galicia on a stone ship, where it landed at Iria Flavia, modern Padrón, and where—following her conversion—the local queen allowed it to be buried. All was forgotten until the ninth century when an apparition of heavenly lights revealed the spot to a shepherd; the local bishop recovered the saint’s body and built a church. The Castilian kings such as Alfonso II and III sponsored the shrine and gave gifts to augment its standing. Pilgrims were traveling to Compostela from at least the tenth century and there was a strong link between the French monastery of Cluny and Santiago. From the eleventh century, the pilgrimage took off enormously, its promotion was the work of Bishop Diego Gelmirez, and it became the third most important destination for western Christian pilgrims. As with other pilgrimage centers, Compostela’s popularity declined in the early to mid-sixteenth century. Just as it was picking up in the latter part of the century, the Counter-Reformation desire to purge the cult of saints of its “superstitions” and endow it with veracity based on hard evidence led to doubts about the journey of St. James to Spain. This began with the new Roman Breviary issued by Pius V in 1568. While it contained a detailed lectionary for St. James’s Day on July 28 and included mention of his apostolate to Spain, focus was on the biblical texts. The Compostelan tradition of the story of his nine disciples and the voyage of his relics to Spain, was omitted. The ecclesiastical historian Caesar Baronius went further; regarding the mission of St. James to Spain to be mythic, he omitted mention of it in his Martirologio Romano of 1582 and 1588, and his Annales Ecclesiasticos of 1588 – 1600.¹³⁹ An active campaign by Philip II, Spanish scholars, and the main Castilian churches led to a restoration of some of the de-

 The most famous book on the Santiago pilgrimage is the twelfth-century Liber Sancti Jacobi the original of which is in Santiago de Compostela cathedral library. The classic modern work on the pilgrimage to Santiago is Parga et al. A detailed antiquarian history of the chapter and cathedral of Santiago, drawing on the capitular registers, is Ferreiro, Historia, chapters 8 on the sixteenth century and 9 on the seventeenth century, are relevant to this study. The summary here is taken from these two works.  Buide del Real, “Removiendo Roma con Santiago.”

28

Chapter 1: Introduction: Long-Distance Pilgrimage in Early Modern Europe

tails in official lectionaries, but damage had been done.¹⁴⁰ Further contentions arose over the status of St. James as patron of Spain and thus the prestige of the shrine when in 1614, St. Teresa of Avila was canonized and made patron by Philip III. A fierce battle ensued in which Santiago was victorious, but further struggles over the patronage of the kingdom and thus the position of the apostle in the spiritual hierarchy occurred over proposals in favor of St. Michael (1643), St. Joseph (1678), and St. Genero (1701).¹⁴¹ Pilgrims continued to arrive, however, bringing with them sufficient wealth in offerings that the cathedral undertook large-scale building modification and enhancement in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to produce one the most impressive baroque-embellished churches in Europe. The second site is the Mont Saint-Michel abbey in the bay of Avranches in Normandy, northern France. This was an apparition site, founded by Bishop Aubert of Avranches in the early eighth century in response to a series of dream-appearances of the Archangel Michael. Again, it was reorganization of the shrine and promotion of the cult of St. Michael in the eleventh century that caused the rapid growth of pilgrimage, which continued to develop as the archangel assumed an important eschatological role in the judgment of souls after death.¹⁴² By the fifteenth century, the shrine was particularly associated with waves of child pilgrimages from the Rhineland and Swiss territories; it also held out against military attacks by the English, and became the foundation place of the aristocratic military Order of St. Michel, inaugurated by Louis XI. Again, pilgrimage fell and rose across the sixteenth century and again, there was sufficient traffic to fund important building works in the seventeenth century. Pilgrimage continued here until the Revolution of 1789.¹⁴³ The third case site, the Purgatory of St. Patrick, was the most remote of these pilgrimages, located on an island in Lough Derg, County Donegal in the northwest of Ireland. This was an “experience” site, where pilgrims went to gain a foretaste of Purgatory in this life, in the hope that it would shorten their stay there in the next world. The origins are obscure; by tradition, the site was founded by St. Patrick the apostle of Ireland, at a spot where God created an opening onto Purgatory so that the Irish might through fear, be brought to better repentance.¹⁴⁴

 Castelao, “Chemin de Saint-Jacques,” 116.  Exhibits 588 – 90 documents related to the patronage of Spain, in Santiago de Compostela. 1000 ans de pèlerinage Européenne, ed. Parga, 466. A recent study of the patrons of Spain in the seventeenth century is Rowe, Saint and Nation.  Smith, “Angel’s Power.”  For a discussion of the outline history of the site see Tingle, “Long-Distance Pilgrimage.”  For details on the development of the pilgrimage, see McNally, “Evolution of Pilgrimage.”

Structure of the Book

29

The pilgrimage’s commencement seems more likely to be related to the foundation of an Augustinian priory at the site, a daughter house of that in Armagh, and the composition of an account written by Henry of Sawtry in ca. 1180, describing the adventures of a knight who had visited the Purgatory.¹⁴⁵ This was rapidly translated into a number of European languages and it circulated widely. The site was destroyed several times across the early modern period: in 1497 by order of the papacy, in the later sixteenth century, in 1632 and again during the Anglo-Irish wars of the 1650s. Each time it was restored, and pilgrimage resumed, continuing across the eighteenth century.¹⁴⁶ In addition to the three main case studies, pilgrimage to a number of lesser shrines of similar origins are also discussed to offer some comparison with the main sites and to allow the drawing of wider conclusions about long-distance holy travel. These shrines have limited remaining documentary sources for their cult activities but possess some material on the post-Reformation revival of their long-distance traffic. Again, each was in some way involved in the struggle against Protestant heresy. St. Martin, soldier then bishop of fourth-century Tours, was one of the most famous saints in Latin Christendom and his shrine was on the route from northern Europe via Paris to Santiago. Much of his shrine and its documentation was destroyed in the Reformation, then the French Revolution. Collegiate chapter records on the fabric and liturgy of the church survive in Paris, although there is less on the pilgrimage, but other records were largely destroyed in World War II, when Tours was bombarded.¹⁴⁷ The pilgrimage to the abbey of Saint-Méen at Montfort in Brittany involves another early site with a significant post-medieval revival. It comprised a healing well and shrine for pilgrims affected by scabies and other skin disorders, dedicated to an early seventh-century abbot of Welsh origin and based in the monastery he founded in the Paimpont forest near to Rennes. The shrine of St. Radegonde, queen of King Clotaire I, founder of the Holy Cross abbey in Poitiers where she was a nun, was a site with royal associations. That of St. Hubert in the Ardennes, was a center for cures for rabies. While slightly further south, the shrine of St. Reine, a fourth-century virgin martyr, at Flavigny in Burgundy, has been the subject of detailed study and so will also be used as a comparison here. Discussion of some of the well-studied Marian sites in relevant context will also allow for consideration of the typicality of the pilgrim experience at the ancient, confessor-martyr shrines.  Henry of Sawtry, Tractatus de Purgatorio Insulae Sanctorum, written in 1180.  Messingham, Florilegium Insulæ Sanctorum; Richardson, Great Folly; Archdall, Monasticon Hiberbicum.  Nelson, Legacy of Iconoclasm, introduction for a discussion of sources.

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Chapter 1: Introduction: Long-Distance Pilgrimage in Early Modern Europe

The primary source base for this study is extremely challenging. None of the Atlantic-region shrines possesses an extensive surviving early modern archive related to pilgrimage. The cathedral archive at Santiago de Compostela has good records for the chapter, whose registers survive in an almost unbroken sequence from the fifteenth century, and for the musical establishment of the church, but nothing specifically related to the pilgrimage. The historian of the chapter, Antonio Lopez Ferreiro, states that there was no attempt to register pilgrims or their miracles, even famous visitors, but there are some mentions of special events in the chapter registers.¹⁴⁸ There are printed lives of St. James from Spain, together with the records of the Hospital Real for the sick, including pilgrims, and miscellaneous other documentary sources. The Mont Saint-Michel abbey archives were divided at the French Revolution; the medieval manuscripts went to Avranches and are extant, but what remained of the day-to-day archive of the community was deposited in the Archives Départementales du Manche at Saint-Lô and were destroyed along with the town itself, in 1944. We retain some contemporary chronicles compiled in the seventeenth century; the reform of the abbey by the congregation of Saint-Maur brought with it interest in the compilation of historical works by monks at the abbey and we have some of their productions. These texts were published in the nineteenth century, and form core sources for this book. Any archives created at Lough Derg were destroyed long before the present day, with the dissolution of the monasteries in Ulster in the later sixteenth century and subsequent further destructions of the site in the seventeenth-century wars. There were, however, histories created by Irish Franciscans living in Europe and contemporary Protestant accounts of the site. The documentary survival related to pilgrimage of the other shrines considered here is even more limited and often confined to chance survivals of a small number of documents related to a particular event or year. The central sources for the study are personal accounts of pilgrimages, surviving mostly in printed form. For Compostela, Ilya Mieck has inventoried seventy-four first-hand accounts dating from the twelfth to the eighteenth century; for the sixteenth through to the eighteenth century, there are around forty-eight, the majority of which are routeway itineraries.¹⁴⁹ There are also a dozen surviving accounts for the pilgrimage to the Mont Saint-Michel and about the same for Lough Derg. For the continental European shrines, accounts come from pilgrims traveling from Spain, Italy, and Germany, but the great majority of the surviving material comes from France. For this reason—and because other documents sur-

 Ferreiro, 8:422.  Mieck, “Temoignages oculaires.”

Structure of the Book

31

vive better here as well—the French perspective dominates in this book. A major limitation is that all surviving accounts were written by men, but that is representative of the pilgrims to these sites, as we shall see. The second important source type is printed pilgrimage books from or about the shrines themselves, written by contemporary clerical authors. These exist in small numbers but are an important genre. Again, French material dominates. There are also many tiny fragmentary mentions of pilgrims in wills, city records, police accounts, parish registers, hospital admission books, a large ephemera that gives us glimpses onto a disappeared world. Antiquarian works of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries have also proved invaluable and important for this study, for their presentation and discussion of sources, buildings and objects that are no longer extant. From these limited, scattered and incomplete sources the current work is composed; it is an attempt to examine agency through the lens of an imperfect glass. The structure of the book is designed to take the reader on the pilgrim’s journey to these distant places. In chapter 2, the motives of pilgrims are investigated, with examination of how they changed over time. In chapter 3, the physical experience of journeying, from a practical and logistical point of view, and the metaphysical construction of movement through sacred landscapes, is explored. In chapter 4, the experience of shrines is examined, along with changes in the nature and experience of sacred sites across the period. In chapter 5, support mechanisms for pilgrims are discussed, confraternities, print publications, devotional objects, and the idea of spiritual pilgrimage, for the returnee and the stay-athome pilgrim. It is argued here that the revival and support of long-distance pilgrimage by the Catholic faithful between the mid-sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries was a result of three important factors: its link to confessional identity and rejection of Protestantism as a religious culture, its masculine nature, and its validation of a sacrally charged universe. These will be explored in this work. At the level of individuals, journeys to distant shrines could be profound physical and spiritual experiences. Ancient sites housing early medieval cults, a long way from major centers of population, reinvented themselves in the early modern period, made themselves relevant to the changing priorities of post-Tridentine Catholicism, and assisted in its dissemination, for they offered the pilgrim an experience that local shrines and other religious traditions did not. Such pilgrimage also contributed to the agency of counter-reform through the movement of people, objects and ideas. In the end, the success of Counter-Reformation Catholicism was linked to the nature of personal religious involvement, the relationship between the institutional Church and individual piety, and the influence of different provinces and their traditions on what was increasingly a world-wide religion. Long-distance pilgrimage had a distinc-

32

Chapter 1: Introduction: Long-Distance Pilgrimage in Early Modern Europe

tive role to play in this experience, for those who were brave and hardy enough to take the rough, uncomfortable road.

Chapter 2 Pilgrims and Their Purposes: The Motives of Holy Travelers In The Pilgrim of Loreto of 1604, the Jesuit Louis Richeome described the principal purpose of pilgrimage as a journey to heaven.¹ His readers would have been comfortably familiar with this representation, of physical travel as spiritual progression, whose motive was eternal salvation for the soul. From its earliest days, the Christian faith had at its core the concept of journey. Christians sought to imitate Jesus Christ’s life of itinerant ministry, from Nazareth to Jerusalem, the cross, resurrection, ascension, and thus salvation for humankind, written as a narrative text in the Gospels. Almost as early is the tradition of the Christian as a pilgrim, a traveler to places made holy by Christ and his apostles, then by martyrs and confessor saints. The aim was to visit sites sanctified by holy presence, to benefit spiritually from the graces still lingering there. All Christians were therefore pilgrims, their journey one from birth to death, and their aspiration, to achieve the celestial kingdom by the surest route they could find, spiritual and physical. Flesh and blood pilgrims had more concrete and immediate motives for traveling to earthly shrines, as we will see. In the two centuries after the Reformation, holy travel became more challenging than in previous eras, so to go on pilgrimage was a conscious choice, an overt statement of belief as well as a demonstration of faith. The intercessory power of saints and their special places was challenged theologically by Protestants; war and destruction across northern Europe made journeys difficult; shrines were damaged; and Church and state authorities increasingly discouraged long-distance travel for spiritual purposes, privileging local institutions and pieties. Yet pilgrimage continued, not only to accessible and nearby sites, and to newly favored intercessors, but to the distant shrines of ancient and traditional saints. It was no anachronism. In this chapter, the impetus for such arduous travel will be explored. Motives for pilgrimage were varied, complex and different for every individual who traveled. They were influenced by age, gender, social status, physical, and spiritual needs. In order to understand the purposes of pilgrims, it is important to know who they were. There was a distinctive demography of longdistance pilgrimage, which will be discussed in the first part of this chapter. The intentions of these travelers differed in some measure at least to those of the collectivity of villagers patronizing local shrines. Long-distance journeys ne Richeome, Pèlerin de Lorète. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501514388-005

34

Chapter 2: Pilgrims and Their Purposes

cessitated resources, capabilities, and resolutions that were beyond the means of many. In order to discern the aspirations of this special group of pilgrims, motive will be examined through the lens of contemporary accounts, the limited number of first-hand descriptions and a wider range of third-party observations. Selfwriting, sources which “provide account of, or reveal privileged information about the ‘self’ who produced it,” generates a range of theoretical issues and questions, of subjectivity and conscious construction.² Such sources can provide access to “the inner workings of the authentic self,” reveal emotional responses, and describe behaviors, although for the historian, the question of purpose in writing, target audience, and the changing nature of memory over time, remain.³ Certainly, such sources offer insights into certain aspects of religion and belief, personal and social connections, and an individualized context for events, partial though it may be.⁴ In this chapter, such documents are used to investigate motive, which is always a subjective experience. Those who wrote directly of their own experiences were a tiny minority of pilgrims and such authors had their own objectives of course; to recall the experience, to reflect their devotion to Christ and the saints through adversity, and to guide others. Thus, the priest who recorded the journeys of Robert Seddon in 1522, wrote “This boke of pylgrymage to saynt James and other holy places within Chrystendome I made for the instruction of good and devout people of Englonde that may be spared willing to se suche holy places and relykes: and take payne on them for Chryst’s sake and encrease of theyr merytes.”⁵ While this literature has many limitations, it does allow us to hear something of the voices of the past and why they undertook to visit ancient saints of wet and windy northwest Europe. The seventeenth-century Dominican Vincent Reboul identified three principal features which commended a place for pilgrimage: the greatness of the saint’s relics it conserves, the real miracles which take place there for the sick, and the multitude of indulgences accorded to it, available to those who visit with devotion.⁶ There was also penance, vows made, piety, social and confessional identity, and curiosity. What all pilgrims had in common was their expectation of contact with the divine, embodied in places and objects. They hoped to capture for their own benefit the power and energy of the supernatural. In the words of Alphonse Dupront, pilgrims journeyed to experience a “sacral re    

Fulbrook and Rublack, “In Relation,” 263. Fulbrook and Rublack, “In Relation,” 265 – 67. Greyerz, “Ego-Documents,” 279 – 81. Langton, Pilgrimage, 39. Reboul, Histoire, preface.

Who Were Long-Distance Pilgrims in Northwest Europe *…*?

35

charge.”⁷ It could be a truly transformative experience. In this chapter, we will try to understand the objective of holy travel to these particular sites and how this changed over time.

Who Were Long-Distance Pilgrims in Northwest Europe in the Post-Reformation Centuries? It is likely that in the later Middle Ages, all but a tiny number of Christians in western Europe visited a shrine at some point in their lives. Shrines were everywhere and recourse was common. But long-distance pilgrimage was the practice of a much smaller number of people. It required a level of physical fitness, an ability to leave home and work, and their commitments, for a period of time, and it needed a certain psychological robustness, to be able to undertake an arduous journey of several days, weeks, or months. Most of the population of early modern Europe was not able to take off and travel for sustained periods of time. Women were constrained by domestic commitments and gendered expectations of behavior that limited their movements; men could not leave their farms and businesses; the old, young, and disabled could not support the physical conditions of travel, and enclosed orders of monks and nuns could not leave their convents. Georges Provost argues that in Brittany at least, by the early modern period, the number of people undertaking long-distance pilgrimage was negligible and systematic survey of parish registers by Alain Croix revealed only a handful of examples.⁸ Other documents, wills, entries in hospital and hostel registers in towns along pilgrim routeways, show that there was some movement, although numbers were small compared to the wider population. Those who journeyed far were therefore a special group. To calculate how many people traveled long-distance, that is, a journey of more than two or three days each way, is virtually impossible. There are some examples of high-profile events at shrines—jubilee pardons or festivals—which catered for large numbers of people and where some attempt at calculation can be made. For example, in 1622 in Puy-en-Vélay, a jubilee was held at the shrine of the Blessed Virgin during the week commencing March 25. There were so many pilgrims that the canons of the cathedral and the city consuls feared disorder because of the shortage and high cost of food, and they set a

 Dupront, Du sacré, 442.  Provost, La fête et le sacré, 100; see also Croix, Bretagne.

36

Chapter 2: Pilgrims and Their Purposes

Table 2.1: Receptions of pilgrims in Santissima Trinità hostel of Rome during jubilee years. Source: Julia, “Gagner son jubilé,” 319. Year 

Male Pilgrims Traveling Alone

Female Pilgrims Traveling Alone

Pilgrims Traveling in Groups

Total Pilgrims

,

,

,

,*



,



ca. ,

,



ca. ,

,



,



,

* The total of , given in the original source has here been corrected.

maximum price for wine and bread, to ensure that no trouble broke out. In his memoirs, Jean Burel estimates that 200,000 visitors came to the shrine during this pardon; even allowing for exaggeration, there was no doubt a great number.⁹ In Troyes in 1626, for the extension of the Roman jubilee of 1625 to the city, the cathedral chapter purchased 77,000 communion wafers for pilgrims.¹⁰ For that of 1661 held in the same city, 4500 communion wafers were purchased.¹¹ Most of the visitors to these events would have been locals to the city, region, and diocese. How many of these came from afar we cannot tell but there were at least some: posters for the jubilee at Le Puy have been found in Toulouse archdiocese, and such events were advertised throughout France to attract pilgrims.¹² When the destination was Rome, very large numbers of pilgrims traveled, especially in holy years. Dominique Julia has studied the receptions of pilgrims in the hospice of the Santissima Trinità during jubilee years and found that tens of thousands traveled (see Table 2.1). While numbers declined over the course of the seventeenth century, if the Santa Trinità pilgrims are combined with those at other hostels and private forms of accommodation, significant population movements occurred. What

 Burel, Mémoires, 519. A short survey of the history of the pilgrimage can be found in Reinburg, “Pèlerins de Notre-Dame de Puy.”  A.D. Aube G 1611. Compte de la fabrique de la Cathédrale de Troyes 1626.  A.D. Aube G 1303. Déliberations capitulaires, chapitre de la Cathédrale de Troyes. 1658 – 1662.  For example A.D. Haute-Garonne 2 G 19. Diocèse de Rieux. Indulgences.

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this data shows is that, for major shrines and for important occasions, largescale movements of people across space were a continuing feature of the early modern period. For the ancient saints’ shrines of northwestern Europe, we cannot calculate even rough numbers of participants, for documentary evidence is fragmentary. However, if we use the numbers of travelers frequenting hostels on pilgrim routes, for which we have snap-shot years for numerous institutions, though rarely whole series of data, we get at least a sense of the scale of movement. In Argentan, 120 miles west of Paris and 80 miles east of the Mont Saint-Michel, the Hôpital Saint-Jacques provided overnight shelter to pilgrims traveling to and from the Mont, Saint-Méen, and other shrines, from eastern France. In 1561, 2000 pilgrims were recorded; in 1573 there were only 142; in 1574, 801; 1019 pilgrims in 1575 and 707 in 1576.¹³ In the summer months of May to October therefore, a very rough average of 150 pilgrims per month or five to ten per day, shows that there was a steady flow of traffic. This was during a period of civil warfare in France, when travel could be dangerous. The hospital of Saint-Yves in Rennes registered 2885 pilgrims traveling to Saint-Méen in the year 1650 – 1651, including fifty-eight on the return journey, from as far away as Boulogne, Nancy, and the Parisian basin but mostly from Brittany, Normandy, Maine, and Anjou.¹⁴ The trans-regional character of the site was still a feature of the early eighteenth century, as fragmentary records from a hospital in nearby Montfort show.¹⁵ Further south in France on the route to Compostela, in the mid-seventeenth century, pilgrims arriving at the hospital of St. James at Bordeaux were more numerous. In 1660, there were 4344 individuals; in 1665 there were 3275, and in 1670, 2371 travelers. In the first half of the decade, an average of 4000 pilgrims a year were passing through the hostel.¹⁶ In the 1660s in Rodez, the governors of the pilgrim hospital claimed that they received 2000 pilgrims annually.¹⁷ At the important hostel-monastery at Roncevalles, at the foot of the most frequented Pyrenean pass, in 1663 Martin de Andía estimated that there were 30 – 40,000 distributions of rations. If every pilgrim had their allotted three, that means 10,000 people went through the pass in that year.¹⁸ In Santiago in 1717, a holy year, there were so many pilgrims that the shrine’s special confessors could not cope with the numbers so the archbishop allowed the faithful to confess

     

Data taken from Julia, “Pèlerinage au Mont Saint-Michel,” 288. Brilloit, “Population pérégrine,” 258 – 59. Provost, La fête et le sacré, 150 – 53. A.D. Gironde H 2317. Jésuites. Pèlerins. Viallet, L’Hôtel-Dieu de Rodez, 12. A.D. Pyrénées-Atlantique G 222. Biens de l’abbaye de Ronvecaux en France.

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to any priest.¹⁹ While this data is impressionistic, it does indicate the continuing scale of travel to Santiago well into the eighteenth century. For St. Patrick’s Purgatory in Lough Derg, there are no institutional records at all, but visitors estimated the numbers of pilgrims present. Bishop Rothe of Ossory claimed in the early seventeenth century to have seen 1500 people at the site and commented “if this was the number of pilgrims at one time, what number shall we estimate in another age, particularly when the approach was freer and not as now hemmed in by colonies of Protestants?”²⁰ One such Protestant, Sir William Stuart, in a letter to the Privy Council on the destruction of the Purgatory in 1632, reported that “I found 431 persons doing such fooleries as is not to be imagined could be done among Christians” when he went to raze the site.²¹ When another Protestant, the Reverend Michael Hewison visited in 1701, the guardian of the site told him that in the previous year they had welcomed nearly 5000 pilgrims and some 2000 had come in the current year; Hewison himself estimated 300 people present at the site during his visit.²² There were clearly visible numbers of pilgrims moving along long-distance routeways of northwestern Europe in the summer months at least. It was a significant phenomenon. The geographical origins of pilgrims differed according to the location and reach of each shrine. The visitors to Compostela were the most international of the shrines studied here. Of those who stayed in the Hospital Real de Santiago, that is sick pilgrims, in the period 1646 – 1701, visitors from France were the overwhelming majority—as they had been throughout the Middle Ages—with 6000 pilgrims. Flemish pilgrims numbered 759, Italians, 428, and Irish, 115.²³ The total number of pilgrims were obviously much greater but probably proportionally of the same origins. There were intermittent waves of Irish visitors, often Catholic refugees from the wars in Ireland, such as during the Cromwellian invasion of 1653 – 1659.²⁴ Martin de Andía, writing of Roncevalles in 1663, noted that “although they come from Germany, Italy and all parts of Christendom, almost all are French. Of ten pilgrims, nine are French.”²⁵ Of the French, the largest contingent came from Paris, the western and central provinces of Brittany, Normandy and the Auvergne, and the Lyonnais. Further north, pilgrimage to the

      

Lopez, “Camino de Santiago,” 478. Translated from the Latin of Rothe, in Leslie ed., 91. Sir William Stuart’s Letter to the Privy Council, June 8, 1632, in Leslie ed., 77. Hewson, St. Patrick’s Purgatory. Provost, “Pèlerins accueillis,” 131. Parga et al., 1:117. A.D. Pyrénées-Atlantique G 222. Biens de l’abbaye de Ronvecaux en France.

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Mont Saint-Michel was inter-regional rather than international in the early modern period. The majority of pilgrims staying at Argentan hospital in the 1570s came from three regions: Normandy itself (23.6 percent), Lorraine (25.7 percent) and the Champagne region (21.8 percent). Burgundy, Paris, Picardy, and the eastern Loire valley were next in order of importance.²⁶ For St. Patrick’s Purgatory, pilgrims came from all over Ireland. Whether or not there were overseas visitors is virtually impossible to say; however, the renown of the site continued in the European imagination, for in Spain for example, Juan Pérez de Montalbán retold the Henry of Sawtry account in his Vida y Purgatorio de San Patricio (1627), and Pedro Calderón de la Barca turned it into a play, El Purgatorio de San Patricio (1636).²⁷ These sites were international in the imaginary and even if their geographical reach had shrunk since the later Middle Ages, it remained wide. The gender of pilgrims on long-distant trails was overwhelmingly masculine. Single women were rare; most often, when women traveled, it was with their husbands or other family members. A study of the Extramaduran shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, visited particularly by the sick and by freed captives, was highly masculine: the miracle stories related by visiting pilgrims across the sixteenth century concerned around 1000 men and 200 women.²⁸ Women were a little more numerous in Rome. Of the pilgrims staying in Santissima Trinità of Rome, 19 – 22 percent were female.²⁹ For the Atlantic pilgrimage routes, the percentage of women traveling was much lower. Only 7 percent of pilgrims who stayed overnight at the hospital at Bayonne 1724– 1767 were female.³⁰ The pilgrims cared for in the Hospital Real de Santiago were 98 percent male.³¹ Typical of women pilgrims were the Dubois family of Chalon-sur-Saône, Claude, his wife Barbe, and Françoise their daughter, who journeyed to Compostela together, in 1611– 1612.³² For a medium-distance healing shrine, there were more women, but they were still a minority: 28 percent of pilgrims passing through the hospital Saint-Yves at Rennes in 1650 – 1651 and a similar number, 25.6 percent, at SainteReine averaged across the period 1659 to 1777.³³ There were cultural assumptions about women’s behavior that made their free movement difficult. Lee Ann

       

Julia, “Pèlerinage au Mont Saint-Michel,” 290. Zaleski, “St. Patrick’s Purgatory,” 472. Cremoux, “Réalité et représentation,” 222. Julia, “Gagner son jubilé,” 318. Julia, “Pour une géographie européenne,” 112. Provost, “Pèlerins accueillis,” 131. Pétouraud, “Registre de la confrérie,” 15. Brilloit, “Population pérégrine,” 269; Boutry and Julia, Sainte-Reine au Mont Auxois, 130.

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Craig’s arguments that medieval literary associations between women’s mobility and lust, pride, greed, and deceit remained in force in the early modern period: women who sought to become pilgrims … faced real barriers to their participation which were based not only in the costs of travel or their quotidian responsibilities in the home, but also in the suspicions of vice which clustered around women who took to the road. Even when practical considerations had been ably dealt with and a female pilgrim was already on her way, her travel must also appear to her companions to be socially justifiable, lest she be regarded with hostility.³⁴

Women did travel, but distant journeys were largely undertaken by men. These long-distance pilgrims were also relatively young. Pilgrimage to the Mont Saint-Michel in particular had been associated with boys and young men since the fourteenth century and in the Nouveau dictionnaire française of 1680, Richelet defined “Miquelot” as a small boy who goes on pilgrimage to the Mont.³⁵ The chronicle of Dom Huynes of the Mont abbey stressed this ancient association. He wrote that in the year 1333 “an innumerable multitude of small children calling themselves ‘the shepherds’ crusade’ [pastoreaux]” came to the abbey from distant countries, some in bands, others alone, and some claiming that they had heard celestial voices telling them to go to the Mont. In 1441, groups of youths from Millau and in 1442, from Villefranche-de-Rouergue visited the Mont for intercession against plague; the high-water mark of this movement came in 1457– 1459 when large numbers of pilgrims, many of whom were youths, came from the German Rhineland and the Swiss cantons.³⁶ This continued in the early modern period. The Mont shared some of its clientele with Saint-Méen and nearly 40 percent of male pilgrims staying in the hospital of Saint-Yves of Rennes in 1650 – 1651, were under thirty years of age; 29 percent of women were also under thirty years old, with 23 percent over forty years of age.³⁷ On the road to Compostela, of the travelers staying at the hospital in Bayonne 1724– 1767, 66 percent were aged fifteen to thirty-five; in the hospital of Buen Suceso in La Coruña 1696 – 1773, 61 percent were aged fifteen to forty years old. More than three-quarters of these were single men and their average age was 29.5 years. Conversely, the average age of the very few women was forty-six years.³⁸ These young men frequently traveled in groups, small for longer-distances and larger cohorts for more proximal journeys. In their influential work on pil    

Craig, Wandering Women, 73. Julia, “Pèlerinage au Mont Saint-Michel,” 271. Huynes, 1:102. Brilloit, “Population pérégrine,” 272. Julia, “Pour une géographie européenne,” 112.

Who Were Long-Distance Pilgrims in Northwest Europe *…*?

41

grimage, the Turners argue that, in embarking on a sacred journey, pilgrims typically left behind everyday norms of social status, hierarchy, and interaction and instead, developed spontaneous association and shared experiences: a temporary state of communitas was reached, it was an out of time experience.³⁹ Yet it is clear that the majority of pilgrims went with companions, not alone, taking their communities with them on the journey. For the Mont Saint-Michel the typical clientele remained bands of young men. Groups of twenty to forty were typical, such as the twenty-four who traveled from Épinal in Lorraine in 1618, with another thirty from the same town in 1623.⁴⁰ In 1631, ten merchants and artisans from the parish of Saint-Eustache of Paris bound themselves together before a notary in a legal agreement to go together on pilgrimage to the Mont. Each member of the party was to contribute to the costs of food and lodging while the captain, lieutenant, and ensign would meet the costs of tambour, fife, books, carriage, and banner. If any of the party was to cry off or give up the journey, he was to pay a fine of 100 livres to the rest of the company.⁴¹ Examples of groups of men traveling together in this way could be multiplied. Similarly, young men in slightly smaller bands were the most frequent pilgrims to Compostela. Claude Haton records that in 1578, three bands of pilgrims left Provins for Compostela: the first group, of nine men, left in January, another group of nine from the parishes of Saint-Pierre and Saint-Quiriace, left in April and a group of five more left in October.⁴² Guillaume Manier and Jean Bonnecaze both left for Galicia in groups of four to five young men in the early eighteenth century.⁴³ For shorterrange curative sites the picture was similar. Groups of young men were the most-frequently encountered pilgrim band to Saint-Méen; 39 percent of travelers staying in the hospital Saint-Yves of Rennes 1650 – 1651 went alone but the rest were in groups, most frequently with family members, couples and young children, father and son or young adult siblings.⁴⁴ Pilgrimage was a group experience. The social group of such pilgrims is hard to reconstruct, again because of limited evidence. Chronicles and pamphlets written for and about shrines list the high-status visitors, but these were relatively few in numbers and diminished across the seventeenth century. Elite visitors to the Mont Saint-Michel included King Francis I with the dauphin in 1532; Charles IX and his brother Henry in

     

Turner and Turner, Image and Pilgrimage. Julia, “Pèlerinage au Mont Saint-Michel,” 292. Archives Nationales de France. N Minutier central, étude XV, liasse 76, 17 juin 1631. Haton, Mémoires (1553 – 1582), 4:71– 74. Manier, 4– 5; Bonnecaze, 173. Brilloit, “Population pérégrine,” 273 – 75.

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1561; the duchess of Bourbon and her seven children in 1576 and in 1625, Mademoiselle de Bourbon, daughter of the duke of Montpensier and shortly to be the wife of Gaston d’Orléans, brother of Louis XIII. The visit of the duke of Mazarin and the brother of Colbert in 1665 seems to have been the last great noble pilgrimage recorded there.⁴⁵ But most of the pilgrims traveling along the Atlantic routes were of the middling to lower sort, agricultural workers, artisans, merchants, and lower officers such as notaries. The confraternities which drew their membership from ex-pilgrims or those aspiring to pilgrimage, were overwhelmingly artisanal. In 1622, ten men who left from Blesle in the Auvergne for Compostela included a “bourgeois,” a weaver, a tailor, and a mercer.⁴⁶ In 1631, a band of eight men from Paris who undertook to journey to the Mont together, comprised five second-hand goods dealers, one stone mason, and two “bourgeois.”⁴⁷ At Laval in 1703, the confraternity of St. James had forty-eight ex-pilgrims as members which included nineteen weavers (39 percent), five butchers, three landscapers, three masons, two roofers, two carders, and other craftsmen.⁴⁸ This was overwhelmingly an activity of the younger, popular social groups. One group that does stand out is the clergy, principally parish priests and chaplains. Historians have long recognized clericalization as one of the characteristic features of the Catholic Reformation, within parishes but also at shrines. As Jean Chelini and Henri Branthomme summarize, one of the features of pilgrimage was the efforts of clergy to control, purify, and bring morality to shrine visiting, to extirpate practices they judged “superstitious.” The appointment of religious orders as guardians of many pilgrimage sites was part of this process, to make shrines a site of mission and interior conversion.⁴⁹ Parish clergy traveling with their flocks could be interpreted as part of this movement, to ensure devotion rather than dissipation en route and to keep an eye on their parishioners. Yet it was almost certainly less instrumental and more devotional than this. As Marc Forster states for Germany, most rural and townsfolk accepted that priests were indispensable for religious practice.⁵⁰ Their presence was vital for sacraments, sacramentals, and processions; if a group traveled to a distant shrine, their priests could provide masses and blessings on the way and offer thanksgiving for and by the whole community when they arrived at their destination. Cler-

     

Bosseboeuf, Mont Saint-Michel, 144. Chaize, “Pèlerinage de Saint-Jacques de Compostelle,” 41. A.D. Seine-Maritime F 491. Transcript. Un pèlerinage au Mont Saint-Michel en 1631. Julia, “Pour une géographie européenne,” 108. Chelini and Branthomme, Chemins de Dieu, 255. Forster, Catholic Revival, 155.

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gy are particularly visible in the pilgrimage to the Mont Saint-Michel and other regional-level pilgrimages, traveling with their flock. Thus, in 1624, Guillaume Brochard, vicar of Saint-Calais-du-Désert in the diocese of Le Mans, entered into the parish register that “on the Monday of Pentecost the procession of Saint-Calais-du-Désert to the Mont Saint-Michel was directed and led by me, priest vicar of this place, the said procession being 122 in number … no-one went separately, and praises were sung to Our Savior on the way there and back, and a Te Deum was sung in the church of Saint-Calais on our return.”⁵¹ Clergy without cure of souls or with special permissions for absence also undertook pilgrimages for their own devotions. Thus, Domenico Laffi, a priest from Bologna in Italy, who has left one of the most detailed accounts of the Compostelan pilgrimage in the seventeenth century, traveled there three times.⁵² The registers of cathedral chapters throughout Catholic Europe contain numerous records of permissions granted to canons and other clergy to go on pilgrimage, and also donations of alms to “foreign” priest-pilgrims passing through their towns. In 1574, Jean d’Alleren, priest of the diocese of Clermont, was given alms by the cathedral chapter of Rouen; in 1591, the cantor from Poitiers was given alms of half an écu by the chapter of Bordeaux cathedral for his pilgrimage to Compostela, and in 1601, the chapter of Saint-André of Bordeaux gave alms to a priest returning to Naples.⁵³ Examples could be multiplied. Clergy were visible, on the road and in the written records, even if they were only a small percentage of all pilgrims. Finally, in the early modern period, political and religious authorities became increasingly concerned about “false” pilgrims, vagabonds, thieves, and rogues who preyed upon the unwary holy traveler or who tried to gain hospitality and alms under false pretenses. From the later Middle Ages, local and royal authorities tried to reduce false pilgrimage. Certificates from local priests or from shrines were increasingly necessary to access hostel accommodation and alms, especially for the Compostelan pilgrimage. In 1569, the municipal government of Santiago de Compostela tried to reduce the number of vagabonds in the city, especially in busy periods, by limiting the stay of pilgrims to three days. Writing a history of the collegiate church in the mid-seventeenth century, Martín Burges, canon and hospitaler of Roncevalles, commented that in his opinion, the

 A.D. Mayenne. Parish Registers online. Saint-Calais-du-Désert. 1624. https://chercher-archives. lamayenne.fr/ark:/37963/r155870x9m5k/f7?context=ead2::FRAD053_2NUM200_RM_de-14097.  Laffi. His account, published in 1671, was largely about his second journey.  A.D. Seine-Maritime G 2312. Chapitre de Rouen; A.D. Gironde G 290. Actes capitulaires du chapitre de Bordeaux. 1589 – 1594; A.D. Gironde G 495. Chapitre de Saint-André. Comptabilité. 1600 – 1607.

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majority of people moving through the pass and spending the night in the abbey were criminals, “punished and banished from their own lands, who to cover up their evil lives, put on the garb of the pilgrim, and take to the roads, to live off the alms of charitable folk, with no intention of completing a pilgrimage.”⁵⁴ Philip II of Spain in the 1590s and Louis XIV of France in the 1670s, both ordered increased certification from bishops and local magistrates for pilgrims traveling, part of the attempt to enforce public order and moral supervision.⁵⁵ By the mid-eighteenth century, pilgrims were often being harassed or arrested by police in the towns and on the roads of France as vagabondage and movement became increasingly linked in the socio-cultural world of the Enlightenment. So, the “typical” pilgrim—if we can really use that term—traveling the longdistance pilgrim routes of northwest Europe was male, relatively young, and a farm worker, journeyman, or artisan. He was most frequently from a rural community or small town and he usually traveled in a group. Thus, in 1622, André Landays, almoner of the hospital of Toussaints of Nantes, traveled to the Mont Saint-Michel with fifteen other men.⁵⁶ Guillaume Manier who traveled to Compostela in 1726, was twenty-two years old and single, a tailor by trade, traveling with three friends from the same village of Carlepont in Picardy.⁵⁷ Jean Bonnecaze from Pardies in Béarn who traveled to Compostela in 1748, was twentytwo years old, the son of a farmer, and traveled with four other companions.⁵⁸ There were, of course, lone travelers and those in family groups. But the male, young, lay, popular pilgrim predominated. For what reasons, then, did these people travel the routeways of Atlantic Europe?

Motives for Long-Distance Pilgrimage The anthropologist Victor Turner related pilgrimage to liminality; he argued that it is an activity by which people escape from the confinements of their ordinary lives, enter into new fields of experience, then return home.⁵⁹ While this model might help to understand the experience of pilgrimage, it leaves the purposes of

 Martín Burges, Historia de Roncesvalles, MS of mid-seventeenth century. Published in Parga et al., 3:22– 24.  Pragmatic of Philip II of 1590 and Edict of Louis XIV reproduced in Parga et al., 3:115 – 16 and 3:117– 20.  Croix, Moi, Jean Martin, recteur de Plouvellec, 92.  Manier, 9.  Bonnecaze, 173.  Turner and Turner, Image and Pilgrimage, xx.

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participants opaque. The early modern pilgrim left us few direct clues as to his, or occasionally her, motives, which varied according to individual or group interests and needs. There were reasons why pilgrims should travel and those why they did travel. The pastoral advice given by clergy as to the benefits and functions of pilgrimage overlapped with but was not always an exact mirror of the reasons why large numbers of young men undertook sacred journeys in early modern northwest Europe. Yet such pilgrims might frame their aspirations using clerical concepts and terminology. In addition to the varying motives for travel of individuals, modern anthropological work shows that the functions of pilgrimage can be determined by the different status of shrines. A study of modern Hindu pilgrimage in India suggests that “low-status” shrines, often local sites, draw pilgrims for problem-solving and cures of physical and psychological ailments while “high-status,” distant shrines are sought for the sake of spiritual improvement or enlightenment. This also seems to have been broadly the case in pre-modern pilgrimage: “Jerusalem was a ‘high-status’ destination and few pilgrims could have undertaken such an arduous journey in order to obtain a cure. They might however have done so to give thanks for one.”⁶⁰ In sum, there were many reasons why pilgrims traveled in general and there were specific motives for this young, male, demographic group. To understand the objectives of their journeys we turn to contemporary voices. First, we will examine the advice given by clerical authors as to why pilgrims might journey. We will then consider why they actually traveled, using contemporary witnesses as far as we can.

Reasons for Journeying: Clerical Perspectives For the would-be pilgrim, there was a long tradition of clerical advice manuals on the utility and purpose of journeys to shrines. Some writers disparaged pilgrimage, warning of its futility, and counseled against it. Evangelical reformers of the sixteenth century, even when they rejected Protestantism, could be critical of pilgrimage. In Cristóbal de Villalón’s Viaje de Turquía of 1557, the characters reflect on the journey to Santiago. The conclusion is that the devout are better off staying at home rather than visiting the saint. The road which leads to heaven and the Ten Commandments are the briefest of all pilgrimages, and do not require a long journey. Also, many pilgrims blaspheme, fail to attend daily mass, and steal or appropriate unjustly what they find to hand. It was not nec-

 Encyclopedia of Medieval Pilgrimage, 458.

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essary to go to Santiago or even to Jerusalem to be saved.⁶¹ Other clergy favored armchair or spiritual travel rather than physical pilgrimage, providing lengthy and detailed guides for meditation, and this will be examined in chapter 5. Yet most clerical authors had a more traditional view. As Louis Richeome stated in The Pilgrim of Loreto (1604), it was not absolutely necessary to seek piety in foreign lands when it could be found at home, but it could sometimes be found with greater ease away from home. Thus, God invites his Christian children to visit places where he shows particular demonstration of his grace; he does not do so by command but by advertisement and gentle words.⁶² Jacobus Gretser’s historical treatment of pilgrimage, De sacris et religiosis peregrinationibus libri quattur (1606) provided a detailed history of pilgrimage and documented its continuing importance to his contemporaries, with a fourth book on the shrine at Compostela.⁶³ Such authors were keen to prime the potential pilgrim on the right reasons for travel and the correct behaviors to adopt to ensure the pious objectives were met. The most persistent motive for holy travel advocated by clerical writers in this period was the Imitatio Christi, to copy “most perfectly the pilgrimage of Jesus Christ and honor in a most particular manner his status as traveler in this world, which made of him a pilgrim, so he could restore to the true road those who had strayed from the way of peace.”⁶⁴ The life of Christ was held to be an allegorical series of pilgrimages: the journey to Bethlehem, the flight into Egypt, his preaching ministry in Judea and the road to Calvary.⁶⁵ Pilgrims were urged to travel the same road as Christ and the elect, that is, the route of penitence, passion, tribulation, and ultimately, salvation.⁶⁶ The fourteenthcentury work of Guillaume de Digulleville (ca. 1295?–1380?), Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, reprinted many times in the early modern period, was a classic of this genre, with the three pilgrimages of Christians being this earthly life, the separation of the soul from the body at death, and that of Jesus Christ, from his nativity to his sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.⁶⁷ As Jean Pascha wrote in 1566, “in this world we are as pilgrims, or even exiles banished to a foreign country, to a vale of tears until, through divine goodness and mercy, we come to the land of our heavenly father. Our fathers and ancestors of the Old

      

Villalón, Viaje de Turquía, 17– 30. Richeome, Deffence des pèlerinages, 32. Noonan, Road to Jerusalem, 88; Gretser, De sacris. P.D.H., Guide des pèlerins, 10. Pascha, Pérégrination spirituelle, 5r. Pascha, Pérégrination spirituelle, 11r. An example of a copy is Digulleville, Pèlerinage de la vie humaine.

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and the New Testament considered their lives to be a pilgrimage and journey towards the heavenly country.”⁶⁸ The pilgrim knows himself to be a passer-by, that he will not stay long in one place but he is only allowed to see it and then pass on.⁶⁹ Penitence, therefore, was the leitmotif and chief purpose of pilgrimage in the early modern period as it had been in the Middle Ages. In Richeome’s Deffence des pèlerinages (1605) he asks the question of why should pilgrims go on foot to a far country, beg alms, expose themselves to the mercy of strangers, endure thirst, hunger, rain, and such inconveniences? It was a matter of penitence, austerity, and time profitably spent.⁷⁰ Holy Scripture shows that pilgrimages were ordered of his people by God, such as the exodus in the wilderness, and then the law of Moses which ordered Jews to visit the temple at the main holy feasts of the year. Richeome argued that the Christian pilgrim took to the road to honor God with greater affection, to show penitence, to learn humility and patience, returning home wiser and richer in virtue.⁷¹ Bernard du Verger, observant Franciscan in the Low Countries, in a work of 1615 advises Christians on why they should be pilgrims: “who taking and undertaking their journey for love of God and for penitence, must suffer much, but their footsteps, their sweat, their shivers and their cold, please God marvelously and are done for their account.”⁷² To win favor with God for the pilgrimage, it was first of all necessary to dispose of the soul. By the seventeenth century, part of changing practices in the form of the sacrament of penitence, it was advocated that the pilgrim should undertake a general confession before departure to be rid of all mortal sins and should maintain a peaceable and humble disposition throughout the journey. All curiosity to see countries and cities should be put aside.⁷³ The anonymous author of La vie de St Fiacre, confesseur patron de Brie avec des avertissements aux pèlerins of 1717 similarly advocated penitence as the primary motive, that pilgrimage should be made “with sincere sorrow for all sins and a firm resolution to correct oneself in future, with the grace of God.”⁷⁴ For this, it was necessary to offer to God all the pains, fatigues and incommodities of the journey and to pray to him to accept these for the expiation of one’s sins. If one was undertaking the jour-

      

Pascha, Pérégrination spirituelle, 3r. Pascha, Pérégrination spirituelle, 7r. Richeome, Deffence des pèlerinages, xxiv. Richeome, Deffence des pèlerinages, 18r&v. Verger, Pèlerin moral, 58. Verger, Pèlerin moral, 77– 78. Anon., Vie de St Fiacre, 19.

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ney for relief from illness or other problem, grace should be requested with complete submission of self. The Tridentine view of pilgrimage emphasized its moral purposes. Linked to this was an increasing emphasis from the late sixteenth century onwards, of personal and spiritual growth. The Jesuit Gaspard Loarte, in a treatise on pilgrimage of 1575, designed to encourage visitors to Rome during the jubilee year, proposed that pilgrimage was an opportunity to grow in the three principal theological virtues, hope, faith, and charity. These were to be “lived” through religious actions, by prayers to God, and acts of penitence through patience and humility, particularly if the pilgrim lived from alms.⁷⁵ John Pits (1560 – 1615), an English Catholic who studied at Oxford, Rome, and Ingolstadt, argued for the educational experience of pilgrimage in his Seven Books on Pilgrimage [De Peregratione] (1604).⁷⁶ Richeome’s Le pèlerin de Lorete counseled the pilgrim to have three aims: to honor God and his saints, to undertake penitence “by enduring with patience the travails and inconveniences of the road,” and to grow in devotion through imitating the examples shown by the saints whom he visited. Richeome condemned those who journeyed without devotion or worse still, in a disorderly manner.⁷⁷ Later in the seventeenth century, the author of a pamphlet for the shrine of Notre-Dame de Verdelais near to Bordeaux wrote that the Church authorized pilgrimages and exhorted her children to use them as efficacious means of drawing closer to God, to disarm his anger; they were a means of maintaining piety and affirming faith.⁷⁸ The author counseled that “from the first step you take to come here, make a strong resolution to renounce all your evil inclinations, leave off your criminal attachments and unregulated passions” and thus gain a clear conscience to present to God.⁷⁹ From the early seventeenth century, a new theme, the search for a reformation of life and an interior conversion to faith, became prominent, linked to introspection, interiority, mental prayer, and finding God in one’s inner space. The superior of Notre Dame de Bon Secours near to Nancy, writing in 1630, emphasized interior conversion to a more devout life as a greater miracle to be found at the shrine than any cure.⁸⁰ The writer of the pilgrimage pamphlet for the shrine of Notre-Dame de Benoiste-Vaux remarked that few had accomplished the pilgrimage who did not feel some interior transformation having received extraor-

     

Loarte, Trattato delle sante peregrinationi. Pits, De Peregratione. Richeome, The Pilgrime of Loreto, 44– 45. P.D.H., Guide des pèlerins, 12. P.D.H., Guide des pèlerins, 24, 27. Julet, Miracles et grâces.

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dinary enlightenment and knowledge from God, along with love of the Father, devotion towards the Virgin Mary, an inclination towards virtue, a horror of sin, and other similar emotions. While graces could be obtained at home it was worth visiting the shrine because one would learn from the example of other devout and virtuous people one would meet there; one would experience miracles, graces, and cures granted for the good and consolation of the faithful visiting the shrine. Most importantly, sinners are converted at the site and receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.⁸¹ As with the temple in Jerusalem, God chose specific places for the manifestation of his grace. In 1668, a booklet for the Mont Saint-Michel written by one of the abbey’s monks, Robert Quatremaires, stated that the essential aim of pilgrimage to the Mont was to “imitate the saints, to enliven devotion, to copy the merits of the saints, and to receive the aid of their prayers, to pray more effectively, to give satisfaction for sin” and also “to animate one’s faith, to enliven one’s hopes, to embrace charity by the sight of this place” and more expressly, “to obtain from God the gift to die in a state of grace.”⁸² Quatremaires was keen to promote his own shrine, for after the veneration of Christ and his mother, the most important veneration was due to the holy angels. Guardian angels were appointed by God to accompany each one of us through the pilgrimage of this life; therefore, a pilgrimage to give thanks to the holy angels and their chief, St. Michael, was particularly rewarding.⁸³ There was a polemical purpose to pilgrimage in the pages of some advice manuals. In 1595, the Augustinian friar Jean Gouyn was commissioned to write a pamphlet for the Saint-Jacques confraternity at Orleans, Histoire de la vie, prédication, martyre, translation et miracles de st Jacques le majeur … Plus la guide du chemin qu’il faut tenir pour aller de la ville d’Orléans aux voyages de Saint Jacques en Galice. The author stated the aim of the work to be to demonstrate that: against the impostures and calumnies of our adversaries, the heretics of our times, that in our Catholic faith, in the early Church and for all times, the glorious memory of the blessed apostles was held in such great honor and reverence by faithful Christians that their sepulchers and holy relics were visited, frequented, and honored by devout travelers, along with their prayers, gifts, and oblations. We see this today in the singular practice towards the tomb and holy relics of the blessed apostle St. James of Compostela.⁸⁴

   

Anon., Histoire et miracles, 38 – 40. Quatremaires, Histoire abrégée du Mont Saint-Michel, 56, 59. Quatremaires, Histoire abrégée du Mont Saint-Michel, 5 – 6. Gouyn, Histoire. Quote is from the introductory “Avertissement aux lecteurs.”

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Gouyn’s guide was an anti-Calvinist apology, promoting travel to shrines as a form of refuting the “monstrous and contagious opinions” of Protestants.⁸⁵ This pamphlet was reprinted for the confraternity of Rouen in 1603 and dedicated to “the devout of Rouen” and written “for good people and not for the disaffected and slanderers who are too numerous in these miserable times; forbidden also for you heretics, Lutherans and Calvinists … who, for the honor we give to the saints, accuse us of idolatry.”⁸⁶ Richeome’s Deffence des pelerinages (1605) was another refutation of the opinions of Protestants, designed to show the utility of pilgrimage. In a similar vein, Du Verger advised that many things would try a pilgrim’s patience but the worst of all was “to hear the bleating and braying of Lutherans and Calvinists … who, glass and cup in hand, mock pilgrimage.”⁸⁷ The pilgrim was to take comfort for it was an exercise pleasing to God, His Majesty has ordered it and the saints considered it a laudable activity. For this reason, late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century writers advocated pilgrimage as a visible contradiction to the heresy of Protestantism. So, the clerical discourse on pilgrimage was about penitence, prayer, then in new departures in the Counter-Reformation, increasingly a reformation of life and interior disposition toward God, in imitation of Christ. Sacred journeys were about morality, resilience, and spiritual growth. They were, literally, soul journeys. How much this advice influenced the cohorts traveling the northwest European pilgrimage routes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is a matter for consideration. Many of the young men who traveled could not read and did not acquire written tracts. But their own clergy could read; sermons by the mendicant orders in towns and countryside were popular and were informed by such spirituality. Increasingly, confraternities of all sorts propagated such piety, as we will see in chapter 5. Ideas moved across these sorts of boundaries. Clerical advice was thus important to pilgrims in preparing and understanding the journey they were to make. But the reasons why people chose to travel—particularly the bands of young men we see on the long-distance routes—were not necessarily the same as those advocated by the clergy, even if they were often expressed in clerical terms. It is to these that we turn.

 For a discussion of this pamphlet, see Julia, Voyage aux saints, 168.  I have not seen this pamphlet but it is discussed in Barret and Gurgand, Priez pour nous, 92.  Verger, Pèlerin moral, 60.

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Reasons for Journeying: Pilgrims’ Perspective Through the Middle Ages and in the first Reformation century, at the highest level of society, kings, queens, their closest advisors, and their representatives, traveled to shrines to demonstrate dynastic legitimacy and to reinforce their links with divinity. Mostly they attended shrines near to their orbits of rule and progression, but occasionally they traveled to the distant, prestigious ancient shrines. Santiago, as patron of Castile, received Ferdinand and Isabella in 1486, where they founded the Hospital Royal for the sick and pilgrims. Their daughter Queen Juana went, as did the future Philip II. Even when the Spanish monarchs stopped visiting in the early seventeenth century, they sent proxies and gifts to the saint. In France, Louis XI traveled to the Mont Saint-Michel three times and in 1469, he founded the aristocratic chivalric order of SaintMichel there, though it was later transferred to Paris. Francis I and the dauphin traveled to the Mont after a progress to Brittany in 1532, Charles IX and his brother, the later Henry III, did so in 1561 and Crown representatives to the Estates of Brittany called on the shrine in the seventeenth century. Dowager Queen Anne of Austria patronized many shrines, visiting St. Radegonde in Poitiers in person in 1650 for instance. These were very special pilgrimages. The royal pilgrims visited out of devotion, but also to signal the links between their personal authority, its validation by their patron, and as supplicants for good fortune for their dynasties and kingdoms. Such pilgrimages received much attention by the resident clergy, but they were rare events. Across time and place, the most frequent motive for pilgrimage of all kinds and certainly for the masses of more humble pilgrims, was the search for the miraculous, most often in the form of a cure for illness.⁸⁸ People visited the saints for relief from suffering. The many shrines and wells of the Middle Ages attest to this widespread practice. As proof of the efficacy of a cult, the guardians frequently collected and published examples of miracles to demonstrate the powers of the saint. Miracles were severely criticized by Protestant reformers in the sixteenth century, but the wars of religion and revival of Catholicism brought them to the fore again. Bruno Maës shows for the shrine of Notre-Dame de Liesse in northeastern France, that recovery from illnesses from plague to paralysis, escaping from accidents, war-related violence, capture, and other ills, were the main form of recorded miracles.⁸⁹ Of the shrines of the ancient saints of northwest Europe, the major sites seem seldom to have been visited for cures. Long-

 For a detailed study of miracles in France see Balzamo, Miracles dans la France.  Maës, Livrets de pèlerinage, 120 – 22.

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distant pilgrimage was arduous and impractical for most sick people. The regionally important ancient cult sites were, conversely, largely healing shrines with specialties assigned to each saint. For example, the shrine of Saint-Méen, near to Rennes, attracted pilgrims suffering from scabies and other skin diseases of the hand as did that of Sainte-Reine near to Flavigny, which also specialized in syphilis. Saint-Hubert in the Ardennes was a specialist against rabies and animal bites, while Saint-Fiacre was reputed for hemorrhoids. Most pilgrims did not travel too far in search of a cure. Instead, people in need took vows to a saint, that if they were cured or relieved of an accident or mishap, they would travel.⁹⁰ The author of a pilgrimage booklet for Notre-Dame de Verdelais lists relief from sickness and pain, success in law suits, consolation for losses and bankruptcies, escape from storms and shipwrecks, as examples of vows made.⁹¹ The most common motive for the long-distance traveler, therefore, was in fulfilment of a vow in thanksgiving for a grace received through saintly intercession. An invocation to a saint and a vow to action normally took place at a time of extreme personal or family stress or danger, illness, accident, and natural disaster. The relationship thus forged between saint and client was contractual; the recipients of divine aid were bound to fulfil the promise of pilgrimage and sometimes to give a gift as well. Once taken, an oath was binding: vow-making “transformed a voluntary intention to perform an action into a legally and morally binding and enforceable obligation.”⁹² As the Verdelais author wrote, “it is true that a vow … can be freely made by anyone, but its execution becomes a precept from which one cannot be dispensed without legitimate reason.”⁹³ For vows made to visit Compostela, the contract was so serious that jurisdiction to absolve the need to travel to the shrine was reserved to the pope or his delegate. If an individual could not keep a promise to visit the saint in question, they might seek alternatives such as a substitute or proxy to travel for them. Joe Bergin comments that whether such vows increased in frequency in the seventeenth century is unknown, but there was a rise in the number of vows written out and sent to shrines, instead of a physical pilgrimage.⁹⁴ Reneging on the promise invalidated the original vow and could result in punishment by the saint and it was likely that sooner or later, God’s wrath would descend on the ungrateful person who had received a grace but had not fulfilled an obligation.     

For a study of different types of vows, see Burkardt, Clients des saints, 409 – 22. P.D.H., Guide des pèlerins, 16. Encyclopedia of Medieval Pilgrimage, 811. P.D.H., Guide des pèlerins, 14. Bergin, Church, Society and Religious Change, 247.

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There are numerous examples of vows made and fulfilled to the ancient shrines of northeast Europe. One of the most famous was a vow made by Philip III of Spain and his queen Margaret of Austria, to visit Santiago in person during its jubilee year of 1610, a thanksgiving for the expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain in 1609. The vow was carried out for the royal couple by their chaplain Cardinal Diego Guzmán.⁹⁵ Vows were made by people of all social groups, however, it was a truly popular and long-lived religious practice. In 1581, the Venetian pilgrim B. Bourdelot traveled to Compostela, in fulfilment of a vow made in the Gulf of Lyons, presumably in a storm at sea.⁹⁶ In 1606, a notary of Auch recorded the will of François de Vic, seigneur de Rieux, and his miraculous escape from Ottoman slavery. In 1594, he was captured by Turks near to Vienna and sold, to work the land on an estate then as an oarsman in the Mediterranean galley fleet. When he was finally released, he undertook to give thanks to St. James at Compostela before returning home.⁹⁷ In 1654, the Austrian priest Canon Christophe Gunzinger of Wiener Neustadt traveled to Compostela via Italy to thank the apostle for curing a fever. When he was six years old, Gunzinger became mortally ill, but recovered after drinking water from a cockleshell; his mother vowed to go on the pilgrimage and Christophe traveled to fulfil the vow for both of them.⁹⁸ In 1657, Jean Mathivet, master hatter of the city of Bellac, had the desire “to go in devotion on pilgrimage to the town of St. James in Galicia, in execution of a vow previously made, to render the deed and his submission to the great God”; he made a will leaving 100 livres for masses for his soul, should he die on route, to be said on St. James’s day, at the altar of the apostle in Notre Dame church.⁹⁹ In 1685, Jacques Lemesre, son of a jeweler of Lille, went to Compostela in fulfilment of a vow taken for the recovery of his mother from illness.¹⁰⁰ For the Archangel St. Michael, there were similar vows although fewer surviving accounts of them. In 1604, a pilgrimage booklet for the Mont Saint-Michel by the Franciscan François Feuardent, recounted three miracles that followed vows, that had happened in the mid-sixteenth century, dated and localized to give them veracity. In 1560, Thomasse George, a young woman from the pays de Caux, was cured of a tormenting spirit by the archangel; another girl had her hand closed by the spirit of her father and was relieved of the disability by St. Michael, and a poor man again possessed by the spirit of a demon, was

 Guzmán, Peregrinacion; Guzmán, Reyna Catolica.  Idígoras, “Peregrino veneciano,” 343.  Carsalade du Pont, “Odysée d’un pèlerin.”  Guntzinger, Peregrinatio Compostellana anno 1654, 17, 129 – 30. Also 80 – 82.  A.D. de la Haute-Vienne 4 E 6 – 222. J. Tournoys notaire royal à Bellac 1657.  Mentioned in Barret and Gurgand, Priez pour nous, 37.

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cured by the saint in 1564.¹⁰¹ These miracle stories show that few took place at the shrine in question, they were a result of a compact between archangel and devotee. Similarly, in 1635, Monsieur de Mesgrigny, maitre de requêtes in Paris, sent a votive silver cockleshell to the abbey of the Mont, in thanksgiving for the safe delivery of a child, following a vow.¹⁰² In 1638, Augustin Cacoing, his wife Denise de Tau, and their infant child walked to the Mont from the parish of Marigny in the diocese of Coutances, to give thanks for their baby, born through the archangel’s intercession after five days of labor. The midwife had counseled Denise to make a vow to St. Michael, for his assistance.¹⁰³ Personal obligation in response to saintly intervention was thus a defining motive for pilgrimage for many voyagers. A further, frequently stated motive for pilgrimage to distant shrines was put simply as “out of devotion,” a vaguely articulated but sincere desire to experience the divine. This could have numerous underlying prompts. Difficult tasks could call for a period of preparatory meditation: in 1543, the Jesuits Melchior Carneiro and Martin de la Cruz traveled from Coimbra to Santiago before traveling on a mission to Ethiopia, while in 1554, the future Philip II visited Santiago en route for England to marry Mary I, to pray and to make a confession.¹⁰⁴ In an attestation of 1599 to the vicar general of Saint-Brieuc diocese, two hermits described the reasons for their recent lives as permanent pilgrims: for a long time they had the intention of abandoning this worldly life to follow one of solitude. As a means of increasing their devotion, they have spent the last five years on pilgrimages to the holy places, among others, Our Lady of Loreto, Montserrat, St. Peter’s of Rome, St. James of Compostela and St. Servais in Germany … and lastly, to the Mont Saint-Michel

and they were on the road to Notre-Dame de Folgoët in the west of Brittany, when they were invited to become residents of a chapel-hermitage belonging to the Seigneur Guillaume de Rosmadec.¹⁰⁵ A desire to have intimate, personal contact with a saint was a strong motive for some pilgrims. Henri-Marie Bourdon, archdeacon of Evreux, “always had a profound respect for the holy angels and believed he should visit a temple dedicated to Our Lord, under the invocation of

 Feuardent, Histoire de la fondation; repeated in a pamphlet by Bordeaux, Deux discours.  Huynes, 2:35; Le Roy, 474.  Le Roy, 474.  Huidobro y Serna, Peregrinaciones jacobeas, 1:376 – 77.  Document reproduced in Raison du Cleuziou, Guillaume de Rosmadec, 31– 32. A similar story, probably fictional, is the basis of the devotional tract of Sainct-Amour, L’hermite pèlerin.

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his first ministers.”¹⁰⁶ He traveled to the Mont Saint-Michel in 1665 to achieve this. Monsieur de Queriolet, conseiller de parlement de Rennes and later priest, had two motives for long-distance pilgrimage: to imitate what Christ did on earth and “to study the virtues of the saints and to draw upon some portion of these in the sanctuaries where their precious relics rested.”¹⁰⁷ He journeyed to NotreDame de Liesse, Rome, and Compostela to these ends. The preambles of wills similarly attest to such devotions, even if they are often formulaic in expression. A collection of pilgrims’ testaments from early seventeenth-century Limousin include Nicolas son of the late Pierre Guéry, merchant, of the parish of Saint-Pierre du Queyroix who made his will “out of desire and devotion to make the journey to St. James in Galicia” in 1602; in 1607, Antoine Faure, servant in the city of Limoges, had “the intention and devotion to leave this present country” to travel to Galicia; and Anthoine Mathivet of Bellac, in 1658 “being on foot, healthy in mind and spirit, wanting to go in devotion to St. James of Galicia.”¹⁰⁸ To go on pilgrimage meant visiting a person who was physically present in their relics and spiritually present in prayer. While relics seem no longer to have attracted popular devotion as they had in the fifteenth century, they fostered a sense of religion that was historic and perpetual, the saint’s remains linking the distant past and the pilgrim’s present.¹⁰⁹ Sophie Germain de Franceschi argues pilgrimage accounts of the Renaissance and baroque periods show how a pilgrim was cast as a member of the celestial company, manifested on earth by remains; a pilgrim found him or herself bodily in the presence of the saint, for a sensual encounter with the sacred, creating an interiorization of faith. A personal relationship with the divine being was sought.¹¹⁰ Spiritual growth was a motive articulated by clerical writers from the early seventeenth century onwards, as we saw above. This was linked to the practice of penitence, a feature of Christian pilgrimage from its earliest days and which remained a motive throughout the early modern period. Pilgrimage always had an ascetic element, although by the sixteenth century judicial penitential pilgrimage imposed by ecclesiastical or secular courts for a grave sin or crime was almost unknown on the long-distance routes. Yet even if such pilgrimages had disappeared, there was a strongly penitential element to the practice, a motive of expiation and a search for absolution. As an ascetic exercise it commonly

 Anon., La Vie de M. Henry-Marie Boudon, 2:272.  Collet, Monsieur de Queriolet, 68.  A.D. de la Haute-Vienne Liasse 4 E 2– 531. Notaire Jacques Raymond; Liasse 4 E 2– 417; Liasse 4 E 6 – 222 Notaire J. Tournois. Cited in Tintou, “Testaments de pèlerins limousins.”  Forster, Catholic Revival, 75.  Germain de Franceschi, D’encre et de poussière, 237, 250.

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played a role in the formation of members of religious orders such as the Jesuits. The Breton priest Monsieur de Queriolet went on long-distance pilgrimages to practice the most rigorous of his penitences, according to his biographer. He walked very long distances each day, ate poor food and was oftentimes constrained to sleep in the open air, when hostels and inns refused to take him in, fearing he was an adventurer or finding him suspect in some way. The pilgrimage to Compostela was the only one he did not undertake alone, for he was accompanied by another priest. To ensure that he focused entirely on God, the two men walked separately and spoke to each other only when it was necessary.¹¹¹ The pilgrimage to St. Patrick’s Purgatory on Lough Derg was clearly penitential because of the severe level of asceticism that was required of the pilgrim, who was expected to fast for nine days and spend twenty-four hours shut up in the Purgatory as we will see in chapter 4. The early sixteenth-century poem Loch Dearg aon Róimh na hEireann [Lough Derg is Ireland’s premier shrine], by Tuileagna Mac Torna proposes that penance is the motive for the pilgrimage to Lough Derg, in itself the only remedy for a stony heart, a hard eye, and a deceitful mouth. McNally argues that it reveals “the Irish went to do penance in the manner established by the ascetical monks of the Irish church. Repetition of prayers combined with physical hardship was their idea of penance”; the Purgatory attracted a particular type of pilgrim, in search of atonement and sanctification with a preference for extreme ascetic practices.¹¹² In the early eighteenth century the prior at the Purgatory told visitors that “they do not pretend any miracles to be wrought … the place is called purgatory only because sins are there purged away by penance.”¹¹³ Fundamental to all pilgrimage is a belief in the spiritual value of temporary physical detachment from one’s familiar surroundings in order to seek the holy, which “is present in higher concentrations in certain places and is always somewhere else” and it is experienced at its most heightened, through hardship.¹¹⁴ The search for consciously enhanced interiority of devotion and the desire to refashion one’s moral and material life, seems to have been more prominent among clerics and educated pilgrims, than for the humble groups traveling the long roads of northwest Europe. This may simply be due to a bias in written evidence, for the artisan pilgrim rarely committed spiritual observations to paper. What is clear, however, is that the dévôts of seventeenth-century France    

Collet, Monsieur de Queriolet, 65 – 66, 81– 82. McNally, “Evolution of Pilgrimage Practice,” 20 – 21, 24. Hewson, St Patrick’s Purgatory, 136. Encyclopedia of Medieval Pilgrimage, 459.

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who articulated the reformation of their souls tended to travel to the high-profile Marian shrines and to Rome rather than the ancient shrines of the Atlantic world. For example, the shrine of Notre-Dame de Liesse, not far from Paris, received numerous elite visitors seeking interior guidance. Jean-Jacques Olier, founder of the Sulpicians, went several times: twice before his ordination, in 1632 to ask for grace to succeed with a particularly important sermon and in 1645, to ask for relief from a difficult affair in his parish.¹¹⁵ Rome, of course, received a constant stream of high level—as well as modest—pilgrims. A more tangible reason for journeying among all social groups was the acquisition of indulgences, formal remission from penance, and thus reduction or elimination of the time a soul spent in Purgatory after death. For some historians, the search for indulgences was an increasingly important motive for pilgrimage over time. Diana Webb argues that indulgences became the most important reason for holy travel in the later Middle Ages, even more so than visiting relics.¹¹⁶ After a decline in the prestige of indulgences across the middle of the sixteenth century following scathing Protestant attacks, pardons again became a highly visible feature of shrines. Pilgrims clearly valued accumulating indulgences along the route and at the shrine itself, even if by the mid-seventeenth century, plenary pardons were widely available at home, through confraternity membership or on pardon days at local churches. Jubilee indulgences, available at shrines in special years, offering plenary remission of sins, were particularly attractive. For example, Domenico Laffi keenly gathered indulgences along the route to Compostela, mentioning them at Milan cathedral, Toulouse cathedral, Santo Domingo de Calzada, Montes de Oca, and Santiago itself. It is clear that collective interests as well as personal reasons motivated pilgrims. Groups of men who traveled often took part in sacred journeys for the community, not just for themselves. Broadly, there were two main traveling groups, members of civic communities—parishes or towns—and of spiritual communities, most often in the form of confraternities. City and village communities sometimes took vows to travel, to supplicate for relief or in thanksgiving for liberation, from natural disasters, plague, and war. These might comprise delegations of the magistracy or sometimes, the whole community. The Marian shrines of Notre-Dame de Liesse near to Paris and Loreto were particularly noted for such pilgrimages. But the ancient shrines of the Atlantic edge also saw community visits. In 1529, the municipality of Girona sent two canons of the cathedral, Bernardo Isern and Antonio Bellver, to Compostela to intercede with the saint for

 Maës, Notre-Dame de Liesse, 90.  Webb, “Pardons and Pilgrimage,” 241.

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rain, after a drought. They were to celebrate masses and give a donation to the shrine and also to Our Lady at Montserrat, which they visited on the way.¹¹⁷ In 1561, a pilgrim from Perpignan gave 6 ducats to the shrine of Santiago, for oil for the lamp that the city maintained in the cathedral. This was probably a regular journey for one of its citizens.¹¹⁸ In the early seventeenth century, the church of San Estevan in La Val d’en Bas near to Girona in southern Spain, sent Maurice Danbre on pilgrimage to Santiago, to represent and to pray for the community, “to insure the people against contagion and to protect the crops”; Danbre was a foreigner, from Belgium, who had lived in Bas for three years as a servant and he was instructed to give a gold escudo in exchange for three masses said on the altar of Santiago.¹¹⁹ Community pilgrims regularly went to the Mont Saint-Michel. One example is a party of 300 men from Lisieux who visited in 1635. They were paying homage to the archangel on behalf of the whole town.¹²⁰ There are numerous other examples. Many pilgrims were members of devotional confraternities which supported and encouraged pilgrimage, and which will be discussed in detail in chapter 5. St. James confraternities were widespread in France. Many were simply devotional confraternities attached to parish churches and chapels but there were also plenty associated with the pilgrimage to Compostela; part of their function was to encourage holy travel as a spiritual good work. At Campan in the Bigorre for example, the register of a confraternity of St. James for the period 1645 – 1817 records 1000 names of pilgrims who left the valley and who enrolled in the guild on their return, an average of six per year for a population of ca. 3000 in the eighteenth century.¹²¹ At Chalon-sur-Saône, in the confraternity of St. James in 1701, there were twenty-one members who had completed the pilgrimage and eighteen who had not yet been; in 1717, forty-five had traveled and twentyseven were still to do so, and in 1737, eighteen pilgrims were admitted on their return from Compostela.¹²² Pilgrimage could also be a family practice. In Campan, the confreres included four men of the Bailac family, of whom two were brothers, enrolled in 1696; two brothers Galiay who also enrolled in 1696; three Sastorne members who enrolled in 1701 and in 1740, two brothers and a cousin Soucaze.¹²³ Spiritual companionship of men from the same community,

      

Parga et al., 1:107. Ferreiro, 8:437. Ferreiro, 9:335. Le Roy, 454. Provost, “Identité paysanne,” 385. Chelini and Branthomme, Chemins de Dieu, 279. Provost, “Identité paysanne,” 386.

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or forged on a journey and perpetuated afterwards, was an important motive for travel. We see collective interest manifested particularly in the use of pilgrimage to combat the Protestant heresy in the later sixteenth century. The act of pilgrimage itself was an overt statement of Catholic orthodoxy in the face of Luther’s and especially Calvin’s criticisms of the veneration of saints and the sacrality of place. Every shrine, by its very nature, defended the Roman identity and pilgrimage was a strong sign of attachment to the Catholic Church. In France in the 1580s, a wave of “white processions,” ceremonies of expiation whose participants were dressed in the white woolen fabric of shrouds, traveled to the ancient shrines of northeast France and the Rhineland: St. Nicolas du Port in Lorraine, Rheims, Notre-Dame de Liesse, St. Fiacre in Brie, St. Antoine de Viennois in Dauphiné.¹²⁴ There was also a great resurgence of shrines on the borders of France, proximal to Protestant territories, or in Protestant regions within the kingdom such as Puy-en-Vélay, Sarrance in Navarre, and Ardilliers in Saumur. Marian shrines were especially involved in asserting Catholic identity against Protestants. Marian images refused to burn when Protestants threw them on fires, such as Notre-Dame-de-Garaison in the Pyrenees; statues were miraculously saved and reappeared under their own volition such as Our Lady at Rocamadour, and the Virgin appeared to intervene on the side of Catholic armies such as at the White Mountain in 1619. In the United Provinces, prohibition of any public expression of Catholicism led Catholics to cross the border to visit shrines, principally Our Lady at Sherpenhervel in Brabant and at Kevelaer in Ruremond in the Upper Rhine; they went in orderly processions led by clergy, often in groups of parishes or confraternities.¹²⁵ Mary was a weapon in the Catholic reconquest of Europe and of the reaffirmation of the faith in Catholic lands.¹²⁶ The ancient cult centers of the northwest were also important in manifestations against heresy. They were either close to Protestant communities or had a history of anti-heresy actions. In the last quarter of the sixteenth century in the context of the Catholic League and Hapsburg wars, and natural disasters sweeping France and the Low Countries, numerous pilgrims traveled to Compostela as a statement of Catholic fervor. Claude Haton records for 1577– 1578 that “a great multitude of people” left that year for Santiago, “men and women, not only from the kingdom of France and from lands subject to its king, but other kingdoms and foreign countries … Flanders, Holland, Ireland, Freesia, Brabant, Liège, Hai-

 Julia, Voyage aux saints, 166.  Julia, Voyage aux saints, 33.  Maës, “Topographies mariales,” 26.

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nault, Artois, Germany, Switzerland and Burgundy … And there did not pass a single week during these two years which did not witness people going and coming on this pilgrimage. From the town of Sens, last year, more than twenty people, and from the town of Provins, this year, as many, in two groups.”¹²⁷ Further, individual Protestants who converted to Catholicism sometimes made vows of pilgrimage, to local shrines, to Rome but also to Santiago de Compostela. In 1597, a Genevan man went to Puy-en-Vélay to abjure Protestantism; he confessed and vowed to go on pilgrimage to Compostela.¹²⁸ The registers of the cathedral chapter at Santiago have numerous records of alms given to converts: in 1603, two ducats to Jean Antoine du Moulin, Frenchman and convert from Protestantism; in 1624, Mateo Oscopia, knight and convert; in 1685, Jacob Lotus, a recent convert from Holland, for example.¹²⁹ Less frequent, in 1606, a woman who had converted from Judaism was given alms by the chapter of Saint-André in Bordeaux, for her pilgrimage to St. James.¹³⁰ Also, in the Hapsburg world, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, St. James was a bulwark against Islam. By tradition, since the victory of Christians against Muslims at the battle of Clavijo in the ninth century through his direct intercession, Santiago “Matamor” was a protector against the Moor and the Turk. Ferdinand and Isabella granted a voto tax on churches in Granada after 1492, to be paid to Santiago Cathedral in thanksgiving for the apostle’s aid in the liberation of southern Spain from Islamic domination.¹³¹ St. James retained an important anti-Islamic function across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Captives in the wars of the Mediterranean and eastern Europe made vows to the saint and traveled to Compostela after their liberation, as we can see in several examples in this study. Alms were given to converts from Judaism and Islam at Compostela: in 1630, Pablo de Juan, converted Muslim; in 1670, José de Santo Domingo, converted Jew; in 1672, Leopold Pascual, converted Muslim who was teaching for the Jesuits; and in 1704, Salomon, son of David, for example.¹³² Conversely, visitors suspected of heresy at these shrines were not well received. In Compostela in 1559, four South German pilgrims left the city without having been to confession, which was highly suspect. They were arrested by the Inqui-

     

Haton, Mémoires (1553 – 1582), 4:71– 74. Maës, “Notre-Dame du Puy,” 142. Extracts from registers in Ferreiro, 9:Appendix 33, 156 – 67. A.D. Gironde G 3303. Chapitre de Saint-André. Comptabilité. Rowe, Saint and Nation, 32. Extracts from registers in Ferreiro, 9:Appendix 33, 156 – 67.

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sition and interrogated for six weeks, only released after paying considerable costs.¹³³ Refugees from religious persecution were also visible at major shrines. Many of course, went to Rome. But Compostela received its share of refugees, especially from the British Isles.¹³⁴ Irish priests were regular visitors; there was a college in the city and alms would sometimes be given to poor lay and clergy pilgrims from the island. English refugees appeared as well.¹³⁵ In 1612, thirty reales were given to an English priest and in 1692, in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, Richard Connor, a Catholic nobleman, declared he had gone into exile because of persecution, desiring to save his life and to live with Christians. Further, the cathedral chapter gave alms to priests traveling to the British Isles for the work of conversion, particularly in the 1620s and 1640s. Such priests came to Santiago for spiritual succor as well as to take ship in a nearby port. In 1618, the cathedral chapter gave 100 reales to Father Cornelius de Griscol, Franciscan, en route to Ireland, and in 1619, alms were given to two Irish Franciscans traveling there. In 1624, 300 reales and a mass vessel were given to the Jesuit Richard de Valois who was going to preach in Ireland and England, and in 1631, 200 reales were granted to Taigh Sullivan rector of the local Irish College, who was going to preach in the island. In 1641, a Franciscan and in 1647, two priests, were assisted on their passage. Traveling the other way, in 1677, Italian Fathers Amadeo Zanelli and Guiseppe de Romanone, of the order of St. Paul, were returning from England where they had acted as chaplains to the family of the Venetian ambassador. Refugees and visitors came from even further afield: in 1685, Thomas de Bonaud, an Armenian bishop, seems to have taken up residence in Compostela, having been deprived of his church by the “infidel,” taken captive and escaped, and wishing to give thanks for his rescue. Some of the regionally important ancient shrines also had important roles to play in constructing Catholic identity in the context of the wars of religion of the later sixteenth century, a result of their cities’ experiences of tribulation. At the shrine of St. Martin of Tours, dismantled and destroyed by Protestants in 1562, the destruction of the relics and treasures came to be constructed as a providential event by later clergy. In the period 1577– 1582, inscriptions defying the Protestant iconoclasm were erected next to the reconstructed shrine inside the church and at the site of the burning of the relics, outside. The clergy took  Parga et al., 1:115.  The following examples come from the chapter registers reproduced in Ferreiro, 9:Appendix 33, 156 – 67.  English Catholic pilgrims—and not only refugees—are discussed in chapter 4 of Corens, Confessional Mobility.

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from the events, and propagated in their writings, a divine message. These acts were ordained by God, who, through the actions of the heretics, sought to crown the saint with the laurel of martyrdom. The survival of a tiny piece of the relics was similarly interpreted as a sign from God of his favor to the saint and the shrine.¹³⁶ This clearly confessional message was relayed to the shrine’s visitors. At Poitiers, an important medieval cult center and another staging point for Compostela, the religious wars also saw tremendous damage to its sacred patrimony. On May 27, 1562, a Protestant force from Gascony smashed up the city’s churches in an intense act of iconoclasm. The shrines of St. Radegonde, wife and queen of King Clotaire and founder of the abbey of the Holy Cross, and of St. Hilaire, the first bishop of Poitiers, were particularly targeted. In the seventeenth century, both shrines were restored. The reconstruction of the cult of St. Hilaire was more the problematic of the two for his relics had been completely destroyed. As city patron, feasts dedicated to him were celebrated three times a year, but a shrine was not possible without relics. In 1602, the bishop of Poitiers obtained a fragment of skull from the abbey of Saint-Denis and in 1657, the bishop of Puy-en-Vélay offered to restore to Poitiers some relics of the saint miraculously discovered in the church of St. George in Puy. But the shrine of St. Hilaire did not flourish.¹³⁷ Conversely, the cult site of St. Radegonde did take off again in the same period. Her shrine had only been partly damaged and some of her relics were saved, so in 1566, they were partially restored. In the 1640s, there was a concerted effort to revive the cult. The bishop of Poitiers founded a confraternity in 1642 to look after the shrine, and in 1643 a hagiographical pamphlet was commissioned to attract visitors. The saint attracted influential adherents, such as the Queen Mother Anne of Austria, who joined the confraternity in 1649 along with her two sons and in 1650, visited the shrine itself. The Queen Mother financed the rebuilding of the crypt and altar, gave ornaments, and a gift of 1800 livres to the church.¹³⁸ While the pilgrimage never became enormously popular, in Poitiers itself, the politics of pilgrimage was part of wider ChurchCrown activities against Protestantism in the region, which retained a sizeable Huguenot population. In 1616, the Poitou region was made a “mission field” by the Papacy, directly organized from 1623 by the Propaganda fide. Missionary activity, new religious houses, the foundation of the influential Company of the Holy Sacrament in the city, all worked towards the reconquest of the territory from heresy.¹³⁹ The ancient saints played their part.    

Nelson, Legacy of Iconoclasm, 95. Coutelle, “Culte de ‘Monsieur Saint Hilaire,’” 81. Vigier, “Politique du pèlerinage?” 33. Vigier, “Politique du pèlerinage?” 41.

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The “war” on heresy was fundamental to the revival of pilgrimage to the Mont Saint-Michel. A factor of major significance for the shrine was the Counter-Reformation Church’s deployment of the cult of St. Michael in the struggle against Protestantism: the iconography of the archangel’s combat against the anti-Christ was used as an allegory of the struggle against heresy. From the late sixteenth century, the Mont abbey capitalized on this association. Pilgrimage to the site was promoted as a personal and collective act in the Church’s struggle and the kingdom’s fight against Calvinism.¹⁴⁰ The Mont, which included a small fortress as well as an abbey, was on the front line of the later wars of religion in France. It resisted successfully a number of Huguenot attacks. In 1577, twenty-five Protestant soldiers disguised as pilgrims attempted unsuccessfully to seize the Mont but were repulsed by a Catholic detachment.¹⁴¹ The incident was widely reported, including in the journal kept by Claude Haton of Provins.¹⁴² The town and monastery of the Mont joined the first Catholic League in 1576 and again after 1588. In 1590, the Sieur de Vicques, military governor of the Mont, was killed while assisting the duke of Mercoeur, the League governor of Brittany, in the siege of Protestant-held Pontorson. De Vicques was taken back to the Mont and buried with full honors in the abbey church.¹⁴³ In 1591, another surprise attack on the Mont was launched on September 29, St. Michael’s main feast day, but it was again defeated, as was a further attack of 1598.¹⁴⁴ Jacques-Auguste de Thou visited in 1580 and later, reflecting on the physical insecurity of the Mont, noted in his memoirs that “one must be surprised that … the religion of our ancestors made such a marvelous place, and that it surmounted so many difficulties and obstacles.”¹⁴⁵ The monks attributed the safety of the Mont to the intercession of the archangel and promoted the abbey as a lieu de mémoire of success against heresy. In 1604, the pamphlet for pilgrims written by Feuardent was aggressively anti-Protestant; he wrote that “unbelievers and atheists, enemies of miracles and disavowers of the infinite power of God” mocked the marvels of the Mont and he used stories of miracles related to the shrine to refute their claims.¹⁴⁶ The Mont became a special site for intercession and thanksgiving. In 1602, 800 people from the town of Vire near Saint-Lô, traveled there to give thanks for the tri-

      

Julia, “Pèlerinage au Mont Saint-Michel,” 299. Huynes, 2:128 – 30. Haton, Mémoires de Claude Haton, 2:895 – 96; Le Roy, 372. Huynes, 2:131. Huynes, 2:134, 149. Thou, Mémoires, 590. Feuardent, Histoire de la fondation, introduction.

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umph of Catholicism over Protestantism.¹⁴⁷ In the 1620s and 1630s, bishop François de Péricard of Avranches held special prayers and services in the abbey church for the intercession of St. Michael in royal engagements against heretics. In 1628, during the siege of La Rochelle, Bishop de Péricard deposited a solemn vow painted in gold letters on a tablet, on the altar of the abbey church. After the fall of La Rochelle, the bishop returned to the Mont on the first Sunday of Advent and celebrated a thanksgiving Mass.¹⁴⁸ In Normandy, there remained sizeable Protestant communities living alongside Catholics, right down to the edict of Fontainebleau outlawing their churches in 1685.¹⁴⁹ They were physically present, visible, and undesirable. To visit the Mont, therefore, was to make a statement of Catholic orthodoxy and to reject Protestantism. Pilgrimage to St. Patrick’s Purgatory in Lough Derg was an even greater attestation of fidelity to Catholic orthodoxy by pilgrims whose religious lives were under direct attack from the English Protestant regime. Irish clergy in exile in Europe created an image of St. Patrick as a bulwark of Catholic orthodoxy. Bernardette Cunningham and Raymond Gillespie show how clergy in continental seminaries and convents “were inspired to revamp Ireland’s saints illustrating how they matched or even exceeded the standards now set for sainthood in Europe.”¹⁵⁰ Patrick as patriarch rather than miracle-working prophet was emphasized by Counter-Reformation writers, who wanted to give a clear message, that Patrick was a saint whose life conformed to the tradition of holy men established by scripture and the unbroken tradition of the Church, which was the Catholic Church. In one of the most influential of the histories of Ireland and its saints, Thomas Messingham’s 1624 publication Florilegum Insulae Sanctorum, the author’s stated purpose was that the lives of these holy people would serve as examples to Catholics and persuade the heretics to return to the true faith.¹⁵¹ A further concern of Irish Catholic writers was that of the continuity of the church in Ireland from the time of Patrick: they aimed to establish that the faith of the Irish had never waned since his mission, so that Catholics would have a strong historical basis for their arguments against Protestantism. Richard Stanihurst’s 1587 text traced the unbroken tradition of Catholicism in Ireland from the time of Patrick, while David Rothe, Catholic bishop of Ossory, and James Ussher, Church of Ireland archbishop of Armagh, had a lengthy corre-

 Julia, “Pèlerinage au Mont Saint-Michel,” 302.  Le Roy, 423.  See Daireaux, Réduire les Huguenots.  Cunningham and Gillespie, “Most Adaptable of Saints,” 87– 88.  Messingham, Florilegium Insulæ Sanctorum; Cunningham and Gillespie, “Most Adaptable of Saints,” 90.

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spondence about Patrick’s credentials.¹⁵² Robert Rocheford made one of the most sustained arguments in support of the idea that St. Patrick was a Catholic in a 1625 preface to the abbreviated translation of Jocelin’s life of the saint. He emphasized key Counter-Reformation ideas, the mass and penance, relics, faith and good works, and used the Patrician stories of miracles and pilgrimage to make the point that the Protestant Church could not possibly be the church of Patrick. He stated that the life of Patrick could not be used to support Protestantism “under the specious vizard of venerable antiquity” because the life of the saint had reference to holy water, holy oils, signs of the cross, ecclesiastical tonsures, and other such things which “sound very harshly in Protestant ears.”¹⁵³ Patrick’s loyalty to the papacy was also stressed in these texts. The impact of such continent-based writings on Catholics in Ireland is difficult to establish, but Irish historians see at least hints of influences. Cunningham and Gillespie argue that by the 1580s, new perspectives on the saint had emerged in religious poetry in the bardic tradition. For example, the Franciscan priest, Eoghan O’Dubhthaigh, provincial of the Friars Minor in Ireland, who composed poetry on the challenges of the Reformation, was already clear about the polarization between Patrick, Columcille, Christ, and Mary on the one hand and Luther and Calvin on the other. Within Ireland itself there were Catholics who responded to Reformation ideas by appealing to Patrick as the antithesis of Protestantism; the idea of the continuity of the Catholic faith from the time of Patrick was commonplace by the mid-seventeenth century, it was a feature of Geoffrey Keating’s popular history of Ireland of ca. 1632, and in evidence in contemporary poetry.¹⁵⁴ At the site of the shrine of St. Patrick’s Purgatory itself, the pilgrimage continued into the later sixteenth century by ordinary Catholics who were interested mostly in sacred landscapes and wonders, but who also had an antipathy to Protestantism. In 1618 the Franciscan press at Louvain published Aodh Mac Aingil’s Scdthdn Shacramuinte na hAithridhe [The Mirror of Confession] with a description of the site at Lough Derg and a lament for the difficulty of the pilgrimage. Mac Aingil describes in his text having visited the Purgatory himself, regretting that it was difficult for fellow Catholics to do so: The cause of my great sorrow is the curse which has befallen us by which God allows these schools of satisfaction, these retreats of penance, be banned to us, something which will

 Stanihurst, De vita S Patricii; Ussher, Discourse of the Religion.  Rocheford, Life of the Glorious S Patricke; discussed in Cunningham and Gillespie, “Most Adaptable of Saints,” 92.  Cunningham and Gillespie, “Most Adaptable of Saints,” 98; Keating, History of Ireland.

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result in thousands of us burning in the fire-lakes of hell and purgatory … Glorious God, many’s the Irish soul today is locked to the devil because of the lock that is on that holy ground, many’s the heart that is hardened in sin for want of the waters waves of which abound in that beautiful, heavenly place. God, many’s that’s eternally burning in hell and purgatory for want of this holy water prohibited from us by the henchmen of heresy.¹⁵⁵

The Anglo–Irish wars of the later sixteenth century, particularly severe in Ulster, saw the dissolution and destruction of the Augustinian priory that had guardianship of the shrine but despite this, by the 1620s the holy site was restored, and pilgrimage continued. In 1625, Archbishop Fleming of Dublin wrote to the papal internuncio at Brussels that “the pious and innumerable pilgrimages of the faithful this year are a pledge of great fervour; for, like bees to the beehive, there daily flock such numbers from every corner of the kingdom, for penitential purposes, to a certain island, which is called the Purgatory of St. Patrick, and which is situated at the centre of a lake, that many have been obliged to return without satisfying their pious desire, there being no room for landing on the island.”¹⁵⁶ Archbishop O’Reilly of Armagh commented in 1631 that “the storm of persecution had made this Purgatory inaccessible for many years back to the great grief of the Irish. But now by God’s permission and things being changed a little for the better, it is distinguished by innumerable crowds of pilgrims” in a letter to Rome.¹⁵⁷ The renewed destruction of the site in 1632, Cromwell’s invasion of 1649 – 1653, and even the outlawing of all pilgrimages in Ireland under Queen Anne in 1704, did not prevent the practice nor the return of the Franciscans to minister to pilgrims. Cardinal Rinuccini, who sponsored an invasion of O’Neill into Connaught in 1648, had a particular desire to send troops to relieve the shrine.¹⁵⁸ He wished to “free from the hands of the heretics the so much celebrated Purgatory of St. Patrick” and wrote that “this equaled any of the most glorious of Apostolic missions and that I should have in some measure fulfilled my career, if this place covered as much by the insults as by the earth thrown on it by the Puritans, it had been granted to me again to plant there the cross,” but it was not to be.¹⁵⁹ Yet Catholics continued to come. In 1737, the Protestant John Richardson

 Ó Dúshláine, “Irish Spiritual Reformation,” 39.  Archbishop Fleming’s Report 1625, in Leslie ed., 95.  Letter from Hugh O’Reilly, Archbishop of Armagh, to the Cardinal in charge of Irish interests at Rome, 1631, in Leslie ed., 75.  Ó hAnnracháin, Catholic Reformation in Ireland, 182– 83.  Archbishop Rinucinni’s Plan 1648, in Leslie ed., 82. Rinuccini’s nunciature in Ireland was published from Rinuccini’s papers in the Biblioteca Rinucciniana by its librarian, Alazzi, Nunciatura in Irlanda.

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visited the Purgatory and commented on the tenacity of the Irish: “when any superstitious place is defaced or demolished, they repair it, and seem to be more inclined to resort to it than formerly. They account it meritorious to adhere obstinately to a practice prohibited by hereticks, and if any punishment be inflicted upon them for it, they believe they suffer for righteousness sake.”¹⁶⁰ While these are outside observations of the site by writers with partisan interests, it is clear that the numbers visiting the Purgatory from across Ireland continued in defiance of the law, in defiant support of their Catholic faith, across the seventeenth century.¹⁶¹ Long-distance pilgrimage as rite of passage seems also to have been important in numerous communities in France as an assertion of masculinity by young men. Men could leave home and travel more easily than women in early modern Europe; but just as importantly, cultural constructions important to manhood were tested and demonstrated in “heroic” journeys. Christopher Fletcher argues that in the later Middle Ages, the characteristics of “manhood” were understood to be strength, vigor, steadfastness, and a concern with status and honor, including largesse and conspicuous expenditure.¹⁶² The idea that male bodies can prove their manliness through showing that they can endure pain and the implicit contrast between “hard” male bodies over which men have mastery and the “soft” bodies of women, is an idea that seems to be reconfigured in different historical periods.¹⁶³ An arduous journey, alone or with companions, reinforced the status of men, through the achievement of a valiant religious act. An important cause of the success of the Mont Saint-Michel pilgrimage, and a reason for its longevity, was its association with masculine religious culture, in particular of male youth groups. The military character of the cult of St. Michael may have been one reason. Strength and fighting, a “military” role, was considered manly, a result of the social importance of the nobility as “those who fight” but also “because of the well-established nature in medieval language and culture of the association between men and a form of quasi-military honor.”¹⁶⁴ In the sphere of religious culture, such values could be focused on spiritual combat in which sin was the ultimate enemy. The concept of the godly warrior was a Christian trope from its earliest days, for St. Paul urged Timothy to suffer persecution like a “soldier of Christ.”¹⁶⁵ As Kristin Routt comments, “the model of the

     

Richardson, Great Folly, x. Richardson, Great Folly, 5. Fletcher, “Whig Interpretation of Masculinity?” 62. Jordan, “‘To Make a Man without Reason,’” 257. Fletcher, “Whig Interpretation of Masculinity?” 63. 2 Timothy 2:3 – 4.

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soldier of Christ that comes down from later Antiquity does not necessarily vanquish new souls or land for the Church. Rather, he patiently endures the suffering brought about by persecution and inner temptations to sin” and she argues that Erasmus and Ignatius Loyola saw mortal life as a kind of permanent warfare in which defense against the assaults of Satan is crucial.¹⁶⁶ As Fletcher observes, “it is not just that fighting sin might be characterized as manly, but that this spiritual battle leads to the accumulation of renown or ‘manhood’ of a kind which is analogous with the worldly honor of the battlefield, even as it claims to supersede it.”¹⁶⁷ The pilgrimage to the Mont took on a military aspect, a demonstration of masculinity in its symbolic warrior form. Contemporary descriptions show us this style. Thomas Le Roy’s description of the arrival of a group of pilgrims at the Mont in October 1634 is typical of many: “there journeyed out of devotion, to this Mont from the town of Lisieux … a company formed of 300 men, marching quickly, well fitted out, their swords by their sides, carrying white rods in the form of crooks. They arrived at the town gate, the tambour drumming and the ensign flying.”¹⁶⁸ An ex-voto in the church of Camembert (Calvados) commemorating a pilgrimage to the Mont in 1772 illustrates the military style of pilgrims. A road is shown along which are marching sixteen pilgrims, two-by-two, holding lances and accompanied by a tambour keeping time and an ensign carrying a banner.¹⁶⁹ A rare event of 1646 reinforces this image. On May 19, a company of thirty-five women from Beauge in Anjou arrived at the Mont. They were led by a woman carrying a staff in one hand and a rosary in the other, all marching two by two, keeping time to the rhythm of a drum played by a young boy.¹⁷⁰ For many men, bonding with others in an all-male social group, traveling long distance, showing a military style, all carried out under the auspices of the archangel, provided a special male religious experience. In particular, there was widespread adoption of the pilgrimage by youth communities, as a customary practice for adolescents on the cusp of manhood. There was already a medieval tradition of children traveling to the Mont in penitential pilgrimages, which seems to have continued in a small way in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Records of the hospital Saint-Jacques of Argentan for the 1570s refer to michelots, petits michelots, and even “small children going on pilgrimage to the Mont Saint-Michel,” a resurgence of penitential child     

Routt, “Exercises in Masculinity,” 182. Fletcher, “Whig Interpretation of Masculinity?” 66. Le Roy, 454. Julia, “Pèlerinage au Mont Saint-Michel,” 293. Le Roy, 554.

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pilgrimage occurring in the context of the wars of religion.¹⁷¹ Between 1603 and 1625, the accounts of the town council of Épinal in Lorraine include alms given to “children” who were leaving to undertake the pilgrimage to the “great Saint-Michel”; there were twenty-four in 1618 and thirty in 1623.¹⁷² As late as 1680, Richelet in his Nouveau dictionnaire français defined “miquelot” as a “small boy who goes on pilgrimage to the Mont Saint-Michel in the sea, begging.”¹⁷³ Dominique Julia observes a liturgical link between the archangel and childhood, for all three feasts of St. Michael, the Gospel read at the Mass of the day was Matthew 18:1– 10 (Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven).¹⁷⁴ More important in the early modern period were groups of adolescents and young men. Georges Provost has seen these long-distance journeys as rites of passage, religious and social, often undertaken by adolescents from rural communities.¹⁷⁵ Anthropologists have long shown the importance of rites of passage for the transition of childhood to manhood, for “the status of an adult male is something which needs to be won, and is not just something which is conferred by reaching a certain age. Masculinity is thus a matter of … ‘becoming’ male (or at least becoming a man).”¹⁷⁶ The chronicle of Le Roy records numerous groups: examples from May 8 and 9, 1647 alone include a party of fifty young men, their curé and vicar from the parish of Rémalard in the Perche; a group of forty young men from Courtemont in the diocese of Le Mans; and a company of fifty-five young men and the curé of the parish of Parcé in Le Mans diocese.¹⁷⁷ Many more examples could be given. The journal kept by Isaac Leguay of Caen in the early eighteenth century again shows the youthful composition of the pilgrimage. In 1715, he records three groups of young men leaving for the Mont: on August 5, around twelve “boys,” “young people” of the parish of Saint-Jean of Caen; on September 9, around twenty “men as well as boys” of Vaucelles, and on September 16 another “troup of young people, men as well as boys” left from the city.¹⁷⁸ The author Nicolas-Edme Rétif de la Bretonne remembered from his own childhood in the Burgundian village of Sacy that eight days before the feast of St. Michael in September of ca. 1745, Jacques Guerreau, the family’s

       

Julia, “Pèlerinage au Mont Saint-Michel,” 291. Julia, “Pèlerinage au Mont Saint-Michel,” 293. C.-P. Richelet, Nouveau dictionnaire français. Julia, “Pèlerinage au Mont Saint-Michel,” 271. Provost, “Identité paysanne,” 399. Fletcher, “Whig Interpretation of Masculinity?” 60. Le Roy, 579 – 80. Leguay, Journal d’un bourgeois de Caen, 213, 216.

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herd drover, left secretly for the Mont Saint-Michel; Rétif noted that this pilgrimage was for young men of fifteen to sixteen years old and that a lad who had not been to the Mont was regarded as a coward.¹⁷⁹ At the end of the eighteenth century, Abbé Legros, former vicar of Saint-Martial of Limoges, noted that before the Revolution, every year in mid-August, between twenty and thirty young men of Solignac went to the Mont. Most of the pilgrims were twelve to eighteen years old and they had to be born in the parish to join the party.¹⁸⁰ Long-distance pilgrimage to the Mont Saint-Michel as part of masculine religious culture was vital in maintaining the tradition of sacred journeys in northern and central French communities. The evidence is less rich, but the pilgrimages to Compostela and Lough Derg were similarly masculine as well as simply male, in construction. For some individuals, there were also material reasons for pilgrimage: it interlinked with or offered a means of livelihood for its participants. There was a relationship between labor migration and pilgrimage into Spain in certain regions of central and southwestern France. Jean Gauthier, weaver from SaintMéen in Brittany, was arrested as a vagrant in Lyons in 1737. He was returning from Compostela. He had left Saint-Méen three years before in search of employment; he had worked at Lamballe, Morlaix, Guérande, in the Poitou and then, not having found work, he decided to go on pilgrimage.¹⁸¹ In other regions, Provost argues for a link between pilgrimage and pedlars and that some villages and regions might be described as “mobile societies.”¹⁸² In 1769, visiting the parish of Chives, the bishop of Poitiers noted that there were around thirty-two families of fathers and sons who were pedlars of religious merchandise. They went to Compostela in the summer and hawked their wares around the Poitou in the winter.¹⁸³ In 1788, Denis Vesraquin, aged fifty-five and native of Tuboeuf in Le Mans diocese, again arrested in Caen, was a pedlar of relics and rosaries in the countryside, and had been to Compostela, the Paraclete at Ferreux-Quincey in northeastern France, Loreto, and the Mont Saint-Michel.¹⁸⁴ More work needs to be done on what might be called the religious economy of rural societies, where devotion, alms-seeking, and petty merchandising provided people with a culturally, as well as economically constructed subsistence. Some pilgrims were paid to do so by others, carrying out the achievement of vows by proxy. In the Middle Ages this practice was frequent, for local and long-

     

Rétif de la Bretonne, Monsieur Nicolas, 69. Julia, “Pèlerinage au Mont Saint-Michel,” 319. Julia, “Aveux de pèlerins,” 446. Provost, “Identité paysanne,” 389. Julia, “Pour une géographie européenne,” 109. A.D. du Calvados 9 B 63. Maréchaussée.

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distance shrines, and instructions were often left in wills for the fulfilment of vows that had gone unacquitted. It persisted on a smaller scale across the early modern centuries, a practice particularly of popular groups in the countryside but one that has left few documents. For example, in 1584, Claude Chesneau, a baker of the parish of Saint-Valérien of Châteaudun, contracted by notary with a widow, Anne Dupré, to undertake the pilgrimage to Compostela on her behalf, for 15 écus soleil. ¹⁸⁵ It is in the eighteenth century that it becomes more visible, not because of a resurgence in the practice but because the records of the maréchaussée show that such pilgrims were being picked up as vagrants by the police. In 1748, Jacques Agnès, a native of the parish of Champeaux-prèsMortagne in the Perche (Normandy) was arrested in Caen and deposed that for eight or nine years he had traveled on pilgrimages either for himself or others, on commission, to Compostela, Loreto, Saint-Claude in Burgundy, La Baume in Provence, and the Mont Saint-Michel.¹⁸⁶ One of the journeys to Compostela was made for Charles Mare, laboureur of Champeaux, who “had a great devotion for this pilgrimage but was unable to undertake it for himself,” for which he was paid twenty écus, ten on departure and ten on returning to the parish, with proof of his success.¹⁸⁷ Finally, there was curiosity and a desire for adventure by young men who mostly grew up in a single locality. Pilgrim travel offered an institutional framing, moral legitimation, and respectable justification for a temporary escape from the mundane. That this was a common motive is hinted at by the devotional writers who counseled the faithful against such vanities. Christian Zacher argues that curiositas was to be avoided, for it “referred to any morally excessive and suspect interest in observing the world, seeking novel experiences or acquiring knowledge for its own sake … vice related to pride and sloth.”¹⁸⁸ Richeome advised the Pilgrim of Loreto to beware of curiosity with regard to vain and useless things.¹⁸⁹ Quatremaires, in his 1668 booklet on the Mont Saint-Michel, commented that “pilgrims must not have the satisfying of human curiosity as a motive for such a holy journey,” although he did concede that once their devotions were accomplished, visitors should take time to appreciate the wonders of the Mont.¹⁹⁰ Pilgrims’ own accounts of their motives frequently include curiosity, however. Guillaume Manier from Picardy, who journeyed to Compostela in

     

Julia, “Pour une géographie européenne,” 113. A.D. du Calvados 9 B 54. Maréchaussée. Julia, “Aveux de pèlerins,” 452. Zacher, Curiosity and Pilgrimage, 4. Richeome, Pèlerin de Lorète, 18. Quatremaires, Histoire abrégée du Mont Saint-Michel, 55.

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1726, did so for two principal reasons: the arrival in his village of four young pilgrims from the Franche-Comté put the idea into his head, but the real reason was to get away from home for a longish period of time. Manier owed money to the captain of the local militia company and hoped that a journey to Compostela would put some space between him and his creditor.¹⁹¹ Jean Bonnecaze, son of a peasant family, wanted to go to study in Spain and as a subterfuge and as a means of traveling there, he decided to go on pilgrimage to Compostela.¹⁹² In a picaresque account of his travels from Salamanca to Santiago published in 1736, Don Diego de Torres y Villarroel relates how he, his friend Don Agustín de Herrera, four servants, and their baggage train of four horses and a mule, journeyed to the shrine via Portugal. They stopped in many towns and villages, both for rest and also “so his companions and servants had the pleasure of discovering at leisure this kingdom which I knew passably well.”¹⁹³ They also stopped in convents and manor houses, where they were entertained with music, dancing, and games. The Mont Saint-Michel attracted pilgrims because of its stunning natural setting—which in turn, made the last phase of the pilgrimage hazardous. This was the Mont au péril de la mer, where the tidal reach was the greatest in Europe and pilgrims who were caught unawares could die. William Wraxall wrote that “numbers of people are drowned every year in passing this place. The sea comes in with a fury and rapidity beyond idea, and frequently arrests unhappy travelers who presume to venture without a guide. I saw, in the churchyard of Genet, a grave where five persons were interred, who perished within these few days, and similar accidents are common.”¹⁹⁴ Accessing Lough Derg was even more difficult. As Richardson described it, the site was “surrounded with wild and barren mountains … It is almost inaccessible by horsemen, even in summer, because of great bogs, rocks and precipices with which it is environed on all sides” and to visit it was, in any case, unlawful.¹⁹⁵ Such sights and risks were not available at home. Pilgrims were attracted to these places by their spiritual services but also because the ardor and dangers of the journey added to its value, making this an epic journey, with social and cultural value as well. Increasingly in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, elite men traveled to see sights and gain experiences, to broaden their educations, of the Christian, classical, and natural worlds. Men and youths from the popular classes also traveled, although with     

Manier, 1– 2. Bonnecaze, 173. Torres y Villarroel, “Vida, 1736,” 51. Wraxall, Tour, 37. Richardson, Great Folly, 1.

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a slightly different framing reference, that of the saints, sacraments, and the Bible. They were just as eager to expand their horizons through travel, for which pilgrimage gave them sanction.

Conclusions In the two centuries that followed Luther’s condemnation of pilgrimages, the routeways of northwest Europe continued to be traversed by holy travelers. While long-distance pilgrims were only ever a minority of shrine visitors, until the mid-eighteenth century, long-distance pilgrimage was a highly visible phenomenon, particularly in the better months of the year. Towns and villages on the popular routeways were accustomed to a steady, regular ebb and flow of the faithful to and from shrines. The reception of over 2000 pilgrims a year even in a city the size of Bordeaux, was an observable movement of people and in a small town like Montfort in Brittany, with perhaps a total population of 2000 people, an estimated weekly thoroughfare of fifty pilgrims en route to Saint-Méen in the mid-seventeenth century could be overwhelming.¹⁹⁶ At Saint-Anne d’Auray, the Breton pilgrimage shrine that emerged near to Vannes in the 1620s, the model pilgrim that emerges from the writings of the Carmelite guardians was a lone man, or at least in “honest company,” who traveled there outside of the pardon celebrations and therefore away from the crowds, on a spiritual journey.¹⁹⁷ In reality, the long-distance pilgrim was certainly a man, usually young and from the middling and lower strata of society, a craftsman, merchant, or agriculturalist. There were also clergy, a minority but a more privileged and visible group of sacred traveler. Women went on long-distance pilgrimage, but their numbers were small, fewer than 10 percent and usually with a husband or male relative. The pilgrim was rarely alone, he was normally in a small or medium-sized group, depending on the distance traveled. The demography of pilgrimage is important in any consideration of motive. The guidance for the purposes of holy travel was largely written by clergy, with a particular view of the motives of the journey. Propelled by formal piety, with their written works constructed in response to the public religiosity of the Tridentine Church, they stressed penitential devotion, interior prayer, and meditation on the holy example of the saints, as well as the sacrament of Christ. These were important propellants, but they were clerical views. The majority of pilgrims

 Sibold, “Vie religieuse,” 247.  Provost, “Dévotion de groupe,” 479.

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were lay, young men who had rarely read any of this literature, and who had different reasons to journey. There were varying causes of travel to the far-away shrines. Voyages across a region or two, for which a couple of weeks sufficed, were often related to cures. For the further journeys, this was less important. Rather, it was to honor a contract with the saint, usually for graces received or sought. Traditional beliefs about saintly patronage accessed through the mechanism of a vow—that is, contractual obligation for supernatural services rendered—were clearly fundamental for many pilgrims and this remained a constant feature of travel across the period. Where the veil of documentary silence lifts on the purposes of the many thousands of holy travelers, it reveals a world-view—spiritual and material— based on honor, reciprocity and gift-giving, which changed only slowly over time. The pilgrim contracted to return a saintly favor with a visit to the shrine, giving him or herself over to an arduous endeavor out of devotion, where prayer and perhaps a small votive gift, were a duty to be performed. With the Catholic Reform movement of the later sixteenth century onwards, there was greater attention to interior prayer and meditation, but these were simply part of the traditional motive of the personal offering of effort and devotion, which remained strong. The pilgrims who traveled often had other motives as well, again linked to honor and obligation, this time to the wider community in which they lived. A long-distance pilgrimage was a personal statement of confessional allegiance, a demonstration in support of the Roman Catholic Church and its saints. Disdain of Protestantism comes across at the personal and group level, in numerous accounts. Community movements declined from the later seventeenth century, perhaps replaced by processions within towns, although confraternal journeys remained important. This may be because demanding voyages were also a gendered performance, of masculinity, of its mobility, physical endurance, and group solidarity. The young men who made up most of the long-distance pilgrim cohorts were demonstrating their ability to enter the company of adult males. Obligation, challenge, and plain curiosity encouraged pilgrims onto the roads. Accounts of pilgrimage made by travelers from the clergy and laity alike were certainly fashioned in response to the discourse of spiritual counselors, using the terminology of clerical writers. They were often based on earlier guidebooks and accounts, but also on sermons and readings they experienced at home. Such pilgrims traveled “out of devotion” to use a common phrase; penitence, prayer, and a desire to experience the grace bestowed on and by the saints were stated motives for shrine visiting. Even more influential was the text of the Christian Gospels. Shadowing Christ’s journey, experiencing and overcoming hardship, brought a pilgrim closer to God. The pilgrim’s understanding of jour-

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ney in terms of the life and Passion of Christ, and the desire to imitate it, was important. It is to the experience of the routeway that we now turn.

Chapter 3 The Journey: Landscapes and Travel to Shrines At the heart of any pilgrimage is the journey. In traditional histories of shrines and shrine visiting, the sacred destination is the main focus of study. But in reality, for long-distance pilgrimages, time spent traveling was much greater than that passed at the shrine itself. Recently, the process of journeying to and from holy sites, the landscape aesthetics of pilgrims and their spiritual experiences along the way, have been studied by anthropologists investigating contemporary movements from the Meccan Hajj to the Camino in Spain.¹ The performance of journeying and the body-centered experience of movement as a key element of research results at least in part from the influence of French theorists such as Michel Foucault, for whom the body was central to the modern system of discipline and control, and particularly Pierre Bourdieu and his concepts of habitus and symbolic power.² Movement of the body is interpreted as a performative action, consciously and unconsciously effecting social and cultural transformations; thus John Urry deploys Michel de Certeau’s notion that “walking can be constitutive of social space in the way that speech acts constitute language.”³ Pilgrimage provides the catalyst for certain kinds of bodily experiences in a ritual framework of movement, a performance of acts linking the individual to the sacred. As Simon Coleman and John Eade argue, various forms of motion—embodied, imagined, metaphorical—are constitutive elements of many pilgrimages, for “in certain cases … mobile performances can help to construct—however temporarily—apparently sacredly charged places.”⁴ Perceptions and experiences of landscapes and environments have been seen as key to understanding the pilgrim’s journey: how did the environment through which the body was moving give meaning and construction to the sacred journey? While there has been an increase in the importance ascribed to place-based spiritual experience in recent anthropological studies, there has been relatively little exploration of the relationship between sacred places, their landscape aesthetics and accounts of spiritual experience.⁵ An important theoretical and methodological tool for understanding the relationship between human and landscape has been that of phenomenology. As Chris Tilley writes,     

Coleman and Eade, Reframing Pilgrimage, 5. Foucault, Discipline and Punish; Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory. Urry, Sociology beyond Societies, 53. Coleman and Eade, Reframing Pilgrimage, 1. Maddrell et al., Christian Pilgrimage, 1, 7.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501514388-006

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“knowledge of landscapes, either past or present, is gained through perceptual experience of them from the point of view of the subject” so the objective of phenomenology is to create a rich or “thick” description, “allowing others to comprehend these landscapes in their nuanced diversity and complexity and to enter into these experiences through their metaphorical textual mediation.”⁶ Embodiment is a central term here. Experience of landscape “takes place through the medium of his or her sensing and sensed carnal body.”⁷ This approach means “accepting that there is a dialogic relationship between person and landscape.”⁸ Of course, this subjective methodology is riven with hazards when related to living humans whose opinions can be asked; for past societies, it has huge problems, not least of anachronism. However, if we look phenomenologically at landscape through the accounts of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century pilgrims, we do learn something of their priorities and interests. In this chapter, we will examine the experiences of early modern pilgrims by following them on their travels in northwest Europe, from departure to destination. The pilgrim traveling to long-distant shrines in northwest Europe was also walking through the period of religious transformation of the Catholic Reformation. There were shifts in devotional emphasis and constructed purposes of pilgrimage, as we saw in chapter 2. Luigi Tomasi’s argument for a relative decline in the penitential element of pilgrimage since the medieval period and an increased emphasis on transformation of the self from the body to the mind, and a greater emphasis on the journey rather than the destination, will be explored in this chapter.⁹

Departure The commencement of a long-distance pilgrimage was normally a formal and often public act, literally a rite of passage into an altered status, that of pilgrim. First, there were necessary material preparations to be made, which increased in number and importance with the distance of the shrine to be visited. For all journeys of more than a few days, some money had to be gathered even if a pilgrim intended to live largely on alms. In 1609, a group of pilgrims from Saverne in Alsace left for Compostela; one of them, Jacques Bosch, borrowed ten livres from

   

Tilley, Interpreting Landscapes, 25. Tilley, Interpreting Landscapes, 25. Tilley, Interpreting Landscapes, 26. Tomasi, “Homo Viator.”

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Dieterich Kirsch, provost of a college, to finance such a long journey.¹⁰ Many young men borrowed small sums of money against their inheritances. Thus, in 1679, François de Bosdemoulin, aged nineteen, of Feytiat in the Limousin, borrowed sixty livres from his father against his inheritance, to buy clothes for the journey, and his two young companions also borrowed against their patrimonies.¹¹ In addition, equipment had to be purchased and often, group arrangements had to be made. For example, in Paris in 1631, a group of merchants formally contracted before a notary to travel, lodge, and eat together and to contribute equally to the purchase of equipment and services, on a pilgrimage to the Mont Saint-Michel.¹² In 1642 in Chartres, two innkeepers and a merchant organized a pilgrimage to the Mont Saint-Michel for which each participant paid thirty sous for the costs of the journey and the making of a votive banner to leave at the Mont.¹³ In 1728, Guillaume Manier of Carlepont in Picardy raised forty-five livres, his companions Delorme and Hermand raised thirty livres and twelve livres respectively, and Manier purchased a coat, and a staff.¹⁴ In 1748, Jean Bonnecaze had only three livres for his costs, packing a shirt and books into his knapsack.¹⁵ All of this was part of the ritual of departure. Pilgrims with some property might also make a will and settle their debts before traveling, a tradition which continued from the Middle Ages. Thus in 1614, Jehan Monguonoilhe, priest of Laguenne in the Limousin, “desiring to go to the kingdom of Spain and other places … and considering that nothing is more certain than death nor more uncertain than the hour thereof,” made his will.¹⁶ In 1645, Jean Leonard Bauvoir of Tulle recognized before a notary that he had received twenty livres from his brother, to whom he granted certain rights over property in case of his death on pilgrimage, “wishing to make the journey to St. James in Galicia and because of the length of the journey, fearing to be taken ill, considering the benefits he has received from his brother Jean Bauvoir.”¹⁷ In 1651, Leonard Vauzanges, merchant weaver also of Tulle and pilgrim to Compostela, “fearing to be surprised by death on his way there or on his return, in order to avoid lawsuits between his relatives,” made a will.¹⁸ Many other examples

        

Almazán, Quête du pardon, 86. A.D. Haute-Vienne 4 E 2– 630. Notaire Léonard Palissier 1679. A.D. Seine-Maritime F 491. Transcript. Un pèlerinage au Mont Saint-Michel en 1631. Baudot, “Diffusion et évolution,” 109. Manier, 2. Bonnecaze, 173. Cited in Barret and Gurgand, Priez pour nous, 54. A.D. Corrèze E 551 Notaire Monteilh, Tulle, 1645. Barret and Gurgand, Priez pour nous, 54.

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could be given. Testament-making was both a practical precaution and a recognition of the metaphysical status of “dying in the world,” albeit temporarily, that the pilgrim went through as part of the sacred journey. For pilgrims crossing state boundaries, principally travelers crossing into France or Spain, and even for those traveling long-distance within kingdoms, the seventeenth century brought greater requirements for official paperwork as personal movement was increasingly restricted by legislation. Already in 1590, Philip II issued an edict to reduce false pilgrimage by requiring pilgrims within Spain to obtain a certificate from the local royal judge. Pilgrims traveling from France and other countries had to present a bishop’s letter to the nearest judge, on entering the kingdom.¹⁹ By the early seventeenth century, French pilgrims frequently asked their parish priests for attestations or certificates of Catholicity, to show their pious intentions. An example is that recorded in the parish registers of La Chapelle du Bois in Maine in 1649, where the vicar: certifies that Pierre Potier and Renée Carré his wife, inhabitants of our parish, wishing to make the journey to Monseigneur Saint-Méen, are not sullied by any ecclesiastical censure and are true Catholics and made their Easter [communion] in this parish. We ask humbly that missires the parish priests and confreres recommend them for charity and alms from good people, and that they will administer the sacraments of the church to them, and in case of death, their burial.²⁰

Under Louis XIV, legislation required increasing certification and authorization, in an attempt to control movement. An ordonnance of 1665 forbade pilgrimage for those who did not have a passport. From 1671, pilgrims traveling to shrines needed three pieces of written authorization, a certificate from their parish priest, authorization from their bishop and from a local royal officer. An edict of 1686 added authorization from a secretary of state to the requirements, but this does not seem to have worked in practice.²¹ The legislation was repeated four times after 1724. This did not deter pilgrims. Jean Bonnecaze traveled without papers in 1741. The hospital of Saint-Yves at Rennes recorded whether its pilgrims came with or without a certificate from their priest; 87 percent did so, leaving 13 percent without, of whom quite a few were women for whom independent travel was frowned upon. Some travelers forged their papers; Marguerite Morin presented a false certificate as did Etienne Hamelienne.²²

   

Julia, “Pour une géographie européenne,” 31. A.D. Sarthe 1 Mi 1132. Parish registers La Chapelle-du-Bois 1649. Julia, “Pour une géographie européenne,” 33. Brilloit, “Population pérégrine,” 276.

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The Museum of Dreux holds a small satchel made of wood, used by a pilgrim, Michel Marie, to hold papers on his journey. It is decorated on the front with little tin cockleshells, pilgrim staffs, and an image of St. James on horseback, indicating its use on the road to Compostela. In a rare act of survival, it also contains the pilgrim’s official documents. Marie left Chérisy in the diocese of Chartres in 1764; he took with him his baptismal entry, a letter of recommendation and of Catholicity, both signed by the curé of his parish; a bishop’s attestation, and an itinerary of part of the route, from Arpajon to Toulouse. The attestation was validated at St. Jean Pied de Port, Roncevalles, Pamplona, Burgos, Carrión de los Condes, and León.²³ According to clerical authors of pilgrim advice literature, the most important preparation to be made was that of the soul. From the early seventeenth century, devotional texts stressed that pilgrimage was a rupture with habitual sins, a means of bringing about a change of life, a total engagement with God and a personal conversion. Louis Richeome advised his Pilgrim of Loreto that “the principal, most familiar and necessary instrument of him that goeth in pilgrimage for devotion” is prayer: Being in the fields he shall take matter of praysing God as those things he beholdeth shall give him occasion, beholding the heavens, he shall admire God in those immortal bodies and lights; seeing the mountains, the plains, the rivers, the plants, the beasts, and other creatures, he shall give thanks for all to God, as made for the behoof of man, and of himself in particular and shall invite them to praise the same creator … In fair weather he shal thank God for that particular benefit of his way and journey; if it doth rayne, hayle, or storme, he shall thank him also for this crosse and adversity, and take it patiently to make his merit thereof, and his spiritual profit.²⁴

Père Proust, author of Le guide du pèlerin of 1674 for the shrine of Notre-Dame de Verdelais south of Bordeaux, wrote that pilgrims needed to lay aside finery and render themselves poor; to carry their cross; to recognize themselves as sinners; to come with a pure heart to this place.²⁵ Whether or not the young men who made up the major part of long-distance pilgrims adopted the interior disposition recommended by dévôt writers, they certainly participated in the public rituals of preparation and departure: confession, communion, and benediction. At a formal church ceremony, a pilgrim was vested in his special garments, conferring an altered status, that of holy traveler. He was given alms, which symbolized the adoption of humility through the re-

 Lelièvre, “Papiers d’un pèlerin.”  Richeome, Pilgrime of Loreto, 47, 63.  Version used here P.D.H., Guide des pèlerins, 27– 28.

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quest for charity. The Roman Ritual of Paul V included a blessing of pilgrims before they began their journey to any holy place and another to be used after their return. There was also a mass appointed in the Roman missal to be said for them.²⁶ Finally, a pilgrim or pilgrim group was accompanied to the edge of the settlement in a procession, where a final blessing would take place. Georges Provost comments that communities with a tradition of distant pilgrimage often had crosses at the edge of the village, where the leave-taking took place. For example, thirty-four “Crosses of St. James” have been recorded in Chartres diocese. Here, the location of the crosses seems to have been designed for rituals of departure: only six were found to the north of villages and five to the west, whereas twentythree were towards the south, perhaps to guide pilgrims heading for Galicia.²⁷ In April 1679, the parish priest of Brignon in the Limousin recorded a blessing for Jean and André Chaussende, who were commencing the pilgrimage to Compostela: he “blessed them with the pilgrim’s benediction in front of our church, having given them alms and something to drink, as they were my parishioners.”²⁸ In 1728, Guillaume Manier and his companions obtained their certificates from their parish priest in Carlepont, had them countersigned by the bishop’s vicar general in Noyon and Monsieur Dopcens, the town’s mayor. They then confessed, attended mass, said their farewells and departed.²⁹ Nicolà Albani, who left Naples in 1743, organized his passports and other documents, then began his pilgrimage at the church of St. James in Naples. He entered wearing his ordinary clothes, followed by a boy carrying his pilgrim attire; he made a confession to the rector then listened to mass; the rector blessed Albani and his gear with special prayers and aspersions of holy water; Albani dressed in the pilgrim’s outfit before taking communion, and at the end, he begged alms symbolically from the people present in the church, many of whom he knew.³⁰ Members of confraternities would organize these rituals for their members. The seventeenth-century statutes of the confraternity of Saint-Michel de Vaucelles of Caen stated that “if any brother or sister wants to go to Jerusalem, Rome or St. James in Galicia, there will be low mass celebrated in the town,

 Roman ritual of Paul V. An English version of 1962 edition can be found at http://www. sanctamissa.org/en/resources/books-1962/rituale-romanum/index.html.  François, “Pèlerins de Normandie,” 20.  Chaize, “Pèlerinage de Saint-Jacques de Compostelle,” 42.  Manier, 2– 5.  The text is published in Albani, Viaje de Napoles a Santiago de Galicia, and an on-line transcript of the Compostelan pilgrimage in Italian is available at http://diariosdeperegrinos.dx.am/ nicola.albani.htm. Discussed in Julia, “Curiosité, dévotion et politica peregrinesca,” 269.

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in a place of their choice.”³¹ It was an obligation to accompany the pilgrim to the departure point, usually with a chaplain in a cope, a processional cross, holy water, and a banner. The seventeenth-century statutes of the confraternity of Saint-Michel of Saint-Niçaise parish in Rouen stated that when a pilgrim wished to travel to the Mont Saint-Michel, “he will be led with the cross by the chaplain, the master and clerk to the gate and, on parting, receive benediction from the chaplain.”³² On leave-taking, there would be a ritual kiss of peace and almsgiving; the confraternities of Saints James and Christopher of Falaise and of St. Gilles of Caen also stipulated the reading of the prologue of the Gospel of St. John “In principio erat Verbum.”³³ The pilgrim or pilgrims then left, to continue their journey.

Apparel The attire of a pilgrim marked out a holy traveler from at least the central Middle Ages. The putting on of the clothes of a pilgrim, as marked by the rituals above, was symbolic of casting off current roles and assuming that of the voyager, dependent on God. It was also a means of signaling the special status of pilgrim, for whom law and custom gave privileges and protection. The classic costume of a pilgrim is that associated with St. James of Compostela, one in which pilgrim saints like St. James and St. Roch were frequently depicted. It comprised the outfit of a poor traveler journeying on foot: a long robe belted at the waist, a coat or cloak, a wide-brimmed hat to protect from sun and rain, a scrip or haversack for documents, food and other personal items, and a staff. A gourd for drinking was frequently attached to the staff. Male pilgrims who traveled long-distance were usually appareled in some or all of this costume. Female pilgrims do not seem to have had such a distinctive dress. A “typical” pilgrim was described in the Pragmatic of Philip II of 1590, as dressed in “cape and sackcloth, clothes of different colors, big hats with badges, and staffs,” for false pilgrims dressed in this manner could pass as an authentic traveler.³⁴ In 1772, Clément Barset, sixty-one years old, who claimed to be a native of Rome on the pilgrimage to Compostela, was arrested by the maréchaussée of Vierzon near to Bourges, and found to possess ten pieces of bread, eighteen sous in money, some little bits of lead or shot

   

Hebert, “Pèlerinages dans les statuts,” 216. Le Charpentier, Instructions pour la confrérie, article 15. Hebert, “Pèlerinages dans les statuts,” 223 – 24. Pragmatic of Philip II of 1590 reproduced in Parga et al., 3:115 – 16.

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in a parchment envelope which he claimed to use for headaches, a certificate of confession and communion, and a staff six feet in length with an iron tip at the end.³⁵ Footwear was also important. Jean Bonnecaze went ill-shod to Compostela; his shoes lasted only to Pamplona, after which he went bare-foot until the return journey, when in Logroño a widow gave him a pair of her late husband’s shoes.³⁶ Not all pilgrims were well dressed and it was common to see paupers traveling. Thus, the admissions register of the hospital of la Coruña notes that in January 1715, the poor pilgrim Antonio Bermudez was admitted, aged forty and from Cordoba, wearing ragged clothes and a cape, carrying a staff and a bag, and he was without money; in the same month, Simon Franciso of Granada was admitted, forty-six years old, he was worn out, wearing rags and without money, and in 1716, Juan Bautista Bergantte of Genoa, again had old clothes, a cape, and a staff.³⁷ Some pilgrimages were marked out by special dress or objects. The pilgrimage to the Mont Saint-Michel was frequently conducted by groups of men in a military style, with the pilgrims marching or riding in ranks, wearing swords, carrying white wands, accompanied with a tambour beating time, and an ensign carrying a standard. For example, in 1647, fifty-five young men and their parish priest from Parcé in the diocese of Le Mans arrived at the Mont Saint-Michel; they marched over the causeway on foot two by two, carrying half pikes on their shoulders, ribbons of various colors attached to the metal of their weapons and their swords at their sides, keeping to time beaten by a tambour.³⁸ Members of the confraternity of Saint-Michel from the parish of Saint-Pierre of Caen undertook the pilgrimage to the Mont in 1634: the priests marched at the head, before the captain, and then ranks of pilgrims marched four by four; at the end of the procession came the ensign carrying a flag on which was painted a St. Michael, a ciborium, the arms of the king, of the duke of Longueville royal governor of Caen, and of the captain of the pilgrims. Seven tambours beat time, wearing red helmets decorated with silver lace. The captain was accompanied by six sergeants wearing white scarves, swords at their sides and carrying halberds.³⁹ This was similar to many parish processions to local shrines in that there were orderly defiles keeping in step to a drum, often singing canticles. However, the Mont pilgrimage is marked out by the militarized appearance of the pilgrim groups.

    

Barret and Gurgand, Priez pour nous, 58. Bonnecaze, 173. Registers of la Coruña hospital are transcribed in Barreiro, “Relación de peregrinos.” Le Roy, 580. Saint-Martin, Voyage fait au Mont Saint-Michel, 423.

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While the rationale for this is unclear, the martial nature of St. Michael’s cult may be a cause of the pilgrim’s distinctive dress. The returning pilgrim frequently wore a badge displaying the symbol of the shrine visited. The most distinctive was the scallop shell of Compostela, which pilgrims most commonly attached to their hats. The Mont Saint-Michel also adopted a cockle, a smaller one from the Mont bay, which pilgrims purchased several of, sometimes on a cloth, and attached to their clothing in some way. Groups might also wear ribbons. It was traditional for the “captain” of pilgrims traveling to the Mont Saint-Michel to give ribbons to his companions. Thus, the captain of the confraternity of Saint-Michel from Caen, who traveled in 1634, gave silver ribbons of various colors to the two nobles and their officers who accompanied him, white and blue ribbons to the priests, and flame-colored ribbons to all other participants, which they tied to the end of their pikes.⁴⁰ The pilgrim was marked out from ordinary travelers and other folk, by his distinctive dress and symbols.

Routeways: Roads, Rivers, Mountains, and the Sea The routes taken by pilgrims were usually long-trodden ways, passing from town to town in a well-known sequence, although there were frequently a number of commonly used routes to a shrine, depending on the starting point. The route to Compostela is the best known, a result of the influential itinerary documented in the twelfth-century Codex Calixtinus, subsequently copied by many authors. Routeways from northern and southern Germany and Italy entered France and joined one of four major routes to Spain: one from Paris via Tours and Bordeaux, one from Vézelay in Burgundy, one from Lyons or Le Puy, and one from Arles via Toulouse. The first three of these converged at St. Jean-Pied de Port, crossed the Pyrenees at Roncevalles, and continued to Pamplona, the fourth crossed into Spain at Somport. All four routes converged at Puenta La Reina and continued to Compostela through Logroño, Burgos, and Laon. Pilgrims also took numerous by-routes, joining up with the major routeways at different places. Spanish and Portuguese pilgrims could approach from the south and west. Pilgrims from Britain and Ireland, Scandinavia and northern Europe, as well as the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts, also traveled by sea, with the port of La Coruña being the nearest to the shrine. Other shrines lay along or just off these routes, giving access to them as part of the larger pilgrimage. St. Martin of Tours, St. Jean

 Saint-Martin, Voyage fait au Mont Saint-Michel, 431.

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d’Angelys, Toulouse, Santo Domingo de la Calzada, Burgos, Oviedo, and many smaller sites were staging posts for body and soul. For the Mont Saint-Michel, there were common routes from the south, west, east and, north but with some variation in the settlements traversed as well. Routeways from the north and east converged on Avranches, via Argentan; from Brittany and the south, pilgrims went via Rennes and then Pontorson. Pilgrims from the center and Loire Valley might travel via Le Mans, Mayenne, and Fougères. The shrine of Saint-Méen shared with the Mont Saint-Michel much of the same route from the south and east, with pilgrims for both sites recorded in the same hostels. In fact, pilgrims to Saint-Méen may well also have called at the Mont, which was a short detour off the roads into Normandy. For Lough Derg, in remote County Donegal, access was always difficult but more so during and after the Anglo-Irish wars of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the pre-Reformation period, pilgrims came from Continental Europe by sea. For example, the Annals of the Four Masters describes a French pilgrim who traveled to the Purgatory in 1516, calling on O’Donnell afterwards and offering him the use of a ship for the reduction of a castle in Sligo.⁴¹ Travelers could go overland, perhaps via London/Derry from the east or Enniskillen from the south. Pilgrims from the Limerick region could travel on the Shannon river to Carrick and then proceed onwards, or journey by sea via the small port of Donegal or the larger port of Derry. Given the danger and illegality of this journey, better-off pilgrims would go in disguise, often as Dublin or Cork merchants, like Bishop Hugh McMahon of Clogher in 1714.⁴² There were no maps for pilgrims but by the sixteenth century, guides to routes or travel itineraries were relatively well known, particularly to Compostela, as with Rome, Jerusalem, and other major shrines. The first known guide to the Camino was that of Aymeri Picaud in the twelfth-century Codex Calixtinus. This remained the basis for guides in the sixteenth century. There were several late fifteenth-century accounts, which were also largely itineraries, such as that by the German knight Arnold von Harff of Cologne, who traveled to Compostela and the Mont Saint-Michel, although his desire to visit the Purgatory of St. Patrick came to naught.⁴³ There were several English guides which remained in print into the sixteenth century, such as The Itineraries of William Wey who traveled in 1456 and The Pilgrimage of Robert Langton published in 1522.⁴⁴ The ad-

   

O’Donovan, Annals of the Kingdom, 5:1335. Account of Bishop Hugh MacMahon’s visit to Lough Derg 1714 in Leslie ed., 112. Harff, Pilgrimage of Arnold von Harff. Wey, Itineraries of William Wey; Langton, Pilgrimage.

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vent of printing allowed for the publication of itineraries for commercial sale, in which the stages of the route and the distances between them, were the main content.⁴⁵ For France, Charles Estienne’s 1552 Guide des chemins and the 1583 Nouvelle guide des chemins of Nicolas Bonfans, provided routes for pilgrims visiting Jerusalem, Rome, Saint-Sauveur and in France itself, to Saint-Fiacre in Brie, Saint-Mémin, Saint-Mathurin de Larchant, Saint-Méen, Saint-Claude, the Mont Saint-Michel, and shrines to Notre Dame at Liesse, L’Espine, Conray, and Cléry.⁴⁶ The reasons for this selection is not made clear but it probably represents a list of at least some of the better-frequented shrines of the Parisian readership (there are few listed for the south of France). Much more concise and perhaps produced for a confraternity or specifically for the pilgrimage was the anonymous, one-sheet Le chemin de monsieur sainct Jacques en Galice, dict Compostel, & combien il ya de lieues de ville en ville, à partir de la ville de Paris, printed in Paris in 1621.⁴⁷ The itinerary was very similar to that of earlier works and provided basic information for pilgrims. Some guides continued to provide itineraries for travel between shrines, such as the anonymous Les merveilles de la ville de Rome ou est traité des eglises, stations & reliques des corps saints qui y sont, which included in its 1676 edition an itinerary from Rome to Compostela via Béarn and St. Jean Pied de Port, where the pilgrim entered Spain. How far these guides were familiar to the ordinary pilgrim we cannot say, but communities and confraternities had traditions of their own, often in manuscript form. In 1548, François Morel, notary of Avignon, left an itinerary of his fourmonth journey to Compostela.⁴⁸ In 1603, a guide dedicated “to the devout pilgrims of Rouen” described the route to Compostela, passing through Elbeuf, Dreux, Chartres, and Châteaudun to Tours, where pilgrims joined one of the major routeways south.⁴⁹ The confraternity book of the pilgrims of Senlis contained eleven itineraries, describing various routes from Paris via Orleans and Blois. While these were based in part on existing published itineraries, there is clearly eye-witness detail in the documents, notably descriptions of churches, based on the practical experience of pilgrims.⁵⁰ A very late one, of 1790, was produced by Jean-Pierre Racq for his confraternity in Bruges outside of Oléron.⁵¹

      

Las Heras, “Étude des itinéraires,” 22. Estienne, Guide des chemins de France; Bonfans, Nouvelle guide de Chemins. Anon., Chemin de monsieur sainct Jacques en Galice. BNF Reserve H 2150. A.D. Vaucluse 4 E 5 1124 Notaire Beaulieu 1548. Barret and Gurgand, Priez pour nous, 92. Las Heras, “Étude des itinéraires,” 26. Récit de Jean-Pierre Racq, 1790 in Desplatz and Blazquez, Jean Bonnecaze, 35.

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Routeway markers were a feature of both the Compostelan and Montois pilgrim ways, as they were of other routes. Some were for practical assistance—to indicate the correct way—and others were markers of historical events, sacred and profane. The most frequently encountered marker was a cross, often of stone but also of wood. Philippa Woodcock notes that the routes pilgrims took to the Mont through the county of Mayenne were marked by crosses and wayside chapels.⁵² Pilgrims of a confraternity from Caen traveling to the Mont in 1634 were heralded by their trumpeter sounding his horn from time to time along the route, particularly beside wayside crosses.⁵³ The Italian pilgrim Domenico Laffi from Bologna also notes in Spain the creation of way markers. At Hornillos, it was easy to lose the way on the sandy plain, but pilgrims made cairns of stones by the sides of the correct routes; likewise, in woods with multiple paths, pilgrims stripped the bark from trees to indicate the right way to pass.⁵⁴ In 1734, the hospital of Aubrac rented pasture land in Mailhebiau to Augustin de Valette on condition that he ensured the upkeep of cairns as way-markers for travelers.⁵⁵ Jean Bonnecaze noted the memorial to Roland and the fallen Frankish knights defeated in battle by the Vasques in the eighth century, celebrated in the Chanson de Roland, located just outside of Roncevalles; a large iron cross and prayer shelter were erected, where he and his party said prayers for the souls of the dead.⁵⁶ Of the routeway and its landscapes, pilgrims make few observations in the surviving accounts. The overwhelming sense from pilgrim writers—in contrast to some other travelers, who might admire a view, for example—is that of inconvenience, hazard, barrier, and danger, that of the sublime in the original sense of the word. The landscape threw up obstacles to overcome, to reach the holy destination. This was indeed a Passion-scape. The more a place showed itself to be wild, the more grace was bestowed on the pilgrim for the arduous journey.⁵⁷ For pilgrims to the Mont Saint-Michel, the island/promontory was “La Merveille,” an architectural marvel built on a rock in one night by angels, but its tidal access made it treacherous to approach. Jacques-August de Thou described the Mont in these terms in 1580: “one must be surprised that from a sterile desert, far from all commerce, with access so difficult that one can hardly approach it by boat even when it is bathed by the sea, that the faith of our ancestors made

     

Dr. Philippa Woodcock, pers. comm. Saint-Martin, Voyage fait au Mont Saint-Michel, 428. Laffi, 142. Barret and Gurgand, Priez pour nous, 71. Bonnecaze, 175. Germain de Franceschi, D’encre et de poussière, 293.

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such a marvelous place, and that they overcame such obstacles and difficulties.”⁵⁸ Claude Haton remarked that pilgrims traveled from the mainland to the Mont led by a local guide, a necessity for visitors who were unfamiliar with the shifting sands and the sea.⁵⁹ The tides were treacherous. A mid-seventeenthcentury Breton pilgrim, Pierre Le Gouvello, went over the sands without a guide and got caught by the incoming sea. He managed to swim to safety and thereafter recited forty Ave Marias daily in honor of St. Michael.⁶⁰ The Compostelan pilgrim had high mountains and rivers to cross and the journey generally lasted months rather than days or weeks. Again, sublime landscape observations prevail. Bartolomeo Fontana, a Venetian who traveled to Compostela in 1538 – 1539, was taken by surprise by fog in the northern Spanish mountains. He recounts that on August 16, 1539, the way became obscured by thick cloud such that he could not see the road nor the mountain itself; there was a terrible wind and rain such that the abyss itself seemed to have opened up and there was so much water flowing down the hillside that he appeared to be in the midst of a stream. Unable to see where he was going, Fontana sat down on the mountainside and spent the night with his coat over his head, lashed by the weather. The following morning, he found the nearby pilgrims’ hostel.⁶¹ A century or so later, Domenico Laffi described the Alpine foothills between Cesara and Montgenièvre in France as “extremely dangerous. One goes between great crags and sheer rock faces which by the look of them are about to fall. The ravine is about two leagues long and strikes terror in everyone, because of the many who have been killed by avalanches and broken fragments that are continually falling from the mountains.”⁶² The climb through the Pyrenean pass was also frightening. After St. Jean Pied de Port: we walked all the while between precipitous mountains, which are terrifying just to look at. They seemed as if they were always about to fall on top of you. Night fell while we were still among these precipices … We kept on climbing the very high and rugged hills for a stretch of seven leagues. It was a frightening and dangerous journey. In the end, with the help of God and St. James of Galicia we reached the very top of the Pyrenees … There is a small very old chapel here. We went in—there are neither doors nor windows that can be closed—and

    

Thou, Mémoires, 590. Haton, Mémoires de Claude Haton, 2:895. Le Gouvello, Vie du pénitent breton, 57. Fontana, Itinerario, 25 – 26. Laffi, 45.

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sang the Te Deum Laudamus, to give thanks to God for having brought us here safe and sound, in his infinite mercy.⁶³

Laffi calls the Paradise Bridge near to Burguete in Spain, the bridge of Hell, for “it spans a big, deep river that runs between two high hills … the water, though it is clear, in fact looks black. It is so fast flowing that it fills the traveler with fear and trembling. The bridge is guarded by soldiers better described as thieves and murders” and in fact Domenico was so frightened by their manner that he ran for a league after leaving the bridge.⁶⁴ Jean Bonnecaze, traveling from Pardies in the eighteenth century, was forced to lay up at the abbey of Roncevalles for two nights because of snow; when he went on his way, the snow was still knee deep, until he got into the lowlands. In New Castile, again the weather not the landscape was memorable: constant rain, that soaked Bonnecaze to the skin, every day for almost a month.⁶⁵ Santiago itself was and is a rainy city, although the first mention of this by a traveler was in March 1669, when the secretary accompanying Cosimo de’ Medici, noted that “the most remarkable things” about Santiago included “the continuous and incessant rains that fall for six months of the winter, almost without cease.”⁶⁶ Good landscapes were agrarian and tamed: Laffi describes approaching Avignon, with “a beautiful, flat, countryside where there are trees bearing every kind of fruit” while that of the Béziers region was “truly beautiful, growing every kind of fruit and cereals.”⁶⁷ Fruitful nature, not wild landscape, was approved.⁶⁸ The model of the Via crucis—the Way of the Cross, in imitation of Christ—was everywhere else. Danger could also come in human form. A canon of Rouen cathedral, Monsieur Roch, was attacked by thieves in a forest close to Compostela, tied to a tree and abandoned, liberated by passers-by.⁶⁹ Jacques Lemestre, eighteen-year-old son of a jeweler from Lille, went to Compostela by sea following a vow made for his mother’s recovery from illness. He was captured by pirates and sold into slavery at Constantinople, where he remained for three years until he was rescued by a French ship’s crew.⁷⁰ Laffi encountered several people who had

 Laffi, 94.  Laffi, 113.  Bonnecaze, 174– 75.  Extract reproduced in Parga et al., 1:244. See also Magalotti, Viaje de Cosme de Médicis.  Laffi, 49, 67, 69.  The preference for cultivated and “tamed” landscapes is discussed for England by Thomas in Man and the Natural World, 254– 69.  Barret and Gurgand, Priez pour nous, 129.  Barret and Gurgand, Priez pour nous, 134.

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been attacked: an Italian from Parma who had been set upon by a band of robbers, who stole his money, stripped and assaulted him, and also two hermits from Naples who had also been attacked in the border region between France and Spain.⁷¹ Guillaume Manier records some of the trials of his journey to Compostela in 1728. First, there was injury. Two weeks into his journey, his feet were sore, and he could scarcely walk. A horseman he encountered gave him some advice on how to toughen them up with cream made of candle tallow, eau de vie, and olive oil. This worked wonders. Thereafter, it was human danger. South of Ingrandes the little party was stopped by the maréchaussée, who advised them to travel singly rather than as a group of four, because of thieves in the area; outside of Brioux-sur-Boutonne, they were so in fear of the police arresting them for theft and sending them for deportation at Rochefort that they left in the small hours and crossed the bridge bare foot, to avoid detection.⁷² Similarly Jean Bonnecaze, who made the journey in 1748, developed health problems, nose bleeds which were seemingly due to the way he was carrying his knapsack: advice from an Italian pilgrim about how to wear the load led to an improvement in the condition. Snow in the mountains, then rain every day for a month inside Spain, made the journey miserable.⁷³ From the later seventeenth century and especially in the eighteenth century, there was also the risk that a pilgrim would be taken as a vagabond by the maréchaussée, and prosecuted or locked up. Pilgrims, particularly the poorer sort, were seen increasingly by the authorities as masterless men, vagrants, thieves, vectors of contagion and sedition.⁷⁴ The sousdélégué of Dax wrote to the intendant of Pau in 1763 that pilgrims to Compostela were nothing more than libertines exercising feigned devotion and although they had authentic passports, they were really brigands.⁷⁵ There are numerous examples of such hazards on the major routeways to Compostela. Some pilgrims died on the journey and others were born. The parish registers of the diocese of Le Mans contain numerous references to pilgrims who died on the route to and from Saint-Méen and the Mont Saint-Michel. In 1677, the parish register of Cuillé records the death and burial of Julien Le Ray, returning with his wife from the shrine at Saint-Méen to Saint-Sulpice near to Ancenis on the Loire.⁷⁶ On August 29, 1679, a poor pilgrim called René Trouain died of a “virulent

     

Laffi, 63. Manier, 22– 26. Bonnecaze, 175. Julia, “Pour une géographie européenne,” 29. Julia, “Pour une géographie européenne,” 37. A.D. Mayenne. Parish register Cuillé 1677.

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malady” in the barn of Jean Ferré in La Roë parish, where the sick man had been allowed to sleep. In Trouain’s pocket, the local priest found certificates from the man’s parish of la Couture and from one of the brothers of the Congregation of the Mission of Saint-Méen, who attested to his having taken communion on July 16. After the burial, the priest of La Roë sent the certificates to the priest of la Couture, to inform the community of the man’s death.⁷⁷ In 1709, the parish priest of Colombiers-du-Plessis recorded the death and burial of Benoist Simon, aged 13 – 14 years old, traveling with another boy, Louis Obouyer, returning from the Mont to their homes in Saint-Maurice, Burgundy.⁷⁸ The parish registers of the town of Montfort, the nearest to Saint-Méen, are similarly populated with accounts of pilgrim burials and there was a special part of the churchyard of Saint-Nicolas reserved for them: in 1627, Jean Malorys a rosary-maker from Coutances diocese; in 1640, Bernard Bellamy, slate roofer aged thirty from Guiguen; in 1654, Jeanne Timonier aged fifteen, who died of a sudden bloody flux; in 1667, Marguerite Gouju from the Beauce region who died after being bitten by a rabid dog, there are many examples.⁷⁹ There were also births: at Montfort, the baptismal registers for 1613 list three, including Pierre, son of “poor passing travelers, claiming to be parishioners of La Pommeraye, diocese of Angers” and that of 1666 registers a child of Catherine Herbreteau from the parish of Saint-Fulgent in Poitou, whose husband had already died on the journey.⁸⁰ Travel was dangerous for health; those who were sick and journeyed for a cure were certainly at risk, but so were healthy pilgrims, who could contract diseases on the way. But the landscape of pilgrimage was much more than a physical experience of roads, rivers, and mountains. How the pilgrim interpreted and experienced these material sites was much less about their physicality and much more about their intellectual and spiritual context, that of the mental universe of the pilgrim him or herself. Phenomenology encourages us to think carefully about the physical landscape, its relationship with power structures, gender, social group and ideological constructs, but it has a key methodological limitation: it is effectively present-centered, for it cannot reconstruct the thoughts of past people. What makes the pilgrim’s journey holy and therefore a landscape sacred, is his/her understanding of it, not ours. In this, pilgrims were well prepared in the early modern period, which saw the production of a wealth of guidance lit-

 A.D. Mayenne. Parish register La Roë 1679.  A.D. Mayenne. Parish register Colombiers-du-Plessis 1709.  A.D. Ille-et-Vilaine. 10 NUM 35641 128. Parish register Montfort. Burials 1625 – 1668. Discussed in Sibold, “Vie religieuse,” 249 – 50.  A.D. Ille-et-Vilaine. 10 NUM 35641 1 (1592– 1625) and 128 (1625 – 1668).

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erature. Two features of this literature affected the pilgrim’s view of the landscape of travel. First, as Wes Williams argues, narrative structure inscribed in the pilgrim journey was modelled on the Passion narrative, of difficulties, struggle, death, resurrection, and redemption.⁸¹ The landscape was seen with and through a biblical framework, the land where saints trod and where miracles took place in the past.⁸² Also, the journey, especially if arduous, favored intimacy with God through asceticism and penance. Walking was a form of prayer; tiredness and the injuries along the way, a true participation in the suffering endured by Christ on his way to the cross. The road could be seen in eschatological terms, an image of this life as a quest for eternal life, whose trials—such as the possibility of sickness and death—were a cause of anxiety but also an assurance of salvation.⁸³ Pilgrimage accounts are often structured with an underlying framework of Passion-style narrative. Secondly, authors of the Tridentine period increasingly counseled their readers on appropriate actions and behaviors to ensure a righteous outcome. While behavioral prescriptions were important to the medieval pilgrim, the heightened individual experience of interior detachment was new. The spiritual profit of the journey had great significance, “the very act of being on a pilgrimage encompassed a set of deeply rooted ideas about exile, sojourns in foreign lands, the metaphor of the road and the life of Christ himself” for the Church “rested upon an intellectual and spiritual genealogy that cast mankind as fated to live in perpetual exile … The righteous were those who persevered on their journey and chose the correct path through Christ.”⁸⁴ Thus, Robert Quatremaires’s pamphlet, L’histoire abrégée du Mont Saint-Michel, instructed pilgrims not to be too interested in the landscape because they “must not have the motive of satisfying human curiosity when on such a holy journey.”⁸⁵ Visiting such a place was not about sight-seeing, the aim was “to enliven the pilgrim’s faith, revive his hopes, warm his charity” by witnessing places where God had made manifest aspects of his divine wisdom.⁸⁶ Pilgrims should travel “with great fervor,” “with sobriety,” “in silence,” and abstain from evil conversation, then confess and take communion when they reached the shrine. The anonymous author of the La vie de St. Fiacre, confesseur patron de Brie avec des avertissements aux pèlerins of 1717, advised that for pilgrims to arrive in a sufficient state to benefit from the graces of

     

Williams, Pilgrimage and Narrative, 173. Pastre, “Pèlerin et son image,” 121. Mesnard, “Quête du pèlerin,” 17. Candy, Archaeology of Pilgrimage, 7. Quatremaires, Histoire abrégée du Mont Saint-Michel, 62. Julia, “Pèlerinage au Mont Saint-Michel,” 306.

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God, it was necessary “to avoid certain faults, which occurred only too frequently on these sorts of journeys, and practice certain exercises which could attract the blessings of heaven” which included avoiding “curiosity about novelties, levity in behavior, dissipation, excesses of language and other similar things.”⁸⁷ Further, the journey should incorporate ritual actions. At the beginning of each day, the pilgrims in a party should say the Veni createur together, or some other prayer, to recommend the journey to God. Prayers to the Virgin, one’s guardian angel, and to the saint should also be said. During the day, the party should say the rosary together. They were also counseled to take a little devotional book with them, an Imitation of Christ, or Pensées Chretiennes, to read from time to time, to nourish their souls and encourage good thoughts.⁸⁸ The author of the pilgrimage pamphlet for the shrine of Verdelais counseled the pilgrim to avoid profane and dissolute songs on the route, to abstain from immodest conversations, insults, and swearing, especially while journeying in boats where such chatter was frequent, and avoid immoderate laughter. Only praying and thinking holy thoughts, sacred canticles and tears were pleasing to God and his mother.⁸⁹ The pilgrim’s journey was an elementary and primordial form of penitence, a permanent prayer, more meritorious if it was painful.⁹⁰ The ritual of movement itself was thus an essential act of pilgrimage. The martial style of the pilgrims of the Mont Saint-Michel, marching with their flags and tambours, linked them to the military style of the archangel. Pilgrims might take on a special penitential activity such as traveling barefoot or achieving some of it on their knees, although this tended to be for a special part of the journey and not all of it, to distant shrines. In particular, the last section might be achieved on foot for those riding or barefoot for the shod. The author of the shrine booklet for Verdelais commends pilgrims who journeyed with bare feet and particularly, those who moved from the river dock to the shrine, on their knees, or who carried torches, or wept for their sins, or administered the discipline to themselves until they drew blood; or, for elite visitors, those who descended from their horses or carriages and made part at least of the journey on foot.⁹¹ Julie Candy argues that the rhythm of walking itself “becomes a conscious meditative act that allows pilgrims to cope with the terrain and the enormity of the task.”⁹²

     

Anon., Vie de St Fiacre, 19. Anon., Vie de St Fiacre, 20. P.D.H., Guide des pèlerins, 28. Barret and Gurgand, Priez pour nous, 115. P.D.H., Guide des pèlerins, 30. Candy, Archaeology of Pilgrimage, 10 – 12.

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The singing of special canticles is often remarked on. Cervantes’s Don Quixote tells of an encounter with six foreign pilgrims with their staffs, who asked for alms by singing.⁹³ Clerical writers frequently warn pilgrims not to engage in profane song. Rather, as Quatremaires counseled pilgrims to the Mont Saint-Michel, “they should employ part of their time in prayer, on meditation on divine and saintly matters, in pious and edifying conversation, and part of their time in vocal prayer, singing hymns and reciting psalms.”⁹⁴ Songs were among the pamphlet literature produced for pilgrims—and stay-at-home pilgrims—in numerous centers. Their ephemeral nature means that few have survived. An early publication of a pilgrim song was included in a collection called Les rossignols spirituels in 1615.⁹⁵ A “Song Profitable for Pilgrims Who Go to St. James” was published as a pamphlet in Toulouse in 1650.⁹⁶ The bibliothèque bleue of Troyes published a number of booklets of Compostelan songs such as the Grande chanson des pèlerins de St Jacques, whether to aid pilgrims or as a popular genre of music is hard to say.⁹⁷ These concentrated the mind on holy matters, gave rhythm to movement, and whiled away the miles. The journey was not, however, always as sober as that recommended by clergy. While mostly pilgrims rose early and walked all day, they frequently sang, played instruments, and recounted stories. Yves-Marie Bercé comments that one of the distinguishing features of a pilgrimage crowd on a journey was its gaiety, with music, flowers, ribbons, and amusements.⁹⁸ They could be heard as well as seen, on the long-distant routes, a distinctive sight and sound indicating their special status and purpose.

Hospitality The landscape recorded by pilgrims was above all a human landscape and its most frequently noted feature was the topography of hospitality: where and how they obtained sleep, food, and drink. Many of the contemporary guides of the Compostelan and other pilgrimages are little more than itineraries of roads and overnight stays. Among the most notable features of the Camino of

 Cervantes, Don Quixote, 2:chapter 54. Translation at http://www.online-literature.com/cer vantes/don_quixote/112/.  Quatremaires, Histoire abrégée du Mont Saint-Michel, 68.  Rossignols spirituels liguez en duo.  Anon., “Chanson moult profitable.”  Soccard, Noëls et cantiques, 22– 24. The Grand Chanson is also published in King, Way of Saint James, 536 – 42.  Bercé, Lorette aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles, 78.

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Compostela of the later Middle Ages was the network of pilgrims’ hostels provided by religious houses, confraternities, and wealthy donors, providing a geography of support for the modest or pious traveler. The earliest may have been of the tenth and eleventh centuries in Spain, in Cebrero in the mountains, Sahagún and Carrión de los Condes. In 1150, a hospice was founded in Ordios and in 1252, Juan de Ortega founded a hospice in the mountains of Oca. Burgos in the later Middle Ages counted around thirty establishments for pilgrims, including the main Hostal Royal. In France, the eleventh and twelfth centuries saw the foundation of many hospitals called Saint-Jacques: Nantes in 1037, la RocheBernard in 1099, at least forty in the southwest of France such as Bordeaux in 1119 and Aubrac in 1120. In 1323, the hospital of Saint-Jacques in Paris was founded. Some were large complexes, with lodge, refectory, dormitory, chapel, cemetery, oven, well, and other buildings. Many were tiny, even one-roomed shelters. Such was the Aumônerie de la Trinité at Les Herbiers, near to la Roche-surYonne; founded by Joachim de Montespedon in 1428 and seemingly revived in 1602, it was run by a priest and had one room with three beds for poor pilgrims going to Compostela and other shrines, who were to be provided with food during their stay.⁹⁹ Religious houses also provided accommodation and food for travelers to shrines. The same was true of other long-distance routeways as well, whether well-frequented and prestigious such as Rome and the Mont Saint-Michel, or other, minor shrines. By the later sixteenth century, in France, this tradition had begun to decay, a result of the depredations of the religious wars and economic problems reducing the financial support of these establishments. At Pons, the hôpital neuf (figures 3.1– 3.3) was one of the main hostels between Tours and Bordeaux and like many such establishments, combined care of the poor sick with hospitality for pilgrims. It was located in the southern suburb of the town, with the hospital accommodation built immediately on the west side of the road and a chapel on the east side, linked by a vaulted arch that spanned the route to Compostela. By the early sixteenth century, its buildings were in bad repair, despite complaints of the townspeople. In 1534, the parlement of Bordeaux ordered that the administration of its revenues should be taken over by competent officers; 100 livres were reserved for the abbé commendataire, Jean de Saint-Gelais, bishop of Aire-sur-Adour, the rest was to be used to repair the buildings, for divine service, and for the needs of the poor. Subsequently, its administration was handed over to the knights hospitaler of St. John of Jerusalem, as a declaration

 A.D. Vendée. 32 J 6 Chartrier de Landreau. For a description of the layout of some of the larger medieval hospitals see: La Coste-Messelière and Warcollier, “Hôpitaux à l’usage des pèlerins.”

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Figure 3.1: Pons hospital. Chapel doorway (© Martin Tingle)

of the prior Marc Gillier in 1547 shows. The wars of religion were severe in the region of the Saintonge, however, and in 1568 – 1569 Pons was besieged and the hospital badly damaged, losing its roof. Pilgrimage slowed in the region in these years, because of violence and insecurity on the roads.¹⁰⁰ The route south from Pons to Bordeaux was even more disrupted. The abbey of NotreDame de la Tenaille, which claimed to have nails of the true cross, was destroyed by Huguenots as was the Cistercian abbey of Plein-Selve, south of Mirambeau. Henceforth, pilgrims sheltered overnight in the ruins of its cellars.¹⁰¹ Further south still, in Béarn and the central French Pyrenean region, under Calvinist rule in the half-century before 1600, pilgrimage institutions were dissolved. Martin de Andía, priest and notary at Roncevalles in Spanish Navarre writing in the 1660s, lamented the permanent loss of lands and revenues for his monastery that this caused.¹⁰²  Detail on the hospital of Pons in A.D. Charente-Maritime sous-série H dépôt 1; also Even, “L’Hôpital Neuf de Pons.”  Glenisson, “Pons à Blaye,” 477– 80.  Cited in Desplatz and Blazquez, Jean Bonnecaze, 63.

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Figure 3.2: Pons hospital. Interior of hospital (© Martin Tingle)

At Toulouse, a major node for the pilgrimage, with its Saint-Jacques hospital for pilgrims and the sick, the city reorganized its institutional poor relief provision in the early sixteenth century. The old institutions were insufficient to meet the needs of the increasing tide of poor and changing sickness patterns of this period. An arrêt of the parlement of Toulouse of 1540 shows that there were five city hospitals, two called Saint-Jacques, one inside the walls which was destined for pilgrims and that of Saint-Jacques over the Garonne bridge, from 1554 also called the Hôtel Dieu, increasingly used for the sick.¹⁰³ Again, the rising

 Cabrol, “L’Hôpital dans sa ville,” 21. See also Casteran, “L’Hôtel-Dieu Saint-Jacques.”

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Figure 3.3: Pons hospital. Exterior from the south (© Martin Tingle)

need for pauper relief and the dislocations of the wars of religion affected the hospitality for pilgrimage. An archiepiscopal visitation of the hostel of Saint-James in Bordeaux in 1572 recorded that the place was in bad order. It had been so for some time. Until the later 1560s, the hospital was administered by eight monks, an organist, a baker, a cellarer, a washerwoman, and a hospitaler. In the 1520s at least, discipline was poor: in 1527 alone, a brother was imprisoned for disobedience and another brother was murdered by one of his confreres.¹⁰⁴ By 1559, only one professed religious remained, Brother Jehan Caubit, sacristan and prior. He was still there, alone, in 1567, described as “an ancient and invalid priest,” along with two clerical refugees from the civil wars on Oléron, also “of poor quality,” whose assistance at divine service comprised the saying of matins at daybreak. There were two dormitories containing twenty small bedsteads with rotten pallets, seven or eight rotten quilts, and several torn blankets; in the kitchen, there was extreme need for everything, even bowls and drinking vessels for pilgrims. Two

 A.D. Gironde H non-classé Jésuites Saint-James H 2317. Novices, Pèlerins.

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years later, in 1574, now under Jesuit administration, the hospital had improved, with twelve bedsteads and thirteen feather beds, six cushions, and eleven blankets although in the women’s dormitory matters were still poor with eleven wooden bedsteads, one broken, with seven feather cushions and blankets, again mostly ragged and spoiled. There was furniture in the refectory area, tables, benches, vats, and wooden basins but little linen, only two long tablecloths for the refectory, two for the kitchen, and two for the side buffet, but no towels or other effects.¹⁰⁵ There was some improvement in the infrastructure for pilgrimage in France with the rebuilding of church fabric in the first half of the seventeenth century. In Pons in 1605, the pilgrim hospital was repaired and a new bell installed, financed by Antoinette de Pons, the local seigneur.¹⁰⁶ In an inventory of 1676, the hospital is recorded as having fourteen beds for pilgrims in the great hall and a further three in a little side room for women and girls; upstairs, there were two beds reserved for clergy pilgrims.¹⁰⁷ In 1617, the duke d’Épernon founded a hospital in Cadillac, dedicated to St. Margaret in honor of his wife, with twelve beds for the sick in one section and in another, six beds for passing poor pilgrims, who would also be given bread, wine, and warmth for a maximum of two nights.¹⁰⁸ In 1662, Monsieur d’Austruy, canon of the cathedral of Rodez, made his will in which he inventoried the donations he had made to the hospital Saint-Jacques in the previous thirty years. His gifts totaled 35,770 livres, for the feeding and accommodation of poor pilgrims traveling to Rome and Compostela who carried a genuine certificate of confession, stipulating that “false” pilgrims should be turned away. He also gave sacred vessels to the hospital chapel, on condition that after high mass on the feast of St. James annually, there would be bidding prayers for him and his parents.¹⁰⁹ The hospital of Saint-Jacques in Paris was receiving pilgrims until 1672, when it transferred its functions to Saint-Gervais.¹¹⁰ In Bordeaux, the Jesuit administration improved the hospital Saint-James. They retired all the priests of the former collegiate foundation and appointed a new lay hospitaler; by the end of the sixteenth century he was assisted by a porter responsible for admitting pilgrims and both men were responsible to the rector of the Jesuit college. The doctor and the apothecary

     

A.D. Gironde H non-classé Jésuites Saint-James 2315 (3) Privilèges, droits etc. A.D. de la Charente-Maritime sous-série H dépôt 1. Even, “L’Hôpital Neuf de Pons,” 495. Barret and Gurgand, Priez pour nous, 162. Viallet, L’Hôtel-Dieu de Rodez, 7– 8. Manier, xvi.

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of the college also treated the sick of the hospital.¹¹¹ The Jesuits put the finances on a sounder footing: in 1567– 1568, the income had been 1500 livres and the expenditure 2136 livres; accounts are patchy but in 1601 income had risen to 4634 livres of which only 360 was used for pilgrims, the rest for other functions of the hospital.¹¹² In 1673, there were sixteen beds, “all cleanly kept” and the linen comprised eighty sheets and 100 towels, “the said linen all bleached and cleanly maintained.”¹¹³ Even for smaller-scale shrines, the same renovation impulse was seen. At Saint-Méen near to Rennes, the abbey which housed the shrine was in clear decline in the sixteenth century. In 1604, the abbé commendataire, Pierre Cornulier, restored the conventual buildings and the hospital and called upon the reformed Benedictines of Saint-Maur to restore and repopulate the monastery. One of their chief roles was to look after the crowds of pilgrims which flocked to the site for cures. While the monastic reform was unsuccessful, with only two monks remaining by 1639, and the subsequent conversion of the site into a seminary under the direction of the Oratoire and then the Lazarists, pilgrims continued to visit. In 1649, St. Vincent de Paul installed the Daughters of Charity to look after the poor and sick holy travelers.¹¹⁴ The equipment of hostels or hospitals in France was fairly basic. Beds, when there were any, had cheap straw mattresses; large beds were sometimes donated by testators, where two pilgrims could sleep. The vicar general’s order to the prior of the hostel of Cadillac on the Gironde river in the mid-seventeenth century stated what he expected to find in that establishment for pilgrims—and which was missing: at least six beds with pallets or mattresses, bolsters and covers, and that passers-by should be provided with food and warmth.¹¹⁵ In the little hostel at Cayac in Gradignan parish, southwest of Bordeaux, an inspection of 1620 showed that it was furnished with two pallets and two mattresses, two bolsters and four bed covers, a fire shovel and six shrouds.¹¹⁶ Pilgrims were usually allowed one night or sometimes two, although in the winter and in bad weather, the stay might be extended to three nights. At Saint-James in Bordeaux itself, the hospital was fairly simple, although larger than in country towns. An entrance gave on to the lodging of the custodian and the pilgrims’ refectory; through

 A.D. Gironde H non-classé Jésuites Saint-James 2315 (3) Privilèges, droits etc; Cavignac, “Hôpital doublement spécialisé.”  A.D. Gironde H non-classé Jésuites Saint-James H 2315 (3) Privilèges, droits etc.  A.D. Gironde H non-classé Jésuites Saint-James H 2317 Novices, Pèlerins.  Duvauferrier-Chapelle, Saint-Méen le Grand, 109, 213.  Barret and Gurgand, Priez pour nous, 171.  Barret and Gurgand, Priez pour nous, 172.

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here, one could access a small courtyard which also contained the pilgrims’ cemetery. The courtyard contained an oven which was used for baking bread and for killing vermin in pilgrims’ clothes. Upstairs, a large room above the custodian’s lodgings acted as a dormitory and chapel for pilgrims and there were two small additional rooms, one for female pilgrims and one for priests. Pilgrims could stay for one night on the way to Santiago and one night on the return journey.¹¹⁷ They were entitled to a pound of brown bread and ordinary wine. Ordained priests received more favorable treatment, with white bread and better wine. Pilgrims were not admitted unless they were clearly recognized as such; they were directed to the chapel first of all to give thanks for their arrival and there would be no toleration of blasphemy, drunkenness, larceny, quarrelsomeness, or bawdiness.¹¹⁸ At the end of the seventeenth century, new instructions were given to the porter, who had to ensure he saw certificates from parish priests for those going to Compostela or of communion at the shrine for those returning.¹¹⁹ Sick pilgrims were cared for. Fortunately, these comprised a small minority of pilgrims, around 2 percent of all pilgrims passing through.¹²⁰ At the almshouse of Saint-Hilaire of Poitiers in 1604 it was recorded similarly that pilgrims could stay for one night, or more if they were sick.¹²¹ In France, the administration of hostels and hospitals could be by clerics or laity. At Saint-James in Bordeaux, by the mid-sixteenth century, the hostel was administered by a custodian and his wife. The regulations stated that he had to be “a good Catholic, faithful, hardworking, along with his wife, to be known in the town to be of good character, the two of them to be over forty years of age, without children, debts or avarice, of good disposition, with a love of charitable works, and both the custodian and his wife to confess and take communion on at least the first Sunday of every month.”¹²² In Spain, the dense provision of hostels and convents providing accommodation was maintained into the eighteenth century, although its quality varied. Again, we get a sense of the variety and importance of the landscape of hospitality on the Camino in the account of Guillaume Manier, who spent most nights on the Spanish leg of his journey staying in monastery guest houses and pilgrim hospices: Santo Domingo, Burgos, Hontanas, Laon, and on the return journey,

     

A.D. Gironde H non-classé Jésuites Saint-James H A.D. Gironde H non-classé Jésuites Saint-James H A.D. Gironde H non-classé Jésuites Saint-James H Cavignac, “Hôpital doublement spécialisé,” 201. Barret and Gurgand, Priez pour nous, 168. A.D. Gironde H non-classé Jésuites Saint-James H

2317 Novices, Pèlerins. 2317 Novices, Pèlerins. 2317 Novices, Pèlerins.

2317 Novices, Pèlerins.

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Oviedo, Madrid, Pamplona, and Roncevalles.¹²³ The most famous—and often the first encountered by pilgrims entering Spain—was at the abbey of Roncevalles. Most pilgrims wrote favorably about the hospitality here. In 1632, Arnaud de Saint-Martin, seigneur de Lacarre attested that: he had been there several times, either for devotion or other business … Pilgrims are very well received there, caringly treated and looked after, both on their journey out and on their return, for three days, their ordinary meals consisting of bread, mutton and wine … They are also well provided with beds and if they fall sick, there are people to look after them until they recover.¹²⁴

Further along the Camino, Castrojeriz had six hostels in the early modern period, each catering for a specific demographic, for example that of San Juan took men only, for whom it had six beds, three for paupers and three for pilgrims.¹²⁵ Spain’s hostels reduced the scope of their hospitality in the seventeenth century, however. Roncevalles reduced its accommodation to two dormitories, one each for men and women; the hostel at Larrasonfín had only three beds in 1640; at Viana, the four hostels found there in the fifteenth century were reduced to one by the seventeenth century and in 1648, as in many other places, pilgrim accommodation was given over increasingly to hospitals for the local poor.¹²⁶ The Hospital Real of Santiago de Compostela (figure 3.4) took fewer pilgrims and more sick, poor Galicians as the seventeenth century progressed: most pilgrims who stayed there were ill. Of the members of the confraternity of St. James of Mâcon who recorded their journey in the register in 1716, one quarter stayed in the Hospital.¹²⁷ Episcopal licenses issued to collectors and indulgences for the hospital are found in many southern French archives, for example a license dated 1605 granted by the archbishop of Lyons and one for 1670 from the bishop of Saint-Papoul.¹²⁸ The quality of these hostels could be poor. Bonnecaze stayed at Silheiro hostel, which he described as “miserable” and in the Augustinian hostel of Laon he spent a night in a bed between three dead men, who died of an epidemic ravaging the hospital, although he noted that he had good care for the fever which he also contracted.¹²⁹

 Manier, 59, 142– 44.  A.D. Pyrénées-Atlantiques G 219. Biens de l’abbaye de Ronvecaux en France.  Candy, Archaeology of Pilgrimage, 98.  Castelao, “Chemin de Saint-Jacques,” 120 – 21.  Provost, “Pèlerins accueillis,” 130.  A.D. Rhône 1 G 169. Copie des actes de l’archevêché de Lyon, 1605 – 1625, fol. 79r; A.D. Aude G 465. Evêché de Saint-Papoul. Indulgences.  Bonnecaze, 177.

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Figure 3.4: Hospital Real, Santiago de Compostela (© Martin Tingle)

In addition to overnight accommodation, many communities provided pilgrims with charity in the guise of food, drink, and sometimes a little money as alms. Laffi noted in the 1670s that most towns in France gave out the passada

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to pilgrims, usually in the form of bread and wine, and this continued in Spain.¹³⁰ The food was basic, but always well received. Guillaume Manier records in some detail the meals provided on his route. At Pons, the pilgrim received a pint of wine and a pound of bread; at Bordeaux, the hostel provided a pint of good wine and a pound of good bread; at Santo Domingo in Spain, the evening meal was broth, beans, and good bread; at San Martin near to Laon, a halfpound of bread and butter, which was rare for, as Manier observes, mostly the Spanish used oil for cooking.¹³¹ But shifts in attitudes to pilgrims—and a focusing of charity on the poor—led to changes. By the time of the journey of Nicolà Albani from Naples, through France and on to Compostela in 1743, he noted that “in the large French cities neither poor foreigners or local paupers can beg for alms and any poor person caught asking for charity in the street is conducted immediately to prison,” although rural communities still gave assistance freely.¹³² This was contrasted with Spain, where the religious houses and hostels found in many cities distributed food at fixed hours and paupers circulated around them, for doles. In Portugal, his pilgrim passport allowed him to collect alms from confraternities all along his route, for here the traditional network of assistance was still in place. Sleeping, eating, keeping warm and dry, the basics of human existence, made the institutions of hospitality the core landscape features of pilgrimage. Just as important on the journey were inns. Domenico Laffi as a man of some means, spent few nights in hostels; rather, he stayed in inns. He comments little on their quality, other than occasionally, when they were bad. Manier records nights spent in The Three Queens at Monarville, south of Paris and the Saint-Jacques at Bayonne.¹³³ But for modest pilgrims such as Manier, private hospitality, in cottages and farms, for a few sous a night, was vital. For example, between September 4 and 7, Manier slept in a barn near Notre-Dame de Cléry, at a farm near Chambord, then at a farm, on straw, at Mantlan, outside of Blois. In October, he records having slept in a stable, on bracken and on boards, in different villages in southwest France. In Spain, particularly in the mountains, Manier and his friends slept on several occasions on straw in one-room peasant farm houses, with their hosts and the animals.¹³⁴ Jean Bonnecaze similarly relates how he spent a night sleeping in a muddy barrel, paying three sous for a rack

 Laffi, e. g. Montgenèvre (p. 45), Tallard (p. 47), Entraigues (p. 50), Viana (p. 125), Hornillos del Camino (p. 142), and others.  Manier, 29, 34, 53, 64.  http://diariosdeperegrinos.dx.am/nicola.albani.htm.  Manier, 17, 43.  Manier, 16, 19, 27, 43 – 45.

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to keep him out of the wet.¹³⁵ Occasionally, pilgrims could call on family and community contacts for accommodation. Just outside Paris, Manier’s party stayed at the farm called Bondousse with one Pierre Louvet from Carlepont, his village, who received the pilgrims warmly.¹³⁶ In Saintes, Manier was able to call on the hospitality of a cantor of the cathedral called François Houpin, who came from the same village and to whom he had a letter of introduction. Houpin paid for the four pilgrims of the party to stay at the inn the SaintLouis and gave them splendid lunches and dinners at his house, as well as alms to help them on their way. They stayed with him on the outward and the inward journeys.¹³⁷ For the little-documented pilgrimage of Saint-Méen, where the pilgrims seem to have been sick and poor, domestic hospitality was vital. At the town of Montfort, east of Rennes and the last staging-post of the journey to the shrine, the local community supported a small hospital for pilgrims, offering them alms and a night’s stay, particularly for the sick. The local Rosary confraternity raised funds for the hostel, including the fees for priests who administered the sacraments to dying pilgrims. The hospital had only eleven beds, however, and was often full.¹³⁸ Householders of the town and its surroundings also offered pilgrims shelter for the night as part of their religious duties. In 1666, a baby was presented for baptism by a farmer and his wife from the nearby hamlet of Village de l’Abbaye, where his pilgrim mother had been given shelter by the couple.¹³⁹ In 1662, a farmer of Ville-ès-Manoir, another neighboring hamlet, found the body of the poor pilgrim François André in his oven, the man identified from the baptismal certificate he was carrying issued by the priest of Soizé in the diocese of Le Mans.¹⁴⁰ Throughout the later medieval and early modern periods, there was a sustained fear of the “false” pilgrim. Only the true pilgrim had the canonical right to alms and assistance, security and protection, as he or she journeyed. The vagabond in search of succor or the thief disguised as a holy traveler were the subject of frequent regulation. In 1531 in Douai, Pierre de Laude, of Paris, was whipped from one side of the town to another, for having “counterfeited” the identity of a pilgrim to Compostela and stained his face with plants to make himself appear ill, thus taking alms from good folks and “stealing” from

     

Bonnecaze, 175. Manier, 16. Manier, 27– 28. Sibold, “Vie religieuse,” 238. A.D. Ille-et-Vilaine 10 NUM 35641 128. Parish register Montfort. Baptisms 1625 – 1668. A.D. Ille-et-Vilaine 10 NUM 35641 128. Parish register Montfort. Burials 1625 – 1668.

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the poor.¹⁴¹ An ordonnance of Philip II of Spain of 1590 forbade anyone to dress in pilgrim costume who was not on a pilgrimage. Pilgrims could not stray more than four leagues from their route to ask for alms, and foreigners from outside the kingdom needed a certificate from the local Spanish justice, or they would be considered vagabonds.¹⁴² Louis XIV of France similarly forbade journeys without episcopal and secular jurisdictional licenses in edicts of 1671 and 1687.¹⁴³ Conversely, the exploitation of pilgrims particularly during jubilee and other busy periods, was another hazard of the voyage. Expensive lodgings, over-priced food and drink, poor quality hospitality, all were frequent at some point in a voyage. It was the responsibility of the urban governments to ensure sufficient provisions at reasonable prices were available to pilgrims, especially at times of great feasts. Pilgrimage cities did try to control these. In 1569, in Santiago, the council attempted to control the prices of bread, meat, wine, and rooms: beds for the better sort of clientele were to have “at least two mattresses, fine sheets, and pillows,” for the more modest pilgrim, the beds were to have “at least a mattress and bolster, two sheets and two blankets, all clean.”¹⁴⁴ Such efforts were rarely successful. From the later seventeenth century, there was a retreat from the provision of charitable hospitality in France, with new attitudes towards pilgrimage. From the later 1660s, there was increasing pressure on pilgrim hostels to combine their resources with the new hôpitaux généraux, which did not cater for pilgrims. The Parisian hospitals were reorganized and the hostel of Saint-Jacques turned to use for the poor.¹⁴⁵ In Rodez, a proposal to turn the hospital Saint-Jacques into a general hospital for the poor was unsuccessful, but a generation later, in 1699, the hospital was given over to paupers and the place reserved for pilgrims was only an annex.¹⁴⁶ In the 1770s, the mayor and aldermen of the southern French town of Saint-Sever wrote to the royal Intendant stating “there are no longer any pilgrims and the better-educated people understand that forgiveness for sins can be obtained anywhere, when one is truly penitent, without seeking it on a long pilgrimage, which always provides opportunities for dissipation” and for this reason, they requested that the hospital and property of Saint-Michel, for pil-

 Cited in Barret and Gurgand, Priez pour nous, 144.  Pragmatic of Philip II of 1590 reproduced in Parga et al., 3:115 – 16. Edict of Louis XIV reproduced at 3:117– 18. See also La Coste-Messelière, “Édits et autres actes royaux.”  Parga et al., 1: 279.  Barret and Gurgand, Priez pour nous, 149.  Déclaration concernant les hôpitaux des pèlerins.  Viallet, L’Hôtel-Dieu de Rodez, 12.

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grim use, be united with those of the general hospital.¹⁴⁷ Similarly in Spain, the available provision shrank. The hostel at Larrasonfín was moribund by the midcentury; at Viana and Santo Domingo de Calzada, the hostels again became general hospitals for the poor. The larger towns such as Burgos and Santiago continued to provide accommodation, but it was reduced in scale and scope and the pilgrimage itself declined.¹⁴⁸ It is clear from pilgrims’ own accounts, therefore, that the landscape of hospitality was a defining one for their journeys. The quality of beds, the quantity and type of food available as alms, the kindness of strangers and countryfolk, these make up the majority of entries of the surviving accounts of religious journeys. Part of a pilgrimage was to cast oneself off from the sustaining structures of everyday life; dependence on chance accommodation and nourishment was to put oneself into the hands of God. There was clearly change over time, in terms of quantity in France, as political and cultural attitudes to long-distance pilgrims changed; and in quality in Spain, as the economic basis of traditional hospitality declined. But pilgrimages were not just about eating and sleeping, the sacred was ever-present as well.

Sacred “Stations”: Shrines along the Route The landscape of long-distance pilgrimage was not simply a routeway or a nodal system of hospitality, it incorporated a great number of activities, and a range of places that were considered important to visit, see, and participate in, sacred places in their own rights. Effectively, long-distance pilgrimages were a linear series of pilgrimages, each shrine offering indulgences and other spiritual benefits that accumulated for the pilgrim, where s/he gave thanks for the journey thus far and took a “sacral recharge” to help him or her along the way.¹⁴⁹ Spicer and Coster call these routeways “veins of sacred force,” with the chapels, shrines, and wells erected along them acquiring their own status as holy ground.¹⁵⁰ Pilgrims might even turn the landscape into one of “stations” of religious observance, with the pilgrimage being a constant procession through sacred space. Early modern pilgrims relished the richness of religious services, relics, and indulgences they found along their routes. Domenico Laffi describes in detail the sights of the cathedrals of northern Italy. In Modena, the cathedral was noted for    

Archives municipales de Saint-Sever, GG 19. Castelao, “Chemin de Saint-Jacques,” 121– 22. Julia, “Curiosité, dévotion et politica peregrinesca,” 298. Coster and Spicer, Sacred Space, 9.

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its antiquity and the hallowed remains that lay there; in Reggio, he noted the remains of St. Prosper; Milan Cathedral was hugely rich in relics, the sacred nail given to St. Ambrose by the emperor Theodosius, eleven of the Holy Innocents and twenty-one other saints lay under the high altar, “countless relics” of saints, apostles, Christ, and the Virgin Mary and above all, the remains of St. Carlo Borromeo, dressed in episcopal vestments and housed in a glass coffin; and in Turin, there was the Holy Shroud.¹⁵¹ This continued in France. In Toulouse, an indulgence of Pius IV of 1561 was granted to visitors to the chapel of the hospital of Saint-Jacques on the Garonne bridge, almost certainly a stopping point for pilgrims, for bed, alms, or just prayers.¹⁵² In the church of Saint-Sernin, there were countless relics which Laffi noted “are kept in silver caskets and make a profoundly wonderful sight,” and in the cathedral, Laffi and his companions obtained an indulgence.¹⁵³ There were some sites which were major shrines in their own right, which also acted as nodes in wider pilgrimages. On the Compostelan routes there were a number of such important shrines and pilgrims noted their visits to them. Roncevalles was the traditional site of the death of Roland, nephew of Charlemagne, at the hands of Muslim troops and the bodies of the fallen were supposedly housed in the chapel, along with Roland’s horn. Santo Domingo de la Calzada in Spain was noted by most pilgrims who left accounts. Here, according to tradition, the intercession of St. James saved an innocent young man from death by hanging, testified by the revivification of a roasted cock and a hen before a skeptical judge. The fowls’ descendants were kept in the cathedral for pilgrims to see and from which souvenir feathers were obtained.¹⁵⁴ Laffi received indulgences here.¹⁵⁵ Manier also recounts devotions at the cathedral of Santo Domingo, where he heard the story of the innocent hanged and acquired some votive cockerel feathers.¹⁵⁶ Burgos had a number of shrines, but the most famous was a life-like statue of Christ in the Augustinian convent, which Laffi tells us was one of three made by Nicodemus: “indeed, this holy image would move the very stones to compassion, were they capable of feeling. It is so well made and has such a mournful expression that when people set eyes on it, it draws tears of pity.”¹⁵⁷ Manier also visited the famous statue and bought paper Christs,

      

Laffi, 17, 22– 23, 35 – 36. AD Haute-Garonne H dépôt 1, 2 B 3. Hôtel-Dieu Saint-Jacques Toulouse. Laffi, 79. Vega, Historia de la vida y milagros. Laffi, 129. Manier, 54. Laffi, 137.

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touched against the figure; he also visited the Augustinian convent of Oviedo, where he gained indulgences for touching relics and acquired two rosaries similarly held to the sacred objects.¹⁵⁸ Oviedo had long been an important shrine, with the cape of St. Idelphonsus, given to him by the Virgin Mary herself, kept in a sacred ark in the cathedral. Bartolomeo Fontana, who visited in 1539, stated that many indulgences were available and that he had attended all the masses he could in the cathedral. He listed all the relics held there, including the thirty pieces of silver, milk of the Virgin Mary, the flayed skin of St. Bartholomew, wine jars from Cana, and other pieces.¹⁵⁹ Traveling priests such as Laffi were anxious to find a church in which to say mass every day and indeed, the altars where he celebrated made the pilgrimage special. When Laffi arrived in an episcopal city, he went straight to the bishop for a dimissory letter, for permission to celebrate in the diocese. Highlights of his pilgrimage were his saying mass in Milan, in the cathedral of Embrun, the church of the Trinitarians in heretic-dominated Montpellier, the cathedral of Pamplona, and the altar of the Crucifix at the Augustinian convent of Burgos.¹⁶⁰ But he also said mass for a small community lacking a priest in Cenasa in the southeast of France, in a church that was “more like a winter refuge from the snow than a chapel” for it was built of brick with a thatched roof, and inside, the altar was so small he had difficulties placing vessels and books upon it.¹⁶¹ Laffi and other clerical observers were keen to note ritual differences: in a chapel in Roncevalles, he noted that mass had some different customs: “just before the elevation they consecrate the bread and cut it into little pieces. Then at the communion they dispense it by carrying it through the church in a bowl covered with a white napkin. Also, they kiss a large metal plate, where we would give one another the kiss of peace.”¹⁶² Further, Laffi and his companions gained much from participating in local rites and ceremonies, when they happened upon them. They attended the public showing of the shroud of Turin as they passed through the city; they were guests at a wedding in Cesana and a funeral in Pontferrada; they participated in the Corpus Christi procession in Orthez and a Holy Sacrament procession in Logroño.¹⁶³ They were also asked to say prayers for the dead in return for alms in a number of southern French churches, especially Montpellier, Castelnaudry, and Villefranche, where the locals asked them “to

     

Manier, 59. Fontana, Itinerario, 26. Laffi, 137. Laffi, 47. Laffi, 109. Laffi, 35, 93, 126, 131.

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go round the tombs, saying the De profundis and other prayers for the dead. We went around many tombs in this fashion, accompanied by the owners, all of whom gave alms.”¹⁶⁴ In Compostela, there were many clerical pilgrims wanting to say mass. In 1672, the chapter agreed to prepare two altars in the cathedral, where any priest could say mass between the opening of the door in the morning to midday.¹⁶⁵ When the cantor and canon François Hanneron came from Ypres in 1660, he was invited to join the choir for vespers, fully robed in Santiagan style.¹⁶⁶ The sacred journey did not only comprise visits to prominent shrines. Many communities adjacent to pilgrimage routes offered small-scale and often unremarked sacred sites for holy travelers. This had been particularly prominent in the later Middle Ages; in the early modern period, there was certainly a reduction in locally renowned places to visit, but still some resurgence after the religious wars had ended. Woodcock has found that the parish churches of Hambers and Bais, just off one of Mayenne’s western routes to the Mont Saint-Michel, underwent rebuilding in 1588 and 1612 respectively, marked with cockleshell decorations, perhaps to attract pilgrims off the route to visit chapels dedicated to St. Michael.¹⁶⁷ The wayside chapel of Saint-Jacques at Libourne was granted a papal indulgence in 1605 for passing pilgrims who called in to say prayers, on their way to Galicia.¹⁶⁸ In Spain, at Fromista, a eucharistic miracle had taken place at some point in the past, where “a wafer stuck to a paten rather than be given to an excommunicate” and was available to see.¹⁶⁹ Again, in a Benedictine monastery on the mountain of Cebrero a eucharistic miracle had taken place in 1300 and relics of this were available for pilgrims to see in the form of a wafer changed to the body of Christ and a phial of His blood.¹⁷⁰ Locals wanted to gain from passing pilgrims’ pious donations while holy travelers wanted special sites to see and experience, to give meaning to their journeys along the way. A feature of Counter-Reformation pilgrimage was the frequency with which pilgrims participated in the sacraments along the route to the shrine. A pilgrimage of the confraternity of Saint-Michel of Caen to the Mont in 1634, led by the son of the royal governor of the city, was conceived of as a sacramental journey, at least by the chaplains who wrote up the event for publication. The company

      

Laffi, 77. Ferreiro, 9:329. Ferreiro, 9:337. Dr. Philippa Woodcock, pers. comm. A.D. Gironde G 8. Actes du pouvoir archiépiscopal. Laffi, 140. Laffi, 156.

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spent its first night in Villedieu, where their priests sang mass at the church of the commandery of St. John; then Avranches, where the party sang none and vespers in the cathedral, then on the Mont Saint-Michel itself. The return journey went via Coutances cathedral and mass; Saint-Lô, with prayers and mass in the church; Bayeux cathedral, again with mass, returning to Caen for a final Te Deum. ¹⁷¹ In the eighteenth century, the Neapolitan pilgrim to Compostela, Nicolà Albani went to confession in the south of France whenever he encountered an Italian-speaking priest; in Spain, he confessed at Montserrat, Saragossa, and Madrid, where again Italian confessors could be found, and at Compostela he undertook a general confession lasting for over four hours. In Albani’s case, confession and eucharist were linked to his great interest in gaining indulgences, which he notes with satisfaction in his account of his travels.¹⁷²

Conclusions The journey to a shrine and the return home was psychologically testing and physically arduous, the more so if it lasted weeks or months. The journey was not merely about walking. It was, as Candy states, “about a broad spectrum of meaningful individual and communal activities”; it is possible to conceptualize a pilgrimage routeway not merely by the specific geographical points along the way, but “as a continuum of experiences and meanings, an unbroken narrative in which place and landscape play a consistently active role.”¹⁷³ For our early modern travelers, the narrative imposed on the journey was biblical in conception. To provide spiritual succor, the pilgrim was encouraged to see the voyage as a reconstruction of the life of Christ or the Jewish Exodus. The material landscape was seen in allegorical terms: wilderness, desert, Siloam, with a new Jerusalem at the end. There was continuity with early periods, for the medieval pilgrim was also a traveler through a Passion-scape. Tomasi’s argument with which we began, that penitentialism as the dominant trope for pilgrimage gave way to interiority in the early modern period, seems to be only partly substantiated by the evidence of pilgrims’ accounts. Individual prayer, meditation, and careful personal behavior was counseled and often followed by Tridentine authors, but such actions were underpinned with a traditional theology of penitence and good works. It is also apparent that

 Saint-Martin, Voyage fait au Mont Saint-Michel, see all.  Julia, “Curiosité, dévotion et politica peregrinesca,” 299, 301.  Candy, Archaeology of Pilgrimage, 22.

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this performed religiosity was intermittent and often site-specific, when pilgrims entered local sacred places, the chapels, churches, and shrines along the way. Between times, they sang, complained, fought with their companions, and got on with the business of walking to their next night’s rest. But they also sang sacred canticles, gave thanksgiving for small mercies, and often stayed within religious accommodation. Again, continuities of penance and community were nuanced by new developments of personal prayer. Mundanity aside, the journey to a shrine was still a ritual action, a demonstration of religious belief and a statement of identity, in which the distinctive apparel and walking with purpose were key. The ritual of “sending out” from the home church of the pilgrim; asking for alms and accommodation along the way; behavior in hostels and inns; honor given to wayside chapels and crosses; accumulation of indulgences and graces at stations of the journey, all were done with a clearly performed persona, that of Roman Catholic and holy traveler. To describe the experience as liminal is to put it beyond normal behavior, when the large numbers of pilgrims tramping the roads of early modern northwest Europe made it a commonly encountered experience. But taking on the pilgrim role did put oneself outside of the daily routine and familiar community, suspending duties and commitments, relying on the kindness of strangers, even if one traveled with companions from home. It was for this reason an activity bounded with protection of God and the saints, but also law and custom. The experience of the long-distance journey changed over the early modern period. In particular, the infrastructure of pilgrimage flowed and ebbed. In France, in the second half of the sixteenth century, damage and destruction of shrines and hostels was caused by civil war and Huguenot attack. There was some restitution in the first half of the seventeenth century as town communities and pious patrons restored buildings and endowments, but never on the scale of the later Middle Ages. In Spain, institutional support for pilgrims continued but its scope and quality was abraded in many communities, through late sixteenthcentury inflation and intermittent agrarian crises across the period. In both kingdoms across the seventeenth century, the needs of the local poor led to the rationalization of hospital provision, especially the creation of general hospitals that also served as workhouses, which reduced accommodation for religious travelers. War and economic problems of the later seventeenth century also served to reduce traffic. Attitudes to pilgrims also changed, with increased suspicion of itineracy by rulers. Philip II and his successors in Spain, then Louis XIV and XV in France, regulated movement through licensing, passports, and a slowly growing disdain for religious movement and mendicancy. By the mid-eighteenth century, pilgrims might even be arrested for vagrancy as physical journey-

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ing for spiritual purposes to the ancient shrines seemed needless to the secular authorities. Yet the Counter-Reformation Church also valued heroic effort, and holy travel continued up to the French Revolution and beyond. Thomas Csordas suggests that bodily acts should be seen not as outward material manifestations of something else, such as belief, but as generative processes that constitute belief.¹⁷⁴ Pilgrimage was a form of travel “undertaken and executed with a primary concern for the meanings discovered, created, and communicated as persons move through geographical space in stylistically specified ways.”¹⁷⁵ As Candy states, “just as the Catholic tradition of the Stations of the Cross is not a simple processional movement, but a punctuated journey that involves certain procedures at given intervals, a pilgrimage may incorporate a great number of activities and a great range of places that are considered important to visit, see and participate in.”¹⁷⁶ These shifted and changed with the interests and devotions of pilgrims, over time. But the aspiration of experiencing divine grace and power in a specific place, the shrine, the journey’s end, remained constant. We now arrive at the holy destination, to examine the pilgrim’s experience of sacred space and time.

 Mitchell and Mitchell, “For Belief,” 84.  Adler, “Travel as Performed Art,” 1368.  Candy, Archaeology of Pilgrimage, 22.

Chapter 4 The Shrine: Experience of Sacred Time and Space I went ahead by a league, alone, to be the first to see the bell tower, which I saw. There are three stone bell towers: that of the Jesuits built by the English [and] two of Saint James’s church, built in the same style … Having seen them, I threw my hat in the air and let my comrades know … Catching up with me, they all avowed that I was the king.¹

Guillaume Manier’s record of his first visual encounter with Santiago de Compostela captures the excited anticipation of the traveler approaching the end of a long journey. Whatever the initial motive might have been, or the adventures along the way, it was visiting the shrine itself that was the central purpose of the pilgrim’s expectations. The pilgrim journeyed to experience sanctity at a tangible site or place. The churches, relics, and other holy materials provided the pilgrim with “a point of reference where the faithful may orientate themselves both physically and spiritually, and in which it is possible to encounter the divine.”² The experience of sacred space is the focus of this chapter. Individual historians and anthropologists differ in their views of what shrines meant and mean to different pilgrims.³ What is clear from the testimony of early modern pilgrims, is that the main purpose of visiting a shrine was a personal, physical encounter with the sacred. The first interest of many pilgrims was communication with the relics or the place where the patron saint acted. Physical contact between a pilgrim and the saint endowed a material link between the two. There was an emotional response in being so close to the site of divine actions, what Alphonse Dupront calls “the sacral charge.”⁴ Pilgrimages were made to shrines “for the express purpose of touching, or coming in as close contact as possible to, the saintly bones contained therein.”⁵ If the relic could not be

 Manier, 2.  Eliade, Sacred and the Profane, 63.  Victor Turner argued that shrines, although frequently located in geographically remote locations, functioned as islands of sacred space and divine presence. Turner and Turner, Image and Pilgrimage, 225 – 26. Simon Coleman and John Elsner mistrusted this single interpretation of shrines and argued instead that such sites are better seen as “empty vessels” into which different hopes, ideas, and outlooks are discharged, a sacred site’s authority coming from its ability to accommodate, absorb, and reflect a variety of religious views and needs. Coleman and Elsner, Pilgrimage Past and Present, discussion in epilogue, 196 – 220.  Dupront, Du sacré, 441.  Classen, The Deepest Sense, 37. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501514388-007

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accessed directly, then its container, whether a tomb or reliquary, was touched. Miracles were also a vital part of the reputation of a shrine and sanctuaries did not remain popular if wonders diminished.⁶ At an important thaumaturgical shrine such as Notre-Dame de Liesse, miracles were part of its fabric. In 1608, François de la Rue wrote that several took place every day and 200 were recorded for the period 1582– 1776.⁷ Cures from illnesses and rescue from accidents were the most commonly occurring miracles, duly recorded by shrine guardians as future witness to the efficacy of their saint. There was a tension, however, between pilgrim enthusiasm for relics and miracles and the prescriptions of the Council of Trent with regard to the veneration of saints. The final session of the Council in December 1563 ruled that it was legitimate to invoke saints and venerate their remains which during their earthly lives had been “living members of Christ and the temple of the Holy Spirit,” but it was enjoined upon bishops to eliminate superstition and to ensure that worship at shrines was honest, decent, and orderly.⁸ Further, Dominique Julia argues that in the Counter-Reformation, there was an attempt to redefine the emotional engagement with the sacred, away from touching towards sight, the “devotional gaze,” rather than the “panicky and wild touching” of the relic.⁹ The aesthetic of the sumptuous baroque reliquary, which exposed more and more of relics to the public view, was an important result, against which pilgrim artifacts—medals, rosaries, ribbons, etc.—could be touched by presiding clergy. For, whatever the official view was, in the early modern period the seeing and touching of relics remained an important feature of the pilgrim experience. At the three main shrines examined in this study, relics and miracles appears to have been of lesser importance for pilgrims: it was the place that was sought after. St. James’s shrine had a first-class relic in the body of the apostle, but the Mont Saint-Michel and Lough Derg had few important pieces or none. At other ancient shrines, healing was still important, but often through bathing in wells (Saint-Méen and Saint-Reine, for example) or the application of curative materials (Saint-Hubert) and above all the holy sacrament, as much as the veneration of holy artifacts. Marc Forster’s observations on relics in Germany appear to be true for Atlantic-edge shrines as well: that despite an active trade in sacred remains, particularly early martyrs acquired from Rome, they no longer attracted popular devotion as they had in the fifteenth century.¹⁰ For the three core sites  Bergin, Church, Society and Religious Change, 251.  Maës, Notre-Dame de Liesse, 117– 19.  “Decrees of the Council of Trent” in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2:796 – 97.  Julia, “Identité pèlerine,” 234.  Forster, Catholic Revival, 75.

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examined in this book, there were also few recorded miracles in the early modern period; long-distance pilgrimage rarely ended in healing. Those that were recorded, all happened at a distance and the pilgrims traveled to give thanks for intercession that occurred elsewhere. For visitors to these shrines, experience was uppermost. The topography of a site, its natural, and its architectural setting, gave significance to traditions and stories, which themselves formed and validated spiritual responses.¹¹ At these as with many other shrines, a holy topography was created and curated, directly framing the religious and physical experience of a site. That experience was mediated through rituals, gestures, and emotions. The pilgrim engaged in a series of structured activities, each with their own theological and mythic rationale. How each individual pilgrim engaged with, responded to, understood, and remembered the facilities and experiences of the shrine, was unique to themselves. This will be explored below.

Visiting the Saint: The Curation of Sacred Space—From Touch to Sight The effectiveness of pilgrimage as an individual spiritual experience was “dependent on the establishment of a symbiotic relationship between the pilgrim and the site” for a place is made sacred and given devotional meaning through “forms of spatial practice.”¹² The pilgrim’s experience of sacred space was one of curated and controlled movement, a series of “stations” of objects and areas visited. Julie Candy argues that the “rhetoric of landscape” can be used to make it understood as holy; sites of religious encounter can be created through material culture and through the management of the actual physical dimensions of place.¹³ This was also achieved by having gradations of sacrality within a space, for example, the church within the churchyard, the chapel within the church, the altar within the chapel: “Christians crossed boundaries of holiness between different zones, or had their representative, the priest, cross these boundaries on their behalf, moving closer to the holy. In this way, sacred space defined religious experience.”¹⁴ Sacred art and architecture determined the routeways taken by pilgrims around sites and the prayers and actions they performed. Further, movement was highly ritualized. Classen argues that for most people

   

Candy, Archaeology of Pilgrimage, 21. Newhauser and Russell, “Mapping Virtual Pilgrimage,” 100. Candy, Archaeology of Pilgrimage, 21. Coster and Spicer, Sacred Space, 9.

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“the role of touch in religion did not primarily concern mystical experience or theological commentaries but embodied practice … Everyday religious practice involved a number of essential ritual gestures: crossing oneself, bowing, kneeling, placing one’s hands together in prayer, and giving the kiss of peace.”¹⁵ The devotional activities of pilgrims as individuals and groups were, as Forster states, frequently those of everyday Catholicism at the shrines, including communal processions, prayers, confession, and communion. The pilgrim would pray—sometimes privately and often aloud—and sing canticles. The Lord’s Prayer, Hail Mary, Salve Regina, and Credo were frequently recited. Forster argues that the prevalence of these practices indicates the extent to which popular religion was practiced within the framework of official church liturgy.¹⁶ Further, the landscape of a shrine consisted not only of the physical terrain but also the myths, traditions, and narratives associated with it, so that “in progressing through the physical geography, a pilgrim travels and lives through a terrain of culturally constructed symbols.”¹⁷ The pilgrim therefore experienced a holy site as a physical, spiritual, and emotional encounter. Furthermore, this encounter changed over the post-Reformation period because of alterations to church plans and architecture as new liturgical priorities emerged. Contacts with saints’ relics and movement around holy sites were transformed, leading pilgrims to engage with sacred objects in different ways. The cathedral which housed the shrine of St. James at Compostela underwent physical modifications over time, such that the pilgrim’s visual experience of the site altered. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, there were four “must-see” sights for pilgrims: the cathedral itself, the high altar and statue of the saint, the reliquary of St. James with his remains, and a collection of subsidiary relics from across Christian history kept within the church. There were more sights within the city itself and further away, towards the coast of Finisterra. We get an idea of the experiences of the medieval pilgrim of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, from Leo of Rozmital, a Bohemian nobleman, who traveled with his entourage to Compostela in 1466. Rozmital’s visit occurred at a time of political turbulence in the region, when the cathedral was being used as a strong house for the bishop’s faction in a local dispute between nobles. Despite this, the party gained entry, confessed, and received absolution, then visited the relics kept in the church: the high altar over the tomb of St. James beside which, hang Classen, The Deepest Sense, 31.  Forster, Catholic Revival, 84.  Coleman and Elsner, Pilgrimage Past and Present, 212; the final section of Virginia Reinburg’s study of pilgrimage examines the relationship between myth, history, and sacred place. Reinburg, Storied Places.

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ing by an iron chain, was the sickle with which the saint was beheaded. They were shown the staff which the saint carried, which was encased in lead, with the iron ferrule at the lower end available to be touched by pilgrims. Afterwards, other relics were shown: the head of St. James the Less, a thorn of Christ’s crown, a piece of the holy cross, and the banner of St. James which the Christians carried in war against the heathen.¹⁸ Later in the century, in the 1490s, the German nobleman Arnold von Harff had a similar visit, noting that the altar had a great wooden shrine on it, on which was a silver crown; pilgrims ascended the altar and placed the crown on their heads.¹⁹ In these accounts, pilgrims had some access to the high altar and relics of the saint. By the mid-sixteenth century, pilgrims’ experiences at many shrines across Europe were being curated in subtly different ways, with more restricted physical access to the high altar and even to relics themselves in some places. In the Middle Ages, shrines containing holy bodies were frequently placed in the heart of the sanctuary, at the east end of the church, behind the high altar itself or more frequently, in the retro-choir; they were invisible from the nave but accessible from the ambulatory—and because pilgrims had to access shrines in this way, entry could be regulated. Such were the great shrines of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury and those at Rheims, Beauvais, and Amiens, all of which were cathedral churches. Other shrines might be placed in chapels in the ambulatory.²⁰ In many of the greater churches of Catholic Europe, the positioning of relics changed over the Counter-Reformation period. Renovations from the later sixteenth century onwards saw the repositioning of holy remains. For example, in Angers cathedral, before the restoration of the early eighteenth century, three reliquary caskets were located on the altar of the retro-choir. This area was demolished, and a new high altar constructed at the entrance to the choir, under which the reliquary of St. Maurille was placed while the reliquaries of Saints René and Sérène were placed in the base of transept pillars, behind wrought iron grills. This had the benefit of making them easily accessible and visible, especially to the confraternities, and reduced the need for pilgrims to access the sacred clerical space of the chancel of the church. Thus, there was a general tendency to make relics more visible to visitors to the church while removing them from close proximity to the site of the eucharist on the high altar.²¹

   

“Schaseck’s Account,” in Rozmital, Travels of Leo of Rozmital, 116 – 17. Harff, Pilgrimage of Arnold von Harff, 275. Lors, “Cathédrales, reliques et pèlerinages,” 110. Lors, “Cathédrales, reliques et pèlerinages,” 113, 120.

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Figure 4.1: Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. West Front (© Martin Tingle)

The cathedral of Santiago underwent some important modifications to its fabric in the early sixteenth century.²² The first alteration was to the west porch (figure 4.1). Originally it was permanently open, such that pilgrims could enter at any time of the night or day. But in the 1520s, doors were erected to control access. The cathedral chapter was increasingly intolerant of what it considered to be profane behavior in the sanctuary: “having information of the scandals, disorders, and other inconveniences which take place each night in this church, which, being open, attracts many dishonest people to sleep here,” they decided in 1529, that henceforth the cathedral would be closed for the night when the curfew bell rang.²³ It appears to have been unsystematically enforced at first, but the order was reissued in 1541. Across the middle decades of the century, the medieval cloisters were rebuilt because they had become too small for the chapter’s business. New galleries were opened off the walks, a sacristy, a chapter house, and a library-archive all provided better accommodation

 Details below are taken from Villa-Amil y Castro, Description.  Ferreiro, 8:57– 58.

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for the canons, and more chapels were made in which to celebrate pilgrims’ votive masses and hear confessions. The Capella mayor—high altar and choir area —was embellished with a new wrought iron screen in the early 1540s and there were additions to the retable, to display the holy sacrament better. A highly decorative silver gilt pyx used in the annual Corpus Christi processions was placed prominently on the altar and used as a tabernacle.²⁴ The choir continued to be physically separated from the nave, but the liturgies performed there could be seen clearly through the grilles by visitors to the cathedral, as a description of 1581 by the Venetian pilgrim B. Bourdelot relates.²⁵ The shrine itself (figure 4.2) was altered in two main ways in this period. Early in the sixteenth century, the twelfth-century statue of the saint positioned above the high altar, started to be dressed as a pilgrim. The most important change came in 1589, with the removal of the reliquary containing the remains of the saint, from under the altar to a place of safekeeping, with fears of English privateer raids on the city. In May of that year, Francis Drake led a raid on la Coruña in which twenty churches were sacked and burnt, with the privateers claiming to seek the destruction of Santiago, “principal emporium of papistical superstition.”²⁶ The relics then remained in hiding until the nineteenth century. Pilgrims could still see the head relic, but attention shifted to focus more closely on personal engagement with the statue, and general visiting of other holy objects in the cathedral’s collection. Further, new pulpits were added to the transept pilasters in 1578, for readings and sermons in the church, one for the Gospel side (north) and one for the Epistle side (south). Erich Lassota von Stebelow, a Polish-Silesian nobleman in military service with Philip II of Spain, made the pilgrimage to Compostela in 1581 and described the cathedral as it was just before the removal of the reliquary: it has two vaults or two superimposed churches; the upper one has an ambulatory which allows one to walk around it; beneath the high altar, covered with gold and silver gilt, girded with a fine grill, lies the body of the holy apostle St. James the Great accompanied by his two disciples Theodore and Athanasius. Above the altar is a sculpture of St. James surmounted with a great golden crown which pilgrims customarily put on.²⁷

Ambrosio de Morales, who visited in 1572, in the course of making an inventory of relics for Philip II, describes the statue as being of stone, slightly smaller than  Ferreiro, 8:180, 190 ff.  Idígoras, “Peregrino veneciano,” 339.  Ferreiro, 8:307.  “Diary of Erich Lassota de Steblovo (1580 – 84),” in Viajes de extranjeros, ed. Garcia Mercadal, 2:425.

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Figure 4.2: Shrine of St. James, Santiago de Compostela. Nineteenth-century reliquary (© Martin Tingle)

life-sized, gilded and painted, with one hand raised in benediction while in the other hand the saint held a book. Lassota tells us that pilgrims visited the high altar, then other relics in the church, then made their confession.²⁸ He also described the relics available to see in the cathedral. The choir, before the high altar, was enclosed by a magnificent screen of which the final column was made of hollow metal, which contained the staff of St. James, moved from its former position against the high altar. There were saints’ relics housed in a sacristy,

 “Diary of Erich Lassota de Steblovo,” in Viajes de extranjeros, ed. Garcia Mercadal, 2:426.

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in a large and fine cupboard, which were shown to pilgrims twice a day. Morales states that the most important relic was the head of St. James, held separately from the body, contained in a bust reliquary of silver gilt, with a diadem of rays and all decorated with semi-precious stones.²⁹ Lassota tells us that two further notable objects were the so-called horn of Roland, which had hung over the high altar in the early sixteenth century, and the great thurible hanging over the crossing—the botafumeiro—in use from at least the thirteenth century.³⁰ By the first part of the seventeenth century, the high altar and choir may have been looking rather old fashioned at Santiago. Bernardo de Aldrete, who with other clergy from Cordoba visited the shrine in 1612, commented that there was no altarpiece or retable, only a “bank” on which was a small silvergilt monstrance containing the holy sacrament and above, the statue of St. James.³¹ The seventeenth century saw important reconstructions to the cathedral.³² The west front was rebuilt on a grander scale, with a monumental staircase up to the porch constructed in 1606, and the two towers transformed from Romanesque to baroque style. The famous “Holy Door” was constructed, for jubilee years when it was opened in ceremonial style by the archbishop of Santiago and which became quickly became a “station” on the pilgrim’s tour. Inside, the choir was remodeled with wooden stalls. The altar remained that of the later Middle Ages, with a frontispiece and retable showing figures of saints, until it was remodeled in the 1670s, including the erection of a baldequin canopy. The statue of the apostle was raised above and placed in a tabernacle, overlooking the altar, still accessible from the rear for pilgrims to touch, via a stair-cased raised passage-way crossing behind the altar. It was not until the 1740s that the great baroque west front—the Obradeiro façade—was constructed, to contain the twelfth-century Romanesque “porch of glory.” The pilgrim thus encountered a monumental baroque style that expressed the glory of the Church Triumphant. The most detailed account of pilgrims’ rituals at the shrine of St. James comes from the Italian priest Domenico Laffi, who visited three times in the later 1660s, after alterations to the cathedral. Many of the pilgrimage rituals remained the same as in former times, however, for there was a deep tradition of gesture and action. In their first sightings of the city, Laffi and his companions were deeply affected by their approach to Compostela. As they entered the final day of their outward journey, they found a spring, washed themselves, and changed their clothes. They climbed a hill he called Monte del Gozo, about    

Morales, Viage, 124. “Diary of Erich Lassota de Steblovo,” in Viajes de extranjeros, ed. Garcia Mercadal, 2:425 – 26. Lapaz, “El ‘Diario del viaje a Santiago,’” 376. Details in this paragraph are from Villa-Amil y Castro, Description.

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half a league from Compostela and on seeing the city, they knelt and sang the Te Deum. Their emotion was high, Laffi records “we had sung no more than two or three verses when we found ourselves unable to utter the words because of the copious tears which streamed from our eyes, so intense were our feelings. Our hearts were full, and our unceasing tears made us give up singing, until finally, having unburdened ourselves and spent our tears, we resumed singing.”³³ Thus they entered the suburbs of Compostela. Once arrived, Laffi and his companions went immediately to the cathedral, where they knelt before the high altar and gave thanks for their safe arrival. Then, they went behind the high altar, climbed some steps, and embraced the image of St. James there. The relics were no longer accessible to pilgrims, so they kissed the life-sized statue. Laffi noted that pilgrims hung their hats and capes on the statue while they embraced it.³⁴ The following day, Laffi returned to the cathedral to say mass and then attended high mass in all its splendor with the archbishop and nine canons wearing full pontifical vestments. The pilgrims stayed for another three days, saying and attending mass and vespers every evening.³⁵ They visited further relics and objects over the duration of the visit. Laffi noted the Holy Door, open only in jubilee years, whenever the feast of St. James falls on a Sunday.³⁶ On his final morning in the city, he visited the great reliquary chapel of St. James. The most notable relics were the cross and the staff which St. James carried on his travels, still housed in bronze columns attached to the choir screen, opposite the high altar.³⁷ Pilgrims including Laffi could journey on to Padrón where it was believed the saint preached and where there was a church built over a spring where St. James supposedly drank. There was also a stone on which his body was supposed to have been laid or which was reputed to have been the boat in which he sailed from Jerusalem. On the final day Laffi and his companions received their certificates or Compostelas, and then they departed.³⁸ The French pilgrim and traveler Albert Jouvin visited at about the same time as Laffi, publishing an account of his travels in 1672. He described the relics of St. James as residing under the high altar and a statue of the saint nearby, which pilgrims climbed up a staircase to embrace three times, kiss and place their hats on its head. He also described the typical activities of viewing the staff of St.

     

Laffi, 161. Laffi, 163. Laffi, 171– 73. Laffi, 164. Laffi, 179. Laffi, 183.

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James next to the choir; the French Chapel where pilgrims who had confessed took their communion and received a certificate, their Compostela; the Chapel of St. James on the left-hand side of the nave, decorated and gilded and where the Knights of Santiago were received, and on the right-hand side of the nave, a “great room” where the relics of the treasury were shown, twice a day. In addition, there were several tombs or monuments in the cloisters which were shown to pilgrims. Jouvin also walked on the roof of the cathedral, where he remarked on an iron cross covered in tiny pieces of cloth, which came from the clothes of pilgrims who slid on their stomachs under the cross, through a small space, believing this a necessary part of their pilgrimage.³⁹ The affective nature of the encounter with the sacred can also be seen in Nicolà Albani’s account. When the Neapolitan first saw the towers of St. James at Compostela, he knelt on the ground and kissed it many times, took off his shoes and walked barefoot to the city, singing litanies. Albani describes that on entering the cathedral of St. James: I felt as if my heart had lit up and outside of me, had entered into paradise. My legs and whole body trembled, my head turned this way and that, my eyes looked here and there for the mysterious chapel of the glorious saint, and once I had found the main chapel I knelt and bent my face to the blessed ground, and gave great thanks to him [St. James], whom I owed for the many graces bestowed on me during my journey.⁴⁰

The personal, spiritual experience of the pilgrimage is clear. The pilgrim felt a great personal attachment to St. James through the experience of spending time in the cathedral-shrine. The Mont Saint-Michel pilgrim did not travel to seek communion with the holy relics of a saint, for this was an apparition site where the archangel had left no physical traces (figure 4.3). Rather, they came, often as part of a community, to honor vows for graces received at some distance from the shrine. Despite the differences in the nature of the shrines, the pilgrim experience at the Mont was similar to that of at Compostela, in that the visit was largely comprised thanksgiving, masses, and tours of sacred relics. The relics were mostly kept in the treasury, with a few in chapels inside and around the main church. The abbey housed quite an extensive collection of sacred objects, even if they were secondary to the prime purpose of the site. There were 214 pieces collected before the Reformation, and thirty-two acquired after 1600. They included the  Jouvin, Voyageur d’Europe, 1:167.  The text is published in Albani, Viaje de Napoles a Santiago de Galicia but an on-line transcript of the Compostelan pilgrimage in Italian is available at http://diariosdeperegrinos.dx.am/ nicola.albani.htm. Discussed in Julia, “Curiosité, dévotion et politica peregrinesca,” 297.

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Figure 4.3: The Mont Saint-Michel, Normandy (© Martin Tingle)

skull and body of St. Aubert, the founder; for St. Michael, there was a piece of marble and a fragment of the archangel’s cape from Monte Gargano; there were also various fragmentary relics of apostles, martyrs, and evangelists of northwest France, donated during the long history of the abbey.⁴¹ François Neveux comments that the collection was similar to those of other abbey churches; it was not outstanding, but it did give material evidence for the apparition of the archangel and offered a variety of Christological and apostolic fragments along with relics of martyrs and bishops.⁴² While there are no surviving records of miracles resulting from the touching of relics, they still provided a presencing, rendering an immaterial cult visible. Claude Haton provided a description of the typical pilgrim’s visit to the Mont Saint-Michel in the 1570s, in his account of an attempted Protestant seizure of the abbey during the religious wars. Pilgrims were led over the sands of the bay by a guide, then climbed the 120 stairs through the little town up to the abbey church. There, they asked one of the monks to say mass for them. They purchased and lit candles, and held them, kneeling, to hear the service. When offered the paten to make a donation and the pax to kiss for peace, Haton relates

 A list of the main relics at the site is found in Dubuisson, Itinéraire de Bretagne, 1:34.  Neveux, “Reliques du Mont Saint-Michel,” 245.

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how a disguised Calvinist produced a pistol and attempted to seize the Mont.⁴³ In 1634, Pierre de Rosivignan’s party from Caen marched to the sound of their tambours up the road to the abbey, where the leader proclaimed three times “Sanct Michell, ora pro nobis” to which the company responded; they said prayers to the saint and heard a sung mass. Afterwards, the company “continued its devotions” by visiting the many relics and went on tours of the abbey buildings.⁴⁴ Similarly in 1634, a party of 300 men from the town of Lisieux traveled on pilgrimage to the Mont. They left their arms at the gate of the town—as was the custom—and climbed to the abbey, where they entered the church. Their clergy sang high mass at the pilgrim’s altar of St. Michael, known as the high altar, which was at the crossing of the choir and the nave.⁴⁵ Again, in May 1647, a party of forty men from the parish of Courtemont in the diocese of Le Mans sang “hymns, verses and praises” in honor of the archangel, before St. Michael’s altar in the church.⁴⁶ More socially elevated pilgrims might receive special honors. In 1576, the duchess of Bourbon visited the Mont on the feast of St. Aubert on June 18, along with her seven children and a party of 300 people. At 8 a.m., the prior and monks in their copes led by a crucifer, processed down to the gate of the Mont and at 9 a.m., accompanied the duchess and her party up to the church. They “listened devoutly” to mass, had dinner at the abbot’s lodgings, did a tour of the monastery and departed at 3 p.m.⁴⁷ A century later, in 1665, the duke of Mazarin, lieutenant-general of the king in Brittany, visited the Mont following a meeting of the Estates of Brittany at Vitré. He was met at the foot of the Mont by all the monks in their vestments and the prior and two cantors in copes; a speech was made; he and his party were aspersed with holy water, and the duke was offered a baldequin under which to process up to the abbey church. The duke refused for modesty’s sake, to the approbation of the monk-chronicler De Huynes and in contrast to Monsieur de Montausier, governor of Normandy, who had visited in 1663.⁴⁸ Visits to the ancient, far-away shrines of Compostela and the Mont were typically short in duration and remained so across the seventeenth century. There was a move in this period elsewhere, for shrine visiting to take longer, with prolonged sets of rituals and specific cycles of devotions. We see this primarily at the

     

Haton, Mémoires de Claude Haton, 2:895 – 96. Saint-Martin, Voyage fait au Mont Saint-Michel. Le Roy, 454. Le Roy, 579. Le Roy, 359. Huynes, 2:56 – 57.

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healing shrines, initially at those dedicated to the Virgin Mary, then at other thaumaturgical places. Pilgrims could stay for short stays, but the full experience came from a longer sojourn. For example, the pilgrimage to Notre-Dame de Liesse in Picardy, traditionally took nine days, for pilgrims undertook the neuvaine, a series of nine days of prayers at the sanctuary.⁴⁹ At Saint-Méen, pilgrims seeking cures could stay longer, to bathe regularly in the well and to pray. Records of the hospital of Saint-Yves at Rennes for 1650 – 1651 show that Jacques Auffray and his son stayed for three months; Martin Bachelier and his wife stayed for ten days, and André Corbeau stayed eighteen days.⁵⁰ In contrast, Compostelan visits typically lasted three or four days, just a tiny part of the time spent journeying to and from the site. Bartolomeo Fontana, visiting from Venice in 1539, stayed three nights: he arrived on September 18 or 19, making his confession to a Venetian priest on the 19th; on the 20th, he took communion “with great devotion, and all the day I spent in seeing many beautiful things,” then the next day he took the road towards home.⁵¹ Guillaume Manier and his companions spent three nights or four days at Compostela in 1728, arriving on November 1 and leaving on the 4th. This was the length of stay allowed at the pilgrims’ hostel and for most pilgrims, it was typical.⁵² Visits to the Mont were even shorter, half a day, arrivals and departures dictated by the tides. André Landays of Nantes visited the Mont in 1622, arriving at the shrine at 6.30 a.m., as the tide ebbed, attended mass, purchased souvenirs, ate dinner at an inn, and left the Mont at 2 p.m., before the tide closed the causeway.⁵³ The pilgrimage to St. Patrick’s Purgatory in northwest Ireland was different to that of Compostela and the Mont Saint-Michel. Firstly, it was an experience or a devotional landscape rather than a shrine as such for it possessed no relics. Experiential sites grew in popularity in the Counter-Reformation, a development from medieval church and city stations of the cross and Monti Sacri sites in Italy. Entire landscapes were created for pilgrims to move around, pray, and meditate, to augment the devotional experience. For example, at Notre-Dame de Verdelais, south of Bordeaux, the Celestine Father Proust, who served the shrine from 1670, created a new road to the church for pilgrims journeying from the local river port on the Garonne, which passed through woods and over a hill, along which four chapels were constructed in grottoes in a form of Mont Sacrée, representing the

 Maës, Notre-Dame de Liesse, 58.  Brilloit, “Population pérégrine,” 267– 68.  Fontana, Itinerario, 28.  Manier, 73, 88.  André Landays, “Voyage du Mont Sainct-Michel 1622,” in Croix, Moi, Jean Martin, recteur de Plouvellec, 92.

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Annunciation, the Crucifixion, and the deposition, where pilgrims could meditate the mysteries of the rosary.⁵⁴ At Lough Derg, the whole, impressive natural landscape was particularly important, and Catherine McKenna suggests there may have been something profoundly Irish about the way the shrine was perceived. She argues that “reverence for the sacred dead in Ireland was in the Middle Ages so profoundly implicated with memory, and memory of persons and events so profoundly implicated with topography, that the European Christian cult of bones and other bodily remains failed fully to take hold. Instead, Irish Christians came to value objects associated with their saints rather than their disinterred and enshrined bodies.”⁵⁵ This led to a focus “on body as terrain, as very particular earth and the water that flows from it.”⁵⁶ In the post-Reformation period, natural sites in the Irish landscape such as Lough Derg “acquired spiritual value through similar processes in which tradition attracted votaries, and their devotion gave rise to new narratives that were inscribed in the earth of the place, multiplying and intensifying its significance.”⁵⁷ The second difference between the Purgatory and the shrines of St. James and St. Michael was that the stay was typically longer, as with the continental Marian or healing shrines, in the early modern period, typically nine to ten days. Even more than with other sites, the experience of the pilgrim changed over the Catholic Reformation, for the shrine was destroyed and rebuilt on numerous occasions, each time impacting on at least some of the activities at the site. The medieval pilgrimage to Lough Derg was by tradition created to give a foretaste of Purgatory to the living.⁵⁸ The pilgrim spent fifteen days in prayer and fasting on Saints’ Island, a preparation which concluded with confession and Holy Communion. Then, the pilgrim participated in a twenty-four-hour vigil in the “Purgatory,” often described as a cave or a pit, during which s/he might see visions and experience the tortures of the other-world.⁵⁹ Thus, a pilgrims’ pass from the Archbishop of Armagh for two French priests and their serv-

 Duclot, Verdelais à travers les siècles, 34– 35.  McKenna, “Gone to Ground,” 61.  McKenna, “Gone to Ground,” 61.  McKenna, “Gone to Ground,” 74.  The best-known contemporary history of the Purgatory and of the life of St. Patrick is found in the work of the Franciscan Messingham, Florilegium Insulæ Sanctorum, produced in the College in Paris.  For one of the earliest discussions of the origins of the Purgatory see Campion, Historie of Ireland, 10. For a fifteenth-century description, see Delehaye, “Pèlerinage de Laurent de Pászthó.”

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ant, stated, “they watched for a certain time and contended in contemplation with the arms of Christ our Redeemer against diabolical frauds and fantastical temptations, and devoutly completed their Pilgrimages and imploring the merits and prayers of the said Saint to the Most High.”⁶⁰ A monk of Eynstadt who visited in 1494 was: let down by the Sacristan by a rope into a deep Pit. As soon as he was there, he reached him a little bread and a pitcher of water by means of the rope to refresh him in his coming conflict with demons. He sat then in the Pit terrified and trembling all night: but offering fervent prayers to the Lord in his horror of the momentary approach of demons. And when he had sat from evening to morning, and when the sun rose the Sacristan came to the opening of the Pit, calling him and letting down the rope for his escape.⁶¹

After the destruction of the site in 1497 and its reopening six years later, pilgrimage activities changed. Once the cave was closed, the Purgatory moved from the underground chamber used in the Middle Ages, to enclosed cabins. It may have moved to Station Island (figure 4.4), although this may always have been the location of the site, it is unclear. Here, otherworldly visions faded, and penitential exercises were foregrounded. The Italian Papal Nuncio Chiericati visited the island in 1517 and recorded: On the day of your arrival you make your will if you have anything to leave. Then you confess and fast on bread and water for nine days and visit the three cabins [of the saints] every hour, saying any number of prayers. And you have to stand in the Lake, some up to the knees, others half-way up their bodies and some up to their necks. At the end of nine days you hear Mass, communicate, and are blessed and signed with holy water, and go with the cross before you to the gate of St. Patrick’s well. Then you go inside, and the door is closed, and not opened until the next day, as you have to stay there twenty-four hours.⁶²

Chiericati, who refrained from entering the Purgatory but whose companions did so, observed: Of those who entered the cave when I was present, two saw such fearful things that one went out of his mind and when he was questioned, declared that he had been beaten violently, but he did not know by whom. Another had seen beautiful women, who had invited him to eat with them, and offered him fruit and food of all sorts, and these were almost

 Pilgrims’ Pass from Archbishop Octavian of Armagh 1485, in Leslie ed., 61.  Pilgrimage of the Monk of Eymstadt 1494, in Leslie ed., 61.  Visit of Papal Nuncio Chiericati, described in a letter to Isabella d’Este, 1517, in Leslie ed., 64.

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Figure 4.4: Plan of Station Island, Lough Derg, by Thomas Carve 1666. Source: Print from Thomas Carve, Lyra sive Anacephalaeosis Hibernica (Sulzbach, 1666). Copy in the Huntington Library, California. vanquished. The others saw and felt nothing but great cold, hunger and weakness and came out half-dead the next day.⁶³

The Jesuit Edmund Campion visited Ireland and wrote a history of it in 1570; he claimed to have met a priest who had undertaken the pilgrimage and that “he for his own part saw no sight in the world, save only fearful dreams when he

 Visit of Papal Nuncio Chiericati, in Leslie ed., 64– 65.

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chanced to nod and those he said were exceedingly horrible: further he added that the taste is rated more or less according to the quality of the penitent.”⁶⁴ After the Ulster wars of the later sixteenth century, there were further changes. The dissolution of the monastery and shrine was followed again by at least a partial reconstruction of the site with a shingle-roofed chapel and cave-buildings, initially one and then a second and a third, to accommodate growing numbers, across the period.⁶⁵ In the early seventeenth century, Bishop David Rothe of Ossory recorded: The cavern itself is a little stone house with such narrow sides and such a depressed arch that a man of big stature could not raise himself nor even sit unless with bended neck. They sit and lean next to each other in nines pressing close, but a tenth could not join them except with the greatest trouble. The cavern has a side window through which a thin ray shines intermittently … The further part of the flooring is laid with heavy stone under which some relate there is the chasm and the trench, which God opened at the prayer of the saint in the gaping earth to the terror of the obstinate.⁶⁶

The Annals of the Four Masters records the experiences of a group of men including Tadgh Buidhe Magrath and a wealthy farmer Giolla Riabjach Ó Kelly, who went on pilgrimage around 1600: they were put in the narrow Cave to the number of fourteen men, and that Tadgh Buidhe himself and that wealthy farmer were among those fourteen men and that it happened that the farmer was lying against him in spite of himself and that Tadgh Buidhe himself in especial was sprinkling him with holy water to awake him in particular, and that it was imposed on him to allow the farmer a little wink of sleep.

The farmer had a disturbing vision-dream that three of his horses were being stolen, which turned out to be true. He continued the pilgrimage, offered the animals up as a sacrifice to God and St. Patrick, and eventually they were restored to him, hailed as a miracle.⁶⁷ With the arrival of Franciscan friars, structured penitential exercises augmented. Raymond Gillespie notes that the friars had shown an interest in the site as early as 1611, when it was depicted as a frontispiece in O’hEodhasa’s An Teagasg Criosdaidhe. ⁶⁸ There was clearly traffic between the site and the places of Irish Franciscan learning on the Continent. In 1624, the Rector of the Irish     

Campion, Historie of Ireland, 11. Coppinger’s Description of the Purgatory ca. 1630, in Leslie ed., 96. Bishop David Rothe of Ossory, in Leslie ed., 93. Annals of the Four Masters, in Leslie ed., 47– 48. Gillespie, “Irish Franciscans,” 68.

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College in Paris, Thomas Messingham, described the course of penance as then performed on Lough Derg. He noted that pilgrims observe “a rigorous fast on oaten bread and water from the lake”; pilgrims went barefoot, commencing with a visit to the church which they circumnavigated seven times, inside and outside, on their knees, repeating prayers. After, they proceed to the seven stations known as lecti poenosi, which were formerly small churches or sanctuaries dedicated to various saints. Having completed all the stations it was customary to visit the lake, “to which tradition pointed as the place in which St. Patrick had knelt in prayer.” All these rituals were repeated three times each day, morning, noon, and evening, during the first seven days. On the eighth day it was repeated six times and on the morning on the ninth day, the pilgrims went to confession and communion and then undertook the twenty-four-hour vigil inside the “cave.”⁶⁹ The description of the Irish Franciscan Michael O’Clery of ca. 1630 makes reference to the seven stations which he calls “saint’s beds,” dedicated to Saints Patrick, Bridget, Colmcille, Molaise, Brendan, Dabheoc, and Catherine. At each “bed,” the pilgrim went “three times sun-wise” round the outside of the bed, reciting three Paters, three Aves, and one Credo. After this the pilgrim moved inside and went “three more times sun-wise” round the bed on their knees, saying the same number of prayers.⁷⁰ The next fifty years are difficult to document for the shrine. The island was sacked in the 1630s and again in the 1650s during the British Civil Wars. The Franciscans ministered to the site in the late seventeenth century but in an intermittent way as political developments, such as the anti-Catholic scare of the early 1680s, interrupted the pilgrimage. One commentator observed in 1683 that “lately the friars began to build therein and penitents resorted thither in great numbers until about three years ago the duke of Ormond, lord lieutenant of Ireland, and the privy council ordered certain gentlemen to see it demolished again which was done accordingly.”⁷¹ John Richardson, an early eighteenth-century Protestant visitor, left one of the most detailed accounts of the pilgrimage. He recorded that “as soon as the pilgrims come within sight of the holy island, they pull off their shoes and stockings and uncover their heads and walk thus with their beads in one hand and sometimes a cross in the other, to the lake-side” where they were ferried over to the shrine.⁷² On arrival, they went to the prior for his blessing; then to St. Pat Messingham, Florilegium Insulæ Sanctorum; also see McNally, “Evolution of Pilgrimage Practice,” 38.  Michael O’Cleary’s Account ca. 1630, in Leslie ed., 69.  Quoted in Gillespie, “Irish Franciscans,” 68.  Richardson, Great Folly, 49.

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rick’s altar, where kneeling they said one Pater, one Ave, and one Credo. Rising up, they kissed the stone of the altar and then went into the chapel, where they said further prayers.⁷³ All the while, pilgrims were allowed only bread or oat cakes and warm water once a day, although Michael Hewson remarked they could have as much snuff and cold water as they wished.⁷⁴ On the ninth day, the pilgrims entered the “cave” or Purgatory, where they were enclosed for twenty-four hours. Richardson described the cave as “twenty-two foot long, two foot and one inch wide and three foot high; it hath a bending within six foot of the far end, where there is a very small window or spike hole to let in some light and air to the pilgrims that are shut up within it. There is little or none of it under ground and it seems never to have been sunk deeper than the rock.”⁷⁵ Richardson noted that “during this time all manner of refreshment is kept from them, and they are debarred of answering the liberties of nature, but above all things they are cautioned not to sleep, the prior telling them that the devil will certainly carry them away (as he hath two cave fulls already) if he should catch them napping.”⁷⁶ On the tenth day they were released, after which they went immediately into the lake and washed their whole bodies and especially their head, to signify that they were entirely cleansed of their sins. In the mid-eighteenth century, the pilgrimage experience changed again. The visit was shortened, reduced to three days, and the “caves” were closed. This coincided with a change in spiritual direction of the site, which passed from the Franciscans to the diocesan clergy. In 1780, jurisdiction passed into the hands of the bishop of Clogher, Hugh O’Reilly, who appointed one of his diocesan priests, Father Patrick Murray, as prior.⁷⁷ Prayerful penitence rather than bodily mortification began to gain ground. Shrines in Ireland were not the only sites to suffer Protestant destruction and subsequent rebuilding. St. Martin of Tours, which retained something of its early medieval importance as a pilgrimage site into the later Middle Ages, was sacked by Huguenots in 1562 and the relics of the saint were burnt.⁷⁸ However, according to the canons, Sieur Saugeron, one of the wardens, concealing himself in the crowd, managed to rescue some pieces of skull and arm bone of St. Martin, along with some relics of St. Brice and St. Gregory of Tours, and the silk cloth in which the bones of St. Martin had been wrapped, thrown to one side by

     

Richardson, Great Folly, 49. Hewson, St Patrick’s Purgatory, 134. Richardson, Great Folly, 8. Also Archdall, Monasticon Hiberbicum, 103. Richardson, Great Folly, 51. McNally, “Evolution of Pilgrimage Practice,” 71– 72. Loizeau de Grandmaison, Procès-verbal; Stegman, “Tombeau de saint Martin.”

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the Huguenots. He took them to the members of the chapter who had stayed in the city during its occupation and the following year, after the Catholic liberation of Tours, the bones were displayed for public veneration.⁷⁹ The restitution of the shrine was relatively speedy compared to others in late sixteenth-century France. The shrine had been located, as was traditional in many churches, east of the high altar. It was a white marble tomb dating from the fifth century, with columns and a cupola over a magnificent fifteenth-century reliquary, created at the behest of King Charles VII. It was surrounded with other reliquaries holding sacred remains. After the destruction and looting of the shrine, it was rebuilt in the same position in the church, firstly in a wooden structure and then in one made of black stone, but in which a fragment of the original white shrine was embedded. Instead of ranges of reliquaries around the shrine, a plain altar was erected, to provide more fully for the liturgical needs of pilgrims. The sumptuous reliquaries of the past were not replaced either, instead, simpler receptacles were used. Later, in 1577, on the site of the cremation of the relics in the churchyard, a monument with an inscription was erected, commemorating the event.⁸⁰ Eric Nelson argues that destruction of such treasures altered the experience of the shrine. Relics were experienced in the context of their reliquaries which over time became closely associated with the saint; it was reliquaries which were paraded, put on display on holy days, touched and surrounded by votives. The loss of reliquaries meant that the visual experience of pilgrimage altered.⁸¹ Further, while the medieval shrine received many expensive votive objects from the kings of France and other members of the elite, few such votives were donated after the restoration of the shrine. Pilgrims resumed their visits to the shrine, but in the absence of records we do not know how many, or what they did when they were there. At a healing shrine such as Saint-Méen, which attracted pilgrims mostly from northern and eastern France, the curated experience of the site was a little different from the international sites, above. Pilgrims with scabies and other maladies of the hand came to Saint-Méen for therapy. The shrine-repository of relics of the saint was in the ancient abbey church, but it was the nearby spring where cures were effected. The complex included a hospital for pilgrims and the town of Saint-Méen-le-Grand grew up close by to service the pilgrimage. A similar but larger complex developed at Saint-Reine in Burgundy. From the later sixteenth

 Gervaise, Vie de St Martin, 344– 45.  For details of the rebuilding from the registers of the collegiate chapter, see Nelson, Legacy of Iconoclasm, 48 – 56.  Nelson, Legacy of Iconoclasm, 43.

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century, a decayed medieval pilgrimage revived. While the saint’s relics were held at the monastery of Flavigny, it was to a nearby spring that pilgrims flocked. A complex was developed of chapel, Franciscan guardianship, then a hospital from 1666. Pilgrims bathed in the waters several times a day for cures to skin diseases and undertook a neuvaine devotion of daily confession and communion.⁸² At Saint-Hubert in the Ardennes, the monastery included a hostel for pilgrims arriving for treatment for animal bites, including rabies. The treatment for these ailments was described by visiting Benedictine monks in the early eighteenth century: “When we were at [Saint-Hubert] ten people arrived from the diocese of Tongres, who had been bitten by a mad dog. After having confessed and received communion, the sacristan made a little incision in their foreheads, inserted three little fragments of St. Hubert’s stole into the wound, then bound it up with a piece of linen.”⁸³ Pilgrims then stayed for nine days, confessing and taking communion, completing a neuvaine devotion. This seems to have become a common form of spiritual and physical therapy by the mid-seventeenth century at thaumaturgic shrines. At all shrines, the pilgrim experience was closely controlled by the presiding clergy. The hosts determined the lay out of the church and its immediate landscape or site; they organized the daily services; acted as guides, confessors, and advisors; and they ensured the keeping of order at busy times of the year. The shrine-sites of ancient cathedral and abbeys in the northern parts of Spain and France kept their medieval staffing arrangements into the early modern period: thus, St. James as a cathedral church maintained its secular arrangement of canons and priests as did the collegiate foundations of St. Martin of Tours and St. Radegonde of Poitiers, while the abbey of the Mont Saint-Michel remained a house of Benedictine monks, and the abbey of Saint-Méen was a religious house and latterly, a seminary. For many other shrines, local bishops invited members of mendicant orders to take charge, to ensure a higher quality of devotion and the treatment of pilgrimage as a mission field. This was the case at Lough Derg. Here, the site was originally part of an Augustinian priory. Papal Nuncio Chiericati recorded in 1517 that there were three canons on the island ministering to pilgrims. There was a prior in charge and a sacristan who, amongst other tasks, lowered and raised pilgrims into and out of the Purgatory cave and provided them with basic refreshment while there. Two servants fulfilled tasks such as rowing pilgrims from the shore to the island.⁸⁴ Before the Ref-

 Boutry and Julia, Sainte-Reine au Mont Auxois, 18 – 19.  Marten and Durand, Second voyage, 145 – 47.  Visit of Papal Nuncio Chiericati, in Leslie ed., 64.

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ormation at least, the names of pilgrims were entered into a book kept in the church, by the presiding clergy. The priory was dissolved in the later sixteenth century, the buildings pulled down, and the Augustinians dispersed. But by the 1620s, the pilgrimage had revived and was in need of a permanent pastoral support. To this end, Hugh O’Reilly, the Catholic Archbishop of Armagh invited Franciscans to care for the site. In 1631, he wrote to Rome for confirmation of this, stating that he could not restore the old guardians of the shrine, the Augustinian Canons, because they were “almost as extinct there as in the whole kingdom, or even if some survive, they would not be fit nor able to undertake such offices.”⁸⁵ Instead, he had sent for Observant Franciscans, “whom we judged to be the most numerous amongst our other regulars and the best suited to rough places,” and asked that “they should destine for such a ministry to the Island aforesaid a number of their learned and exemplary religious annually to assist the pilgrims with their customary fervour of soul and alacrity of spirit.”⁸⁶ The friars fled the island at the destruction of the shrine in 1632, but returned afterwards; in 1647, Bishop Henry Jones recorded that pilgrims arriving at the site were examined before admittance; there were huts for confession with a priest; and one of the brothers accompanied pilgrims to the Purgatory cave, kept an eye on their progress especially if one became “troubled by temptation,” and released them at the end of twenty-four hours.⁸⁷ Michael Hewson remarked in 1701 that there were many priests on the island, providing several masses a day and a sermon, as well as confessions and the rituals for the shutting up and opening of the Purgatory.⁸⁸ Such men brought new devotions and practices from around Europe, making shrines central to the mission of the Catholic Reformation. Fiona McNally has traced the careers of some of the Franciscan priors associated with Lough Derg. Dr. Tadhg O’Clery was appointed prior of Lough Derg in 1648 and 1661. He was educated in Salamanca, and became vicar-general of Raphoe until 1661, when he was also prior of Lough Derg. In 1670 Felim O’Coineagain was prior and evidently appointed to the post by Archbishop Oliver Plunkett. A report on popery in Fermanagh dated June 22, 1714, confirmed that “Edmund McGraw officiating in the Parish of Inish McShant [sic] and came from beyond the seas, not registered nor taken the oaths.” In 1753 Francis MacCavell was pastor of Carn and Coolmony as well as director and prior of St. Patrick’s Purgatory. He also re Letter from Hugh O’Reilly, Archbishop of Armagh, to the Cardinal in charge of Irish interests at Rome 1631, in Leslie ed., 75.  Letter from Hugh O’Reilly, Archbishop of Armagh, in Leslie ed., 75.  Jones, Saint Patrick’s Purgatory.  Hewson, St Patrick’s Purgatory, 134.

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ceived a licentiate in both (civil and canon) law in the consultative Faculty of Paris.⁸⁹ The shrines of the Atlantic world were international in their staffing, clientele, and practices and as such, acted as nodes in the transmission of new religious practices across even the remotest regions of Europe as we will see below. The pilgrim’s experience of a shrine was therefore both personal and individual, but frequently in the company of a group of friends or family, and of course in the context of large crowds at the site itself. Indeed, the collective encounter with the saint was important in providing a physical and mental framework for the visit. The experience was also carefully controlled. The anticipation of a long journey and the monumental nature of churches and abbeys housing shrines—or the sheer landscape in which the shrine was located—had a profound impact on long-distance travelers. There was relief, thanksgiving, and awe, making the initial sight of the holy city a memorable one and the—often short—stay there, filled with rich experiences. The shrines themselves, their plan and routeways for pilgrims, decorations, smells, sounds, and richness of sights, were designed to touch psychologically their visitors through sensory stimulation. As Emma Wells argues, pilgrims needed “an imaginative and performative aspect to their visit in order to have a fulfilled devotional experience.”⁹⁰ There was a change over time in the activities privileged at shrines. In the later Middle Ages, at most shrines, contact with relics or their proxy, such as a statue, was vital. As the seventeenth century wore on, devotional exercises came to dominate, prayer and above all the sacraments. Whereas for Rozmital confession gave access to indulgence pardons, by the time Laffi and his contemporaries were visiting Compostela, it was necessary to take communion as well. The stress on individual prayerful contrition and the centrality of the eucharist to the pilgrim experience is seen in the experience of space and time at the shrine.

From the Body of the Saint to the Body of Christ A marked feature of the Catholic Reformation experience of pilgrims at all shrines was the development of sacramental liturgy and a reframing of the veneration of the saint in a strongly eucharistic and Christological framework. As Louis Richeome counseled his pilgrim in 1604, “he cannot better begin to honour this holy place than with so holy an action, nor more refresh and solace the travail of his pilgrimage than by this refection, nor better open the doore of his

 All examples from McNally, “Evolution of Pilgrimage Practice,” 58.  Wells, “Archaeology of Sensory Experience,” 35, 253.

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soule to the light of the Holy Ghost, than by the receiving of such a sacrament; and this should be the first meal and the last banquet of every true pilgrim.”⁹¹ The medieval pilgrimage experience was, of course, framed by liturgy: prayer stations, masses, and litanies. Because of widespread variation in liturgical traditions, pre-Tridentine pilgrimage afforded pilgrims the opportunity to participate in celebrations that were different from their local practices. Some of these traveled home with returning pilgrims, especially after visits to Rome or Jerusalem. But emphasis on personal participation in the eucharist grew after 1580. The shrine was cast as much as a source of spiritual healing, obtained through confession and communion, as of physical cures. Thus, the shrine guardians adopted and fostered the spiritual priorities of counter reformers and modernized their devotional activities. As Georges Provost states, it was only after spending a reasonable time adoring the holy sacrament that the pilgrim should approach the miraculous statue; hearing mass, confessing, attending a second communion to receive the eucharist, these were the ideal activities of the pilgrim before visiting relics. Only then should s/he visit the treasury of the church, meditate on the holy objects found there, and buy souvenirs.⁹² It was as a direct result of new liturgical priorities, that shrines underwent modification in the seventeenth century, along with other churches. Secular churches—cathedrals, colleges, and chapels which were maintained by chapters and diocesan clergy—reordered their chancels opening them up to view from the nave to make visible the sacrament of the mass. Rood screens were demolished, high altars were raised up on steps, so they dominated the line of sight of the church, while low balustrades were erected around them to prevent the laity from entering the sacred space. Reredos or retables were erected behind altars, often richly decorated, and baldequins could be erected, in imitation of that of St. Peter’s in Rome.⁹³ In churches belonging to enclosed orders, for whom the screening of their chancels remained important, there were also alterations especially to nave chapels accessible to visitors. Across Europe, shrines were important showcases of baroque spectacle, whose ideas and images pilgrims took home with them. The materiality of worship was an important part of Catholic renewal and received major investment to augment its solemnity and theatre. Pilgrims’ accounts show the importance of the mass in their spiritual activities: the eucharist was framed as the central experience of the visit to the shrine. For example, in 1634, Pierre de Rosivignan’s large-scale pilgrimage to the Mont

 Richeome, Pilgrime of Loreto, 169.  Provost, “L’image du pèlerin,” 275.  Lors, “Cathédrales, reliques et pèlerinages,” 105.

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Saint-Michel was a ritual procession with the mass at its center. The pilgrimage commenced in the church of St. Pierre of Caen where Veni creator was sung before departure. Along the way, the pilgrims stopped for services in a number of churches: Villedieu; Avranches, where the party attended the offices of none and vespers at the cathedral; and as they crossed the bay to the Mont at low tide, they sang litanies to the Virgin and saluted St. Michael. On the day of the visit to the abbey itself, the pilgrims began with prayers then a sung mass was celebrated by their accompanying chaplains. On the return journey, the party attended masses at Coutances cathedral; the collegiate church of Saint-Lô; Bayeux cathedral and returning to Caen, the pilgrims dispersed and met again a few days later for a mass in the chapel of Saints Michael and Martin in the Franciscan convent.⁹⁴ The mass was central to the pilgrimage. Thomas Le Roy’s chronicle shows the increasing importance of communion to pilgrims to the Mont. In 1646, a visit of a group of women to the abbey included them “performing their devotions in the church, confessing and taking communion.”⁹⁵ In June 1647, a party of eightyfive young men and eleven priests from Bayeux arrived, sang high mass and the “captain” and his company “received the very holy sacrament of the eucharist with extraordinary devotion and all the priests performed [their] masses in the same manner.”⁹⁶ After they had dined, they returned to the abbey to sing praises and hymns to the archangel, before departing for home. It was reception of the sacrament and the confession which preceded it that became the fundamental action of pilgrimage. Assisting at mass was good, but insufficient; pilgrims had to communicate as well to experience an individual encounter with Christ through the eucharist. The importance of making a confession at shrines is clearly evidenced in the Middle Ages. Again, it became almost routine after Trent. At Compostela, the Church provided confessors who could speak foreign languages, so pilgrims could confess in their own tongues. There was a confessor and a sacristan in the cathedral, a confessor in the hospital and various members of religious orders with linguistic skills. In 1683, the chapter resolved to ask the Holy See if they could suppress a prebend, in order to pay for two foreign language confessors.⁹⁷ After taking communion, pilgrims received a certificate of having achieved the pilgrimage, for which they paid two reales, and a printed ticket, for which they paid a quarter.⁹⁸

    

Saint-Martin, Voyage fait au Mont Saint-Michel. Le Roy, 554. Le Roy, 598. Ferreiro, 9:327. “Diary of Erich Lassota de Steblovo,” in Viajes de extranjeros, ed. Garcia Mercadal, 2:426.

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The visit of Cardinal Diego Guzman to Compostela in 1610, in proxy for King Philip III and Queen Margaret of Spain, was focused on sacraments. On their first glimpse of the cross of St. James from a distance, the party “did the same as all pilgrims,” that is they said prayers to the saint. They were escorted from the gate of the city to the shrine by canons and cardinals from the cathedral, and other elite clergy and laity, whence they embraced the image of the apostle.⁹⁹ The following day, the archbishop presided over mass in the cathedral, where Guzman presented the monarchs’ gifts. On the third day of his visit, he said mass in the cathedral where all the retinue took communion and gained the jubilee indulgence, visited the sacristy and all the stations of the church, then the Franciscan convent and the Royal Hospital in the town.¹⁰⁰ On the fourth day of the pilgrimage, Sunday October 10, Guzman processed with the archbishop and heard mass, with the swinging of the botafumeiro, and prayers were said for their Majesties while the altar was decorated with the cloth the monarchs had donated.¹⁰¹ Lower down the social order, Guillaume Manier and his companions entered the city of Compostela on November 1 at 9 a.m. They went straight to the cathedral, where they gave thanks to God for having brought them through their journey in good health and where they heard mass. The next day, Manier went to confession in the hospital, with a French priest there, who gave him a ticket to prove that he had been shriven. Manier then went to the cathedral, where he took communion in the chapel of St. Louis, which was the usual place for pilgrims to communicate. After, he obtained another certificate—his Compostela —to prove that he had made the journey and acquired the indulgence.¹⁰² There were also French priests available for confession in the cathedral, who also gave out tickets for communion. When Nicolà Albani arrived at Compostela, he visited St. James then made a general confession to an Italian-speaking priest. He spent the evening beforehand preparing for it, sitting in a corner of the chapel of St. James examining his conscience until after 1 a.m. He then made a confession that lasted four hours and twenty minutes.¹⁰³ At St. Patrick’s Purgatory, where masses were celebrated in shelters and ruins rather than the splendor of a baroque cathedral, the sacraments were also important in the pilgrimage. Michael Hewson, a Protestant visitor in 1701, noted that the pilgrims heard mass several times every day during their nineor ten-day visit; they confessed and took communion before they were closed  Guzmán, Peregrinación, 173 – 74.  Guzmán, Peregrinación, 176.  Guzmán, Peregrinación, 183.  Manier, 74– 75.  Julia, “Curiosité, dévotion et politica peregrinesca,” 299.

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up in the Purgatory caves.¹⁰⁴ John Richardson also noted that pilgrims “hear mass several times every day … They are obliged to confess before they begin their stations, and some do it much oftener, paying 6d for every confession.”¹⁰⁵ During a clandestine visit around 1714, Hugh MacMahon, Catholic Bishop of Clogher, remarked that pilgrims heard a Requiem mass before they entered the cave, “just as if they were dead to the world and ready for sepulture.”¹⁰⁶ He was keen to abrogate this practice, at least on Sundays and the principal festivals, to be replaced by the Roman office of the day, but the shrine keepers “claimed the authority of immemorial possession and of custom to the contrary, originating, as tradition held, with St Patrick himself,” and so the practice remained. A second form of evidence for the augmented status of the Eucharist can be seen in the relative investment of resources in the embellishment of relics and liturgy. The monastic chroniclers of the Mont Saint-Michel provide much evidence for this process. In the fifteenth century, there was a good deal of investment in new reliquaries to display relics, for their veneration was a focus of devotion. In the sixteenth century there was no investment in reliquaries and in the seventeenth, only two examples: the arm bone of St. Lawrence was placed into a new silver reliquary in 1623, and a small silver statue of the Virgin and Child was acquired in 1644, into which was placed a lock of the Virgin’s hair.¹⁰⁷ In addition, several donors gave articles that included relics: in 1638, the Sieur Brouhé gave a small collection of relics acquired from Rome, in two small containers, one with a portrait of St. Lawrence on it, perhaps to accompany the relic already held by the abbey.¹⁰⁸ Practices were changing. As Forster states, the “‘miracles discourse’ was only part of what happened at shrines, although this was important … Pilgrims considered shrines to be places to practice devotions and most people began their visit by praying before the altar … they attended mass … they prayed and contemplated images and relics.”¹⁰⁹ Instead, a great deal was spent refurbishing the church’s altars. At the Mont, the nave or pilgrim’s altar of St. Michael was completely rebuilt in the newest style and re-consecrated in 1644. This included a large crucifix suspended above the altar and a new image of St. Michael vanquishing the devil. In 1647, this was augmented with the addition of an image of a guardian angel on the

     

Hewson, St Patrick’s Purgatory, 134– 35. Richardson, Great Folly, 61. Bishop Hugh MacMahon’s visit to Lough Derg 1714, in Leslie ed., 113. Le Roy, 385, 527; Huynes, 2:45. Le Roy, 474. Forster, Catholic Revival, 99.

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altar in the place of a tabernacle, and the completion of a retable with images of Saints Martin and Aubert, Maur and Placidus, John the Baptist and Joseph, a mixture of ancient and modern cults. The high altar of the abbey was also embellished, although this may not have been easily accessible to pilgrims. In 1645, a tabernacle of gilded wood and six gilt candlesticks were purchased in Paris and placed on the altar.¹¹⁰ Side altars were also refurbished, important for the “stations” of pilgrims and the holding of votive masses. In 1643, a donation of a painting of the Nativity of Christ was given by the prior Henry du Pont to the chapel of St. Peter, to serve as reredos to the altar. In 1645, a painting of the fall of the angels with St. Michael trampling the devil, commissioned by the duke of Nevers, was placed in the chapel of St. Aubert.¹¹¹ The eucharist was considered the best way to venerate the abbey’s saints. The monks at the Mont Saint-Michel also commissioned new liturgical vessels, again to augment the splendor of the eucharist. In 1623, a number of old silver vessels stored in the treasury were melted down and remade into a new chalice, paten, suspended altar lamp, and incensor.¹¹² In 1634, more old silver ornaments, including the box-and-pulley system for suspending hosts over the high altar, were reworked into a “modern” ciborium and sunburst monstrance for the display of the holy sacrament.¹¹³ In 1645, a monk of the abbey made ten ornamental candlesticks for use on special feasts.¹¹⁴ Donations contributed to this ornamentation—for example in 1638, the Sieur de Brouhé made a testamentary bequest to found a lamp to burn perpetually before the Holy Sacrament in the church of St. Pierre on the Mont, one of the pilgrimage “stations.”¹¹⁵ The investment priority of the monks and their patrons had shifted from saints’ cults to the eucharist. At the Mont, the most striking expenditure was for textiles for vestments and altars. In 1644, velvet was purchased from Paris to make an altar frontal, burse, and chalice veil; cloth of silver and lace was acquired to make stoles for the subdeacon to wear on major feasts; and silver silk with lace, embroidered with flowers, was made into a chalice veil for use on solemn feasts.¹¹⁶ In 1645, the prior Dominique Houilliard purchased a high-quality set of matching cloths and vestments of grey silk: an altar frontal decorated with a cross of the Holy Spirit, a

      

Le Le Le Le Le Le Le

Roy, 541– 43. Roy, 416. Roy, 412. Roy, 455. Roy, 541. Roy, 473. Roy, 529 – 31.

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chasuble and two tunics, two copes for the cantors, and a cope for the celebrant.¹¹⁷ In 1646, the monk Philibert Chapel, an expert embroiderer, made ten chalice veils and several burses of silk, satin, and lace, in all the different liturgical colors, to serve the church throughout the year.¹¹⁸ Again, this investment was augmented by high-profile donations. In 1625, Mlle de Montpensier, future duchess of Orleans, donated a set of gold-work mass vestments, the chasuble embroidered with St. Michael, worth 2000 livres, which the abbey kept for its most important ceremonies.¹¹⁹ In 1631, the Dame des Vergers-Grave of SaintMalo, sister of one of the monks, gave a white satin stole embroidered in silk and pearls with two images of St. John.¹²⁰ At other shrines, such donations were also visible mementos of status, wealth, and devotion to the saint. There were numerous such votive ornaments at Compostela, for instance. An inventory of the Chapel of St. Nicolas in the cathedral of 1568, listed a silver gilt chalice and paten donated by a German knight, whose arms were on the base, and a basin of white silver for the ablutions of the priest saying mass, given by two pilgrims.¹²¹ These acts continued a long-standing tradition of associating the donor with the mass and Christ, as well as the saint, through gifts, and thus augmenting the beauty of the eucharistic celebration. Music was another major investment of shrine churches, again to embellish the liturgy. The great pilgrimage centers of Rome and its satellites invested heavily in music across the Renaissance. At the Holy House shrine of Loreto, directly dependent on the papacy, already by the 1470s, there were eight vicars choral employed to sing high mass every day, to which was added a daily evening Salve Regina and Ave Maria. In the 1530s, a boys’ or youths’ choir was added to the chapel and for the Roman jubilee of 1575, the musical establishment was put on a permanent footing. A Capella master was appointed, who chose the repertoire and conducted the musicians, along with a choir master who ran the choir, and an organist.¹²² The music at the cathedral of Santiago was internationally renowned and has been studied in detail. Cardinal Diego de Guzman, who went on pilgrimage to Compostela in 1610, noted the fineness of the cathedral music. He observed that the music establishment had an income of 5000 ducats a year and the director of music was a canon with the right to

     

Le Roy, 539. Le Roy, 557. Le Roy, 417. Le Roy, 435. Ferreiro, 8:422. Bercé, Lorette aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles, 63.

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vote in chapter.¹²³ Bernardo de Aldrete of Cordoba, who visited in the first part of the seventeenth century, also commented on the numerous, excellent, and wellpaid chaplains who provided music, in the superb choir with its well-made stalls, and he noted the care and punctuality with which the divine offices were held.¹²⁴ Pilgrims themselves commissioned masses in addition to those provided in the shrine churches. Votive masses and Te Deums were often performed or requested by pilgrims in thanksgiving for a particular grace or for the journey’s successful completion. At Compostela, a rota was drawn up of duty priests who for a week at a time, took charge of the masses requested by pilgrims.¹²⁵ At some shrines in northwest Europe, an increase in the number of chantry and anniversary masses was also recorded across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, although these were donations by a small number of high-status patrons. The proxy pilgrimage to Compostela undertaken by King Philip III and Queen Margaret of Spain in 1610 resulted in the foundation of two annual masses for the couple on St. Philip’s and St. Margaret’s days, by the chapter, out of thanks for the gifts given to the cathedral.¹²⁶ At the Mont Saint-Michel in 1633, the prior ordered the compilation of an obit calendar for the abbey church. Most of the surviving chantries and anniversaries were ancient ones, mostly undated, of major patrons or donors to the abbey in the past. Of the datable foundations, one quarter were for kings and nobles of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; there were two early sixteenth-century foundations and of the later years of the century, one of 1578, two of the 1590s for governors of the Mont killed on duty there and one of the 1630s, by Jacques de Moricière, son of the late governor, and archdeacon of Bayeux Cathedral.¹²⁷ There were few or at least fewer recorded, foundations by middling patrons. This is not surprising. Pilgrims from lower social groups visited the shrine for short-term, devotional purposes; humble visitors did not have the means and probably lacked the interest to invest in permanent intercession. Other embellishments which could benefit all were, however, afforded by the increased pilgrim revenue. At Compostela, in 1584, the cathedral chapter added a solemn feast in honor of the apostle for the day after Ascension, with a procession of the Holy Thorn, and in 1586, during Saturdays in Lent, Compline was to be sung with the organ, with great solemni-

    

Guzmán, Peregrinación, 186. Lapaz, “El ‘Diario del viaje a Santiago,’” 377. Ferreiro, 8:426. Guzmán, Peregrinación, 186. Le Roy, 445 – 46.

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ty.¹²⁸ Light was an important factor in the magnificence of the liturgy: at Compostela, on solemn feasts of the apostle, All Saints’ Day, and the feast of St. Ildefonso, the choir was fully illuminated with candles and lamps, which must have been a magnificent sight.¹²⁹ Finally, the period saw a Romanization of liturgy, in accordance with new directives after Trent. The adoption of the Roman liturgy across Europe in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was an important outcome of the Tridentine decrees, to augment the dignity and gravity of the eucharist as the central rite of Catholicism and as a means of enhancing the authority of Rome. Before this date, dioceses and provinces followed their own traditional liturgies. At ancient shrines in cathedrals, there was resistance to novelty. At Compostela, the distinctive services were printed for the first time in a Manual of 1532 followed by a Breviary of 1541.¹³⁰ Within Castile, the Provincial Council of Salamanca of 1565 promulgated the decrees of the Council of Trent and by the end of the sixteenth century, there was widespread adoption of the Roman rite throughout the kingdom.¹³¹ At Compostela, however, there was some opposition to the Romanization of the cathedral liturgy. In 1568, the Roman Breviary was issued, and Pius V forbade the use of any other versions, unless a church could prove that its own traditions had been followed for at least two hundred years. The Cathedral at Santiago could do so, and it was in any case not content that the Roman Breviary had eliminated some of the traditional story of the Spanish apostolate of St. James, choosing instead to privilege the Gospel narratives of the saint. When Archbishop Gaspar de Zúñiga produced the 1569 version of the Breviarium alme ecclesiae Compostellane, he claimed in the introduction to be introducing the Tridentine Breviary. However, the Compostelan saints’ calendar was preserved in the new work—and not the Roman calendar—and the traditions around St. James’s apostolate to Spain were retained.¹³² In 1578, Archbishop Francisco Blanco introduced new Constitutions to the cathedral, including Tridentine-influenced worship.¹³³ The times of canonical hours were fixed, appearance and vestments of officiants, the form of ceremonial entries into the cathedral and the choir, the order and composition of processions, prohibition against leaving services early, the liturgy of feast days, all were regulated

 Ferreiro, 8:380.  Ferreiro, 8:381.  Ferreiro, 8:208.  Parga et al., 1:141.  Zúñiga y Avellaneda, Breviarium alme ecclesiae Compostellane; Buide del Real, “Removiendo Roma con Santiago,” 319.  Castelao, “Chemin de Saint-Jacques,” 117.

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and standardized to bring greater dignity to worship. In a further concession, in 1621, Gregory XV allowed the cathedral to celebrate the mass of St. James every Monday, so long as there was no other feast.¹³⁴ In France, each diocese adopted the Roman rite in its own time, largely in the early seventeenth century. Even greater tensions existed for the churches of the religious orders, for each again had its own rite. The offices used in the Mont Saint-Michel abbey church were, of course, Benedictine rather than Roman. Once the abbey had affiliated to the Congregation of Saint-Maur, it used that liturgy in its choir. In 1645, a new ceremonial was approved by the Congregation, printed and sent to the Mont and in 1648, a revised Ritual was similarly disseminated.¹³⁵ However, the liturgy was also subject to some Romanization. In 1648, the abbey adopted the singing of revised hymns and canticles approved by Urban VIII in 1635.¹³⁶ But the crucial message overall was dignity, orthodoxy, and splendor, and the special experience of the mass for pilgrims was important. That it was a standardized, Roman, mass or at least Romanized liturgy, also contributed to the reinforcement of spiritual authority of the wider Church, with the pope at its head, even in the remoter regions of northwest Europe.

The Mission Field: Instruction and Indulgences The influence of Catholic reform on the religious activities of shrines was especially notable for two devotional developments. Firstly, clergy responsible for shrines became increasingly concerned to rid pilgrimages of “superstitious” elements: miracles and cures were secondary to medicine for the soul. Instead, interior purification, personal conversion, and devotion were promoted. Secondly, shrines became mission fields, opportunities for clergy to educate the Catholic faithful in orthodox doctrine. To these combined and mutually reinforcing ends, clergy promoted three activities: preaching, reading, and indulgences.

 Villaverde, “800 años de vida litúrgica,” 471, 477.  Le Roy, 544, 618.  Le Roy, 616.

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Instruction: Preaching and Print Trevor Johnson has argued that at many Counter-Reformation shrines there was an attempt “to associate pilgrimage with a catechetical discourse, a pedagogic and penitential spirit,” through sermons and other “educational methods.”¹³⁷ Preaching became a feature of the pilgrim’s experience at many shrines. For the three cult centers studied here, there is no direct evidence for pilgrim preaching, but there are hints that it was increasingly encountered across the period and that it was expected by pilgrims, at least on feast days. At Santiago, there were regular sermons in the Cathedral but whether these were for pilgrims we cannot determine. The registers of the cathedral chapter for the sixteenth century record payments to preachers, usually Dominicans, more rarely Franciscans, who delivered sermons on liturgical feasts, notable Lent and Advent. The decrees of the Council of Trent mandated that cathedrals should have a permanent prebendary preacher; by 1585, a post of lector seems to have been in place at Santiago, if not specifically a preacher, for the chapter asked for a clear role description to be created.¹³⁸ The language of any sermon delivered in the sixteenth-century cathedral is unknown, which is important for the concept of mission. Most pilgrims were international visitors, who would not have understood Spanish or Latin. It seems likely, however, that preaching was not a daily occurrence for any language group to attend. The Grenadan Canon Bernardo de Aldrete who visited in the early seventeenth century attended high masses in the cathedral between February 24 and 27, including the feast of St. Matthias, and he remarked that “there was no sermon,” which surprised him.¹³⁹ Raymond Gillespie observes that at St. Patrick’s Purgatory, the Franciscans worked to transform the pilgrimage from a set of popular rituals into an interior spiritual experience. Pilgrims “were provided with instructions, printed in modern form, that urged them not simply to perform the rituals but pointed out the biblical significance attached to them and urged them to meditate on their actions, turning the ritual into an example of Tridentine interiority.”¹⁴⁰ From at least the early seventeenth century, a daily sermon was preached in the pilgrimage season. A reference to preaching at the site appears in the biography of Rev. Francis Kirwan, who visited the Purgatory in the 1630s, and “there did he apply himself to hearing confessions and preaching sermons.”¹⁴¹ In 1701, Michael Hew    

Johnson, Magistrates, 290. Ferreiro, 8:148. Lapaz, “El ‘Diario del viaje a Santiago,’” 377. Gillespie, “Irish Franciscans,” 69. Lynch, Portrait of a Pious Bishop, 63.

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son, Protestant rector of St. Andrew’s parish, Dublin, noted that there was a daily sermon in Irish on the island and an early eighteenth-century Irish poem describes the outstanding ability of Father Philip Gartland, a Franciscan preacher at Lough Derg who “proved his worth as a preacher by explaining the writings of the Church Fathers and examining the Gospels.”¹⁴² The bishop of Clogher, Hugh MacMahon, in his Relatio of the diocese sent to Rome in 1714, observed that there was a sermon twice or three times a day, and that “such is the fervour of the pilgrims that the preacher is frequently interrupted by sobs and outbursts of weeping among the congregation.” Another preacher, Francis Magrath O.F.M, received faculties for confessing and preaching in 1736.¹⁴³ A second means of achieving the pedagogical aspirations of clergy was through the medium of popular print. There is a large historiography on the history of literacy, reading, and the book for the early modern period: the reading population increased, more books were purchased and produced. While Roger Chartier argues that merchants and artisans—important long-distance pilgrims —bought few books and that a widespread book-reading population did not exist in this period, a reading public did not necessarily mean individual readers. Rather, group and shared reading, often reading aloud, was important. In this, confraternities were influential, as we shall see in chapter 5. The production of pamphlets and small books by shrines was an important form of cheap print acquired by such groups.¹⁴⁴ Philip Soergel comments that the pilgrimage booklet was a new literary genre which emerged from the Catholic resurgence. It differed from medieval miracle books in that the contents covered a wide range of issues, interweaving polemical, apologetic, and didactic content. Often in octavo format, they were “pocketbook guides” to shrines for literate pilgrims; they gave the history of the site; they detailed some of the contemporary miracles reported there; they provided lists of the church’s relics, indulgences, and most important pilgrims; and offered prayers, litanies, and meditations for the pilgrim to use.¹⁴⁵ Virginia Reinburg sees them as “an archive or written record for their shrines, and thereby laid claim to significant places through the preservation of testimony about the shrines’ marvels” and also “a means of proving the truth of the shrine, and of the Catholic faith woven into its history.”¹⁴⁶ They took off enormously as a genre after 1600. For France, Bruno Maës has located 554 surviving pam    

Hewson, St Patrick’s Purgatory, 134. McNally, “Evolution of Pilgrimage Practice,” 47. Chartier, Cultural Uses of Print, 152, 180. Soergel, Wondrous in His Saints, 168 – 70. Reinburg, “Archives, Eyewitnesses and Rumours,” 172.

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phlets published from the late fifteenth to the late eighteenth centuries, with a notable peak of activity in the period 1630 – 1660, although healthy activity was maintained until the 1780s. Twenty per cent were written on Christological cults, 33 per cent for saints’ cults and the remainder, 47 per cent, for Marian cult centers.¹⁴⁷ They were published for a mass market. For example, a contract for the bookseller Claude Le Picart selling at the shrine of Notre-Dame de Liesse, with the Parisian printer Vincent du Monstier, was made for 36,000 copies within six months, in 1663.¹⁴⁸ They were mostly sold at shrines in souvenir shops or printers, if the town was large enough to support one, although pedlars also hawked booklets into the countryside, along with other items. Such booklets were often illustrated, particularly with woodcut images. Maës argues that this contrasted with ordinary devotional books, where fewer than 10 per cent were illustrated.¹⁴⁹ Maës’s study of the shrine of Notre-Dame de Liesse and Philippe Martin’s study of Lorraine pilgrimage handbooks emphasize how important these works were in touching a large public and encouraging personal prayer.¹⁵⁰ These and other studies have found important changes in content over time. While late medieval pamphlets related miracle tales, those of the period 1560 – 1660 contained much polemical anti-heresy and a strict historicity, where objective historical facts were used to prove the veracity of the cult in question. Miracles had to be dated and preferably verified by a doctor and a judge. From around 1660, controversy declined and instead, devotional content increased, as booklets became tools of spiritual retreat.¹⁵¹ Pilgrimage was an occasion for each person to examine their conscience; booklets advised on attitudes, methods of thinking, and provided words to use for meditations and prayers.¹⁵² By the early eighteenth century, Christological devotions dominated, writings on the eucharist, Passion, and Sacred Heart, and devotional aids to help the Christian to live an interior life with Christ. The expansion of the number of prayers, particularly those to be said in specified circumstances, was a means of educating the pilgrim in the spiritual life and proposing words to use before the saints; it was a form of education in interiorized relationship with the divine.¹⁵³ The proportion of such exercises in pilgrim literature expand-

      

Maës, Livrets de pèlerinage, 53. Maës, Notre-Dame de Liesse, 69. Maës, Livrets de pèlerinage, 87. Maës, “Livrets de pèlerinage de la reforme catholique”; Martin, “Paroles de pèlerins.” Maës, Livrets de pèlerinage, 75. Martin, “Paroles de pèlerins,” 501. Maës, Livrets de pèlerinage, 255.

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ed over time. For example, Gabriel Gerberon’s short history of the holy tunic of Argenteuil of 1706 included ten pages on the history of the holy robe and twentysix pages of offices.¹⁵⁴ Pilgrimage booklets also provided pilgrims with devotions to use at home, once returned from the shrine. Few specifically pilgrimage publications come down to us from Compostela. As befits one of the patron saints of Spain and of the highest chivalric order, there were detailed Lives of St. James written in the later Middle Ages and early modern period. For example, Mauro Castella Ferrer, Historia del Apostol de Jesus Christo Sanctiago Zebedeo Patron y Capitan General de Las Espanas of 1610 was a long and detailed history of the life of the apostle and his cult in Spain. A few high-quality copper plates illustrate the text. This was not a pilgrim booklet, but a detailed and scholarly study of the history of Santiago.¹⁵⁵ A similar text was Hernando Oxea, Historia del glorioso apostol Santiago patron de Espana: De su venida a ella, y de las grandezas de su yglesia, y orden militar of 1615, an 800–page life of Christ and St. James, discovery of the tomb of the apostle, privileges of the church of Compostela, founding of the order of Santiago, miracles associated with the saint, lives of the bishops of the see, and notable facts about the city.¹⁵⁶ It was a lengthy and detailed work. It was not for carrying home by a long-distance traveler. For the pilgrim market, little survives. There was a book seller in the city from the mid-1530s, when the printer/seller Nicolas Thierry opened a branch of his Valladolid business in Compostela, run by his son-in-law Andres Pajaro. Giraldo del Sol, possibly an employee of Thierry in Valladolid, married Pajaro’s maid and opened a bookshop in 1542. From then on, a small number of sellers—usually linked by marriage in some way—kept bookshops. They were provided with stock firstly from Valladolid, then from the merchants of Medina del Campo and Salamanca. Books also came by sea routes from France and Flanders.¹⁵⁷ An inventory of the books sold in a bookseller’s shop during the feast of St. James in July 1627, shows that there were 555 copies of the Bull of the Blessed Sacrament in stock, of which two were sold at this time; that there were fortyseven copies of Diego de la Mota’s Libro de la venida de Santiago Apostol a predicar a España, of which seven were sold for 1.5 reales each, and that “a quantity of trifles” was also sold, presumably small booklets and cheap print.¹⁵⁸ Albert Jouvin’s account of his visit, published in 1672, informs us that printed lists of     

Gerberon, Histoire de la robe. Ferrer, Historia del Apostol. Oxea, Historia del glorioso apóstol. Costas, “Santiago de Compostela,” 370 – 71. Fernández, “Testimonio del comercio de libros.”

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the relics in the cathedral treasury were on sale to pilgrims.¹⁵⁹ A rare survival of a Compostelan publication was found with other documents in a pilgrim’s satchel of the mid-eighteenth century: Martin Marie, of Chérisy in Chartres diocese, traveled to Compostela in 1764 and purchased a printed image of St. James with the words “Memoria de las santas reliquias que hay en esta santa Iglesia de nuestro Glorioso Patron Sant-Iago.” It was produced locally by the printer Sebastian Montero.¹⁶⁰ This was probably the most-frequently purchased form of print from the Galician city, especially as the international pilgrim traffic visiting the city rarely spoke Spanish. At the Mont Saint-Michel, there was a clear attempt to influence pilgrims through print. As we have seen, one of the first activities of the revived Mont pilgrimage was the sponsorship of Feuardent’s pamphlet of 1604. It was republished fourteen more times across the seventeenth century.¹⁶¹ Much of Feuardent’s text was repeated in a pamphlet by Christofle de Bordeaux, Deux discours sur les faicts miraculeux advenus depuis quelques temps à l’endroit de plusieurs pèlerins de S. Michel du Mont de la mer printed in Paris in 1613.¹⁶² In 1668, another booklet was published by one of the monks, Robert Quatremaires, Histoire abrégée du Mont Saint-Michel, which described “the motives and methods for usefully and devoutly making the pilgrimage to the glorious archangel Saint Michael.”¹⁶³ Again, he reused much of Feuardent’s pamphlet, but the message had changed. Pilgrims’ behavior was also counseled to be “with great fervor” and “with sobriety,” tending towards silence and abstaining from bad conversations.¹⁶⁴ The new handbook was to guide the devotion of pilgrims, to ensure that they filled every minute of their travels with useful and pious activities. The essential aim of the pilgrimage was to “invigorate [pilgrims’] faith, fortify their hopes, embrace charity by seeing these places where His Divine Majesty has revealed particular remains of his holy wisdom,” and more particularly, pilgrims should visit the Mont to obtain from God the blessing to die in a state of grace, as St. Michael presented souls before the tribunal of God. Above all, it was interiority of spirituality and a reformation of life that was encouraged: the labelling of the shrine Péril de la Mer, “alerted us to the dangers of this life, which, as with a stormy sea, cannot be navigated without the holy angels, especially their prince.”¹⁶⁵ Pilgrim-

      

Jouvin, Voyageur d’Europe, 1:166. Lelièvre, “Papiers d’un pèlerin,” 8. Seguin, “Livrets de pèlerinage,” 3:290. Bordeaux, Deux discours. Quatremaires, Histoire abrégée du Mont Saint-Michel. Quatremaires, Histoire abrégée du Mont Saint-Michel, 62. Quatremaires, Histoire abrégée du Mont Saint-Michel, 59.

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age to the Mont was therefore compared to the human journey in search of salvation and Quatremaires attempted to spiritualize both of these for the pilgrim. There were also descriptions of the relics kept at the Mont, prayers and hymns, and details of the indulgences to be gained. The booklet was reissued at least twice more, in 1685 and in the early eighteenth century.¹⁶⁶ A four-page pamphlet called “Oraison à Saint-Michel,” without date and place but seventeenth-century in look, is an even smaller and more concise print product from the shrine. The front page has a woodcut of the archangel and the text comprises short, didactic statements, Christological and Roman Catholic in timbre: “St. Michael and his angels have forgotten their own excellence and are only concerned with the grandeur and perfections of God. Let us imitate this holy angel, let us not be occupied too much with our own talents, lights, advantages, powers etc. All of this is nothing before the majesty of God,” and “St. Michael and his angels vanquished the dragon with the blood of the lamb; we must, like this holy archangel, put our confidence in the blood of this adorable victim, who was sacrificed for us and not for the angels.”¹⁶⁷ We see in these works an attempt to spiritualize the pilgrimage experience. The works were octavo, printed on low quality paper, with basic typography and were designed to be cheap. The illiterate could also benefit from them, for each work was illustrated with a woodcut of the archangel. This could have been used, even by the poorly literate, as an image to aid prayer at home. For St. Patrick’s Purgatory, there is no surviving literature from the shrine extant for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There was an active literature in the life of St. Patrick and other Irish saints as we have seen above. Much of this referenced Lough Derg, but as part of a wider narrative about Irish Catholicism, its legitimacy and traditions. They were written almost entirely by clergy in exile on the Continent and usually in Latin, occasionally in Gaelic or English, largely for a clerical audience. The aim of such works was not to support pilgrims on the ground but rather, to perpetrate an Irish clerical vision of Catholicism. The earliest printed guidebook for pilgrims to the Purgatory was produced in 1726 by the Dominican Dominick Brullaughan, The Pilgrimage of Lough Derg, published in

 Histoire abregée du Mont Saint-Michel en Normandie: Avec les motifs pour utilement & saintement faire le pèlerinage du glorieux archange St. Michel … Par un religieux bénédictin, de la congrégation de Saint Maur. Avec l’inventaire de toutes les reliques qui sont au Trésor (1685); Histoire abregée du Mont S. Michel en Normandie: Avec les motifs pour utilement & saintement faire le pelerinage du glorieux archange saint Michel, & de tous les saints anges. Par un religieux benedictin de la congregation de Saint Maur (1699 – 1729).  A.D. Seine-Maritime G 1242. Saint-Niçaise de Rouen. Pamphlet, Oraison à Saint-Michel.

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Belfast, Dublin, and Strabane.¹⁶⁸ It provided details on the layout and penitential exercises associated with Station Island, with scriptural explanations. Pilgrims were encouraged to mediate on their actions. John Richardson noted in 1727 that there were written instructions at the site for pilgrims to read, if they could—whether these were printed and sold as well, we do not know. The texts encouraged Christological and orthodox meditations to accompany the physical stations or penances: perambulations of the chapel should be accompanied by penitential consideration of sin and meditation on the passion and the cross; during the circuits of the seven penitential beds, pilgrims were to consider “the first for the sins of cogitation, the second for the sins of locution, the third for the sins of operation; then for the Trinity; then meditations on the twelve fruits of the Holy Ghost, penance for seven deadly sins, and invocation of seven moral virtues.”¹⁶⁹ In the water, pilgrims were to meditate on the way of perdition and Christ’s redemption of sin, and in the Purgatory itself, the “descent” into the cave/cabin was in imitation of death and the exit, rebirth, cleansed of sin. Washing afterwards symbolized the cleansing of the penitent from sin.¹⁷⁰ There was also a Latin guide to the site published by Brullaughan in Louvain in 1735; he made the pilgrimage there and recalled his experiences of Station Island.¹⁷¹ Booklets could include a range of other content, most notably songs, which could be sung alone or in groups, or used as prayers. Christophe de Bordeaux provided a song in his booklet for the Mont Saint-Michel, Father Proust did so for Notre-Dame de Verdelais and several sheets and booklets of songs survive for the journey to Compostela. Overall, print provided the right sort of religious apologetic for pilgrims to shrines, one they could carry home for their families and friends.

The Expansion and Systematization of Indulgences In the sixteenth century, Protestant rejection of the theological premises on which pardons rested led to a rapid decline in their use, but as Catholicism came to counter such criticism, indulgence acquisition provided a militant, conscious denial of heresy. As the Capuchin Charles de Génève stated, “the heresy of

   

Brullaughan, Pilgrimage of Lough Derg. Richardson, Great Folly, 57. Richardson, Great Folly, 60. Brullaughan, Pilgrimage of Lough Derg.

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Luther originated in contempt for and opposition to holy indulgences [so] one of the most powerful means of destroying heresy is to honor and celebrate holy indulgences.”¹⁷² The revival of pilgrimage in the late sixteenth century was accompanied by an even stronger interest in pardons. The nature and methods of acquiring indulgences changed in the Counter-Reformation, however. There was a great increase in the issue of papal, plenary pardons. Indulgences became standardized in format. There was a rejection of the compulsory donation of alms. Further, the huge volume of pardons issued by Rome contributed enormously to the extension of papal authority throughout the Catholic world. Expansion in plenary pardons available at shrines was directly responsible for the rising importance of confession and communion, as it was necessary to participate in these sacraments to access full indulgences.¹⁷³ Pilgrims were encouraged into sacramental observance by these new developments in piety. What is interesting about the ancient, long-distance sites is that their indulgences remained the traditional medieval, partial, indulgences—except for on special occasions—and they do not seem to have participated in the great request for plenary pardons at Rome that we see in other churches. The indulgences available at Compostela were renowned throughout Europe. The ordinary indulgence for pilgrims to Santiago, available at all times, was a pardon of a third of sins and if a pilgrim died on the journey to or from the shrine, plenary indulgence was obtained. Those who assisted at the Sunday processions in the cathedral obtained forty days of indulgence each time, and on special feast days, 200 days of pardon. For pilgrims who participated in the vigil and feast day of St. James on July 25, 600 days of pardon were available in addition to the third part of all sins. Another 200 days came from attending any mass delivered by the archbishop, dean, or a bishop or cardinal, in the cathedral. During the jubilee years, when July 25 fell on a Sunday, there was plenary indulgence available to pilgrims, to encourage traffic to the shrine.¹⁷⁴ Periodically, more were available, especially when the cathedral was fund raising for building projects. Thus, in the 1530s, Pope Clement VII issued an indulgence—quantity unknown—for pilgrims to Santiago who gave alms towards the construction works.¹⁷⁵ There seems to have been a popular inflation in pardons according to contemporary accounts. Laffi records that “it was said” a plenary indulgence was available to pilgrims who kissed the statue of St. James, but the official indulgence—

   

Cited and discussed in Dompnier, “Aspect de la dévotion eucharistique,” 28. Tingle, Indulgences after Luther, chapter 2. Parga et al., 1:151. Ferreiro, 8:174.

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duly certificated—was granted only once confession and communion had been undertaken.¹⁷⁶ More work could usefully be done in the Vatican Archives on indulgences for Compostela. Similarly, at the Mont Saint-Michel, there were already plenty of indulgences available in the later Middle Ages. When the pilgrimage revived, these were still on offer. In 1604, Feuardent’s pamphlet advertised prominently the indulgences available at the site. They had been bestowed by popes Alexander IV and John XXII, who each gave 100 days of pardon for the major Christological and Marian feasts, then Urban VI and Innocent IX, who each gave one year and forty days to the major calendar feasts and to those of St. Michael. Nicholas V gave another seven years and seven quarantines for the three feasts of the archangel.¹⁷⁷ From the 1620s, the monks obtained more “modern” indulgences from Rome, but they were still relatively limited compared to newer shrines. First, there were indulgences associated with a new confraternity and altar of the rosary, founded in a side chapel of the abbey church in 1624. Membership of the confraternity itself bestowed indulgences as did attendance at its feast day masses. Secondly, pardons for souls in Purgatory were obtained. In 1628, the monks obtained a grant of a privilege for the rosary altar, where, every Monday, each mass celebrated would liberate a soul from Purgatory.¹⁷⁸ Thirdly, the abbey acquired plenary pardon-day indulgences as well, for the main feasts of the archangel on May 8, September 29, and October 16. Finally, papal jubilees were also celebrated at the Mont, for the monks and the parishioners of the town, as well as for visiting pilgrims. For example, at Easter 1668, a universal jubilee decreed by Clement IX for prayers for his pontificate was held throughout Avranches diocese. At the Mont, the jubilee opened on March 3 with a sermon by Dom Pierre Le Duc, one of the monks, after which the monastic community went in procession through the parish, and monks and congregation together undertook prayer stations in the chapels of the church. The jubilee closed on March 18 with another procession and prayers.¹⁷⁹ Pilgrims in attendance also benefited from these pardons. St. Patrick’s Purgatory was also granted indulgences. In 1503, Pius II granted indulgences at the re-opening of the Purgatory and we know of their operation from a letter of 1507 by Prior Donatus McGrath that there were indulgences for

   

Laffi, 163, 179. Feuardent, Histoire de la fondation, 40 ff. Le Roy, 426. Huynes, 2:229.

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the diligent pilgrim, for himself, and for the intention of a soul in Purgatory.¹⁸⁰ Clement IX granted a pardon to the newly restored shrine in 1660 and around 1707– 1708, Clement X granted a plenary seven-year indulgence, probably a successor to earlier pardons which have left little trace.¹⁸¹ As for other traditional shrines, again indulgences flourished in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as pilgrimage booklets keenly promote.

Pilgrims’ Gifts to the Saints: Votum fecit, gratiam accepit In return and in thanksgiving for graces received, pilgrims visiting shrines gave gifts to the saint. Richeome counseled the pilgrim of Loreto to “do some markeable alms, if he be able.”¹⁸² Quatremaires advised pilgrims to the Mont Saint-Michel that as the wise men brought gifts to Christ, so it was customary for the faithful to give presents to the saints whom they visited. However, the Church recognized that not everyone had the means to give gifts, so those who were wealthy enough should give according to their disposition, but everyone, even the poorest, could offer a contrite and humble heart.¹⁸³ Pilgrims who vowed to undertake a journey to a shrine also frequently vowed a gift. The donation of votive objects—ex-votos—was an important part of the pilgrimage ritual for many. The letters V.F.G.A., are often found on postmedieval votive offerings and stand for Votum fecit, gratiam accepit, a vow was made, and grace was obtained. While propitiatory votives can be given in request for future favors, the majority of ex-votos were thanksgiving offerings, gestures of gratitude for the bestowing of divine aid or assistance, an acquittal of a debt towards the heavenly protector.¹⁸⁴ Trevor Johnson states that votive gifts, as tangible evidence of prayer, facilitated the public expression of feelings, and desires, which could itself help to relieve the suffering.¹⁸⁵ They are thus sacred objects, visible, material witnesses to the expression of invisible and infinite sacred power. They were also commemorative, a souvenir of a past event. Placed

 A chronology of events can be found at https://www.loughderg.org/wp-content/uploads/ 2018/03/Chronology-of-Lough-Derg-March-2018i.pdf. But the references are unverified.  Bishop Hugh MacMahon’s visit to Lough Derg 1714, in Leslie ed., 112.  Richeome, Pilgrim of Loreto, 253.  Quatremaires, Histoire abrégée du Mont Saint-Michel, 70.  Bernard Cousin has made several detailed studies of ex-votos, largely for Provence, his latest work being Regard tourné vers the ciel. For votive practice in archaeological contexts, see Osborne, “Hoards, Votives, Offerings.”  Johnson, Magistrates, 279.

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within a shrine-chapel, they kept alive the memory of graces received, bore witness to the past patronage of the shrine saint, and “helped to bind him or her ever closer to the present community, acting moreover as barometers of sacred favor.”¹⁸⁶ They also offer a continued representation of the donor to the saint, a means of prolonging the protection given, for they remained in the sanctuary, perceptible and tangible, long after their presentation.¹⁸⁷ They were intensely personal items, strengthening the bond between the saintly patron and the devotee that had already been created by a miraculous cure or escape. Gifts were of two main types, donations of alms in cash and ex-votos or votive objects. Cash donations were almost ubiquitous. Shrine churches were furnished with large coffers, into which pilgrims placed alms. By this means, the donor hoped for help and protection in the future from the saint who was well disposed to the gift-giver through delight at having received the votive offering. The large-scale offerings of pilgrims to Compostela and the Mont SaintMichel helped to pay for the refurbishments of the churches in the seventeenth century. At Santiago, during the morning mass where the pilgrims communicated in order to access their indulgence, priests made a collection of alms: after the announcement and listing of pardons during the service, a basin was passed round in which pilgrims were invited to place their donation. Only monetary alms were accepted: votive figures, wax, incense, or other such traditional gifts were not taken. At other altars, pilgrims could donate well-made swords and bells. Pilgrims were, however, allowed to place lighted candles before the image of the saint.¹⁸⁸ Wealthy patrons sent large sums of cash: 600 ducats by the Duke of Maqueda in 1603, 1000 ducats in 1606 by the Bishop of Ourense, 2000 ducats in 1668 by Captain Juan Ramon of Assis in Brazil, for example.¹⁸⁹ Ex-votos ranged from representations of cured body parts modeled in wax to crutches, the chains of freed prisoners, garments, jewelry or other precious metalwork, votive panel painting, and three-dimensional depictions of boats and cities. These donations gave evidence of miraculous interventions worked by the shrine saint and created an appropriate environment for the working of further wonders. In the words of Mary Laven, ex-votos constituted “archives of miracles.”¹⁹⁰ Royal gifts were especially prized, officially recorded and displayed, they gave honor and authority to a cult site.¹⁹¹ Shrine walls and surfaces were

     

Johnson, Magistrates, 279. Van Staten, “Gifts for the Gods,” 69. Parga et al., 1:150 – 51. Ferreiro, 9:334. Laven, “Recording Miracles,” 194. Wells, “Archaeology of Sensory Experience,” 110.

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covered with votives. We have virtually no surviving ex-votos in situ at the major shrines of northwest Europe, so to get a flavor of what they might have been like, we turn to contemporary descriptions of other major shrines. Michel de Montaigne described two votive sites in his travel journals from Italy in the early 1580s. At Loreto, he spent four or five days at the shrine celebrating Easter, visiting the holy house, and he erected there a silver votive plaque. He described the Holy House and its ex-votos: “at one end … you see high up on the wall the image of Our Lady, made, they say, of wood; all the rest is so heavily adorned with rich votive tablets from so many places and princes, that all the way to the ground there is not an inch of space empty and not covered with some place of silver or gold.”¹⁹² For his own votive, he records “I was able to find room there only with the greatest difficulty, and as a great favor, to place a tablet on which there are four silver figures attached: that of Our Lady, my own, that of my wife, that of my daughter … All are in a row on their knees on the tablet and Our Lady above them in the foreground.”¹⁹³ At Viterbo, Montaigne visited the church of the Madonna della Quercia, a mile outside town and noted that “the church is beautiful, most religious, and full of innumerable votive tablets … built around an oak tree.”¹⁹⁴ This gives a flavor of the furnishings of most shrines. The extent of votive offering at the ancient, long-distance shrines of the Atlantic world is very difficult to judge. At present, there is no evidence for great collections of wax motifs at any of the shrines studied here. This is not surprising, as they were not prominent thaumaturgical sites. At Compostela, votives took a variety of other forms. The best-recorded in the chapter records are the gifts of money from the Crown, often annually and always during jubilee years. But votives came from all social groups, although we only have descriptions of elite gifts. Tetzel, one of Leo of Rozmital’s party, who visited in 1466, recorded that a large number of coats of arms of lords and travelers were hanging in St. James’s chapel and that his lordly companions also left their arms, which was fairly common practice.¹⁹⁵ Occasionally, rich patrons would give specific vestments, ornaments, or books, as exampled above. In 1568, the marquesa of Cerralbo gave several rich corporals and in the same year “some Breton pilgrims” gave four altar cloths and amices, perhaps in the linen for which the province was famous.¹⁹⁶ In 1572, Toribio Tellez of Avila, acting for the duchess     

Montaigne, “Travel Journal,” 1185. Montaigne, “Travel Journal,” 1185. Montaigne, “Travel Journal,” 1253. “Schaseck’s Account,” in Rozmital, Travels of Leo of Rozmital, 102. Ferreiro, 8:437.

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of Sesa, gave a chalice and paten of silver and some taffeta cloth to the cathedral, while “a knight” gave a smaller chalice; in 1600, the duchess sent another gift, of two corporals, one of embroidery and one of silk.¹⁹⁷ Margaret of Austria, Queen of Spain, sent a gift described as a hanging with her chaplain Cardinal Diego de Guzman, who made the pilgrimage to Santiago on her behalf in 1610. The “hanging” was actually several pieces of silver fabric frosted with gold and it was decided to use it to make an altar frontal, backcloth, and canopy for the altar of St. James. The king and queen also gave two candlesticks of silver.¹⁹⁸ In 1677, Maria Guadalupe de Lencastre duchess of Aveiro, sent a jubilee gift to Santiago of a silver statue of St. James, commissioned in Rome, showing him at the battle of Clavijo, where he appeared miraculously to save the Christian forces. The canons decided to keep it in the reliquary chapel to show to pilgrims, and to take it out once a year, at Corpus Christi, to be placed on one of the claustral altars.¹⁹⁹ A gift particularly associated with the shrine was the silver lamp. A number were given in the sixteenth century, including one from Alonso de Acuña, governor of the Portuguese Indies. Erich Lassota von Stebelow noted in 1581 that in front of the high altar there were numerous silver lamps, gifts of powerful sovereigns and lords, the most beautiful of which had been given by the king of Portugal.²⁰⁰ They were still being given across the seventeenth century: in 1607, Etienne de Sayos, a French pilgrim from the diocese of Roan, gave a silver lamp and 150 reales to pay for oil for five years; in 1610, Orazio Levanto from Genoa, gave a lamp and 200 ducats for oil; in 1633, Jorge Gomez Alonso of Lisbon sent a large lamp along with 1500 reales to invest for provision of oil, and in 1670, the infante Don Juan de Austria sent a lamp.²⁰¹ Occasionally, votive objects from important victories or rescues were given, such as in 1572, a banner from one of the ships from the victorious fleet at Lepanto.²⁰² Similarly, at the Mont Saint-Michel, only the expensive items were recorded by monastic chroniclers. We do not know if these were the only sorts of votives or if they were the only ones that caught the monks’ attention. Thus in 1635, Monsieur de Mesgrigny, maitre de requêtes in Paris, sent a votive silver cockleshell to the abbey, in thanksgiving to St. Michael for the safe delivery of a child, following a vow.²⁰³

      

Ferreiro, 8:427. Guzmán, Peregrinación, 175. Singul, “Liberalidad.” “Diary of Erich Lassota de Steblovo,” in Viajes de extranjeros, ed. Garcia Mercadal, 2:425. Ferreiro, 9:333 – 35. Ferreiro, 8:428. Huynes, 2:35.

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One form of votive deposit, of which we have only a couple of examples, are testimonies of gratitude written out by the recipient of the grace from the saint. At Santiago there are three surviving examples, published by Ferreiro. In 1624, two documents were given to the cathedral and recorded by the chapter, an attestation by the procurator of Parma as to the truth of the second document, which was a witness statement of a man whose family was saved from a burning house by the warning of a pilgrim, who they were sure was St. James himself. The man traveled to Santiago to give thanks for and bear witness to the miracle. A second document is a testimony written in French by Louis Thourott, master goldsmith of Saint-Quintin in France. He was falsely accused of a serious crime—which he did not name—and was arrested and imprisoned. He vowed on his knees to St. James, that he would bring him a gift to Compostela, if he were freed. Four days later, Louis was liberated so together with his son, traveled to Santiago, to whom he presented a votive gift of a gold head of St. Quintin, along with his testimony.²⁰⁴ The third votive testimony is a document which was translated and written in Spanish by the foreign language priest at the Hospital Real, for Francisco Sorani, a Roman cleric. In 1687, Sorani went as a chaplain with Italian troops to the wars against the Turks in Hungary. He was captured along with forty-five other men and feared for his faith, being among infidel. He vowed to St. James and the Virgin Mary, that if he were freed, he would visit the shrine. In that instant, he relates, “I was strengthened with courage, and with my own hands and no other instrument, I broke the ring of the chain, which I present to the Apostle, and escaped out of a window of the stable where the prisoners were kept.” He swam across a river over to the Christian side and took the road to Compostela, via Vienna.²⁰⁵ These written testimonies were votive acts to St. James. Another form of votive was graffiti. Careful examination of the walls of the cathedral of Oviedo, for example, has revealed many scratches of names, places, dates, emblems, and signs, mostly of French pilgrims who were no doubt visiting the Sacred Arc on their way to Compostela. Philippe Renar in 1629, Jacques Mallèvre in 1669, François de Tourée las Claveries, a cross with 1664, are just a few examples. Carving their names into stone was a form of remembrance for posterity.²⁰⁶ Other forms of votive deposit to the Atlantic-edge shrines have left little or no trace. But for the pilgrim, this was a treasure stored up in heaven, proving that the obligation taken on to journey to the shrine was fulfilled.

 Document reproduced in Ferreiro, 9:Appendix 10, 106 – 7.  Document reproduced in Ferreiro, 9:Appendix 29, 150 – 51.  Parga et al., 2:492– 93.

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Conclusions Recent historiographical work on the senses shows us that intense religious experience such as that of a pilgrim at a shrine was a charged visual, aural, and tactile encounter. The last stages of the journey were highly ritualized, with penitential gestures along with tears and joy. While the authors who left accounts of their experiences were constructing narratives to demonstrate their piety within the conventions of the genre of literature, the fact that many such writers visited numerous sites (Fontana, Queriolet, Albani), or traveled to their special site more than once (Laffi), is testimony to the spiritual and psychological boost they received there. The churches which housed most shrines at these distant destinations were visually impressive buildings with magnificent interior decorations. The baroque period, in which many shrines were refurbished, promoted the sensuous as part of religious experience. Albert Pio wrote in the sixteenth century, that joy should accompany worship; the senses being necessary to understand spiritual reality.²⁰⁷ This is to except Ireland, where Protestant destruction was ongoing, but here the landscape provided dignity and poignancy to worship. The CounterReformation saw at least some rebuilding of shrine churches, although rarely demolishing the existing fabric, for tradition of locus was important. Baroque sumptuosity augmented rather than replaced the Romanesque and gothic work of the abbey, college, and cathedral churches in northwest Europe, adding to the historic layers of the pilgrim experience. Further, lighting was enhanced with more lamps, often bequeathed to the shrine. Music was an important part of the atmosphere, with professional instrumentalists and choirs providing regular sung masses of high quality. Visiting a shrine was a truly sensuous experience. The pilgrim’s encounter with the sacred was highly controlled in terms of the layout of the site and the activities undertaken. Ritual space was closely constructed, and devotional movement was channeled in careful ways. Shrines were closely managed by the resident clergy and there was a recommended order to a visit. In the post-Reformation period, developments in Catholic liturgy and devotional practices led to the reordering of many pilgrim churches, moving relics away from high altars and prioritizing veneration by sight rather than touch. Pilgrims still wanted to see the relics, however, even at sites without primal thaumaturgical functions, such as Compostela, the Mont, and Lough Derg. Visitors wanted close contact with the famous objects, to connect with the sa-

 Albert Pio is discussed in Hall and Cooper, Sensuous, 2– 3.

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crality and history of the place and to feel its authenticity. With post-Tridentine shifts in spirituality, participation in the sacraments came to dominate the pilgrim visit: the end point of the pilgrimage was less the arrival at the sanctuary than the reception of the eucharist.²⁰⁸ Confession and attending mass were long-standing practices, but taking the eucharist and accessing indulgences, above all plenary pardons, was new. Also, personal, private prayer was encouraged, with words provided in the booklets and pamphlets for sale at the shrine. The pilgrim’s visit to a shrine was frequently short, from a few hours on the Mont Saint-Michel, to a few days as at Compostela. At the healing shrines, stays were of course longer. The Counter-Reformation clergy wanted this visit, however brief, to have maximum impact. Over the period, the pedagogic aspect of shrine visiting grew: guided tours of relics and chapels, sermons, booklets, and prints for sale. Pilgrims were instructed at all points as to how and why they should behave and think. Even in the hostel accommodation for the humble pilgrim, there was chapel worship and “honest conversation” where possible. The pilgrim was wrapped around with a total spiritual experience in the visit to the saint. It has long been argued that the Reformation and Counter-Reformation were processes that led to the internalization and individualization of religion. To the extent that this is true, the transformation of sacred space meant that its function was no longer to act as “spatial gates” between the earthly “known realm” and the sacred “unknown realm,” instead, it allowed individuals to find a deeper level of spirituality by reminding them of elements of the divine.²⁰⁹ The degree to which such changes penetrated the popular consciousness remain important questions. Linked to this is the extent to which religious excitement at the shrine could be translated to life-long transformation and devotion. It is to the aftermath of pilgrimage that we now turn, to see if the visit to the saints led to a reformation of life for the pilgrim and the deepening of Tridentine spirituality for the wider community.

 Provost, “L’image du pèlerin,” 275.  Coster and Spicer, Sacred Space, 16.

Chapter 5 The Life-Long Pilgrim: Continuing the Journey at Home Pilgrims traveling to distant shrines could be away from home for some considerable time. While a journey to the Mont Saint-Michel might take only four or five days from Nantes or Caen on horseback, most long-distance journeys, especially those on foot, took weeks. Pilgrims to Saint-Méen west of Rennes, mostly from Maine and Anjou, took perhaps three or four weeks for their return trip: Louis Monnier, Angevin, was recorded at the hospital Saint-Yves at Rennes as having taken nine days to get there from his home parish, and it was another day at least on to the shrine, with the same length of return journey.¹ The register of the confraternity of St. James at Lyons records the departure and return dates of eighteenth-century pilgrims. While Lyons to Compostela could be achieved in a month, normally it took two months, meaning that a pilgrimage took three to four months. At the hospital Saint-Eutrope at Dax, records of outwardand inward-bound pilgrims show that the average journey time to Compostela and back from the French border was two and a half months. From distant Pistoia in Italy, the registers of the opera or guild of St. James show an average pilgrimage duration of seven months.² The return home after a long absence had an impact on families and communities, but it also posed a challenge for a Church which promoted pilgrimage as a way to lifelong, interior reform. How could the spiritual keenness of the outward journey and the sacral charge of devotions of the shrine itself be maintained and furthered after the event was over? In this chapter, the pastoral support of ex-pilgrims and its role in the dissemination of Counter-Reformation piety, will be explored. In all religious conversions, whether to a new faith or a renewed commitment to a saintly protector, the greatest challenge is maintaining the convert in the new life. The experience of transformation is accompanied by energy and enthusiasm, but continued fervor necessitates ongoing activities and sustenance. For pilgrims returning home from far-distant shrines, the question of how to continue veneration of the saint and maintain the piety expressed in the journey was an important one. The two main ways in which the voyage was remembered, and devotion was maintained, were by the spiritual support of confraternity membership and through the material assistance of objects and souvenirs  Brilloit, “Population pérégrine,” 267.  Julia, “Pour une géographie européenne,” 76. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501514388-008

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acquired along the way, things which provided small “sites” of memory. In addition, the former pilgrim could participate in spiritual journeys, of memory and imagination, which could be based on real pilgrimage experience or on journeys in the mind’s eye. All three of these will be examined in this chapter. The return home of pilgrims was frequently accompanied by rituals of thanksgiving and sometimes the deposition of a votive gift in the home church. The pilgrim would show his or her certificates to the parish priest, who would say prayers in thanksgiving for graces received. When André Landays and his confraternity returned from the Mont Saint-Michel pilgrimage to Nantes in 1622, the group held a Te Deum and mass in the chapel of Saint-Jean in Pirmil church, before the image of St. Michael; the “captain” then gave a dinner for his “soldiers,” and afterwards, escorted them to the river crossing back to Nantes.³ On returning from the Mont pilgrimage in 1634, the confraternity of Saint-Michel of the parish of Saint-Pierre of Caen held a thanksgiving mass in its chapel in the Franciscan convent. The musicians played to accompany the liturgy, and the “captain” deposited his crown and his bandolier of silver cockleshells in the chapel.⁴ Writing in the late 1960s and 1970s, Edith and Victor Turner argued that Christian pilgrimage involved an escape from the normal confines of everyday life, especially the spatial and regulatory structures of the Church, into a liminal space of communitas where pilgrims came together as equals in a spirit of homogeneity and comradeship. Returning home was to re-enter the normative structures of daily living.⁵ Yet as we have seen, the overwhelming majority of long-distance pilgrims traveled with the support of confraternal assistance or, more frequently, with companions from home, and therefore in some way they journeyed with the community and the Church which they had left. It was in close relationship with communities that the memory and experience of pilgrimage was perpetuated for individual pilgrims. Confraternities, with their fraternal, human support, and the material aids to devotion purchased by pilgrims at shrines and taken home, were important in the spiritual lives of lower and middling sorts of people. Their operation and influence were means by which popular urban and rural groups were influenced by and in turn effected the devotional priorities of the Counter-Reformation Church. In this chapter, the aftermath of pilgrimage will be discussed with particular reference to pilgrims returning to France, for whom the richest documentary sources survive.

 Landays, “Voyage du Mont Sainct-Michel 1622,” in Croix, Moi, Jean Martin, recteur de Plouvellec, 92.  Saint-Martin, Voyage fait au Mont Saint-Michel.  Turner and Turner, Image and Pilgrimage, 496.

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Confraternities and Pilgrimage Confraternities—or guilds, in traditional English description—had their origins in the central Middle Ages and were both geographically widespread and numerous in membership. Nicolas Terpstra defines the confraternity as “a self-governing congregation of lay Christians adapting and adjusting traditional clerical forms of group worship to their own situation and times.”⁶ Before the Reformation, their main functions were charitable or pious works, intercession for living and deceased members, and sociability and mutual aid, all mediated in some way through the offices of the Church. They were relatively independent organizations, raising and administering their own funds under limited supervision by the clergy.⁷ There were different types of confraternities and individuals could be members of more than one association. The most common were craft fraternities, parish guilds dedicated to patron and other locally venerated saints, and charitable associations formed for a specific purpose such as the running of a hospital. Pilgrimage confraternities were usually a subset of parish devotional confraternities, dedicated to the veneration of a special saint through provision of rituals and the promotion of good works, but some also ran or helped to administer hospitals for travelers. For these groups, the central good work was pilgrimage, visiting and venerating the saint’s shrine, helping others to do so in moral and material ways, then perpetuating the cult upon return home. Pilgrimage confraternities began to appear in the historical record at the same time as the long-distance shrines began to take off, after 1100. They followed broadly the same chronological development as other devotional confraternities in Catholic Europe, of later medieval vitality, Reformation decline and Counter-Reformation resurgence. The Reformation attack on saintly and collective intercession which caused a decline in long-distance pilgrimage led also to a fall in confraternity membership in the mid-sixteenth century. In regions and cities of Europe where Protestantism was established, confraternities were abolished. Reformed ideas also undermined collective prayer associations in Catholic regions and there were criticisms of confraternities at the Council of Trent. In the XXIII session of the Council in 1562, canons VIII and IX ruled for episcopal control over confraternities to bring them under greater clerical supervision.⁸ Yet from the mid- to late sixteenth century, confraternities were renewed or reborn throughout Catholic Europe, a result of religious militancy and revival.

 Terpstra, Lay Confraternities, 49.  Flynn, “Baroque Piety,” 233 – 35.  Black, “Confraternities and the Parish,” 8.

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The chief features of the new and reformed fraternities were greater emphasis on the performance of charitable work, rejection of convivial festivities, new devotional emphases on frequent confession and communion, and above all overt statements or demonstrations of Catholic faith.⁹ The new-style confraternities played an important role in the mobilization of Catholics against heresy and in the shaping of confessional identity. Devotional confraternities, encouraged particularly by the mendicant orders, expanded, including Penitents, based on Italian and Spanish models.¹⁰ Yet the novelty of late sixteenth-century confraternal associations can be overstated. Many communities continued to support their traditional groups. Some pilgrimage confraternities also began to re-emerge at this time, for example Claude Haton records the restoration of the confraternity of Saint-Jacques and the resumption of pilgrimage at Provins in 1578.¹¹ After 1600, the confraternity again became a prominent institution of religious life for clergy and laity alike, in town and countryside, and there was a major expansion of numbers. Historians have identified shifts in the functions of Counter-Reformation confraternities. Firstly, Tridentine reformers sought to impose greater clerical authority over these voluntary associations. Already from the later sixteenth century, Church councils stipulated that fraternities ought not to be founded without episcopal license, that their rules, activities, and funds should be subject to visitation and supervision, and that their devotional and associational life should be brought within the compass of the parish so that Catholics should not be diverted from their primary obligation of parochial observance. Following on from the rulings of Trent, the Bull Quacumque of Pope Clement VIII of 1604 gave powers to parish priests to curb the autonomy of confraternities, to elect or at least to veto their officials, to scrutinize their accounts, and to control when they celebrated offices in order to avoid clashes with parish celebrations.¹² Secondly, the separation of the sacred from the profane was a preoccupation of reformers. In confraternities, they stressed the sanctifying aspects of fellowship but played down sociability. Fraternity feasts were discouraged and not allowed to take place in guild chapels or in connection with masses. Processions with the sacrament needed permission from the bishop and any money collected above the needs of fraternity masses was to be used for pious works.¹³ Thirdly, new devotional confraternities were one of the great

 Bossy, “Leagues and Associations,” 175, 177.  Bossy, “Leagues and Associations,” 176.  Haton, Mémoires (1553 – 1582), 4:74.  For discussion of the post-Tridentine regulations of confraternities, see Black, “Confraternities and the Parish.”  Hsia, World of Catholic Renewal, 202.

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successes of the Catholic Reformation. Holy Sacrament confraternities were founded to promote the cult of the eucharist through more frequent administration of the sacraments of confession, penance, and communion. Confraternities of the rosary encouraged Marian devotions. The new devotions of Christ and Mary replaced older confraternities in many communities. P.T. Hoffman shows that in the Lyonnais, old parish guilds such as Holy Spirit fraternities declined, displaced by Holy Sacrament and rosary confraternities. These had not existed in 1610, but by the mid-eighteenth century there were forty-two holy sacrament and twenty-eight rosary confraternities in the 108 parishes of the northeast of the diocese.¹⁴ Maureen Flynn also observes a decline in local dedications of confraternities and states that “in relation to the elaborate lattice of confraternal devotions under favored local saints in the Middle Ages, the early modern period preserved a more standardized and homogenized pattern of advocacies.”¹⁵ Yet as with the period of religious warfare, innovations can be overstated. Many traditional confraternities continued to operate as local and regional studies have shown, particularly the work of Stefano Simiz for Champagne, Andrew Spicer for Orleans, and Philippe Desmette for Cambrai and Tournai.¹⁶ The period certainly saw the flowering of pilgrimage confraternities. They contributed to the promotion of pilgrimage and to the spiritualization of Catholicism in the communities in which they were founded. The returning pilgrim member of a confraternity was an important means by which new devotions and spiritual concerns were spread among the popular groups of rural and urban Catholic Europe, in this case example, France.

Numbers and Locations of Pilgrimage Confraternities It is difficult even to estimate the numbers and geographical extent of pilgrimage confraternities for the later Middle Ages or the early modern period, for records of these organizations have frequently been lost. Also, there is some difficulty correlating confraternities dedicated to widely venerated saints such as St. James and St. Michael to pilgrimage, for they were common dedicatees of altars and churches. For example, the Archangel Michael was patron of numerous parish churches, so fraternities dedicated to him in whole or part were not uncom-

 Hoffman, Church and Community, 110 – 11.  Flynn, “Baroque Piety,” 244.  Simiz, Confréries urbaines; Spicer, “(Re)building the Sacred Landscape”; Desmette, Brefs d’indulgences.

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mon; in early modern Paris, nineteen known confraternities were dedicated to the archangel as one of their patrons, but only one was founded for those who made the pilgrimage.¹⁷ In France, studies of individual dioceses show that pilgrimage confraternities were relatively common and widespread. The most numerous and geographically extensive were confraternities dedicated to St. James of Compostela. For example, Pierre Hebert estimates there were 107 confraternities dedicated solely or jointly to St. James in Normandy before 1600, with regional variation: fifty-eight in the modern département of SeineMaritime, twenty-three in Eure, sixteen in Calvados, six in Manche, and four in Orne. Whether this reflects the contemporary situation on the ground or haphazard documentary survival, we do not know.¹⁸ However, numbers were geographically variable everywhere: Marc Bouyssou’s study of confraternities in the archdeaconry of Blois shows that 9.5 percent of all confraternities were dedicated to St. James but in the archdeaconry of Vendôme, only 1.3 percent were.¹⁹ In the modern département of the Haute-Pyrénées, forty-one confraternities of St. James have left traces for the period of the sixteenth to the nineteenth century.²⁰ Germany and the Netherlands were rich in confraternities to St. James in the later Middle Ages, but few survived past the mid-sixteenth century. Some important fraternities continued in northern Italian cities, such as Verona and Pistoia, but how widespread they were in other regions is unknown. Confraternities dedicated to the Archangel Michael and his pilgrimage were more regionally concentrated: by the early seventeenth century they are more often found in northern France and in provinces either side of the central Loire region, although there were also confraternities in eastern France. The late medieval Rhineland confraternities in German and Swiss territories largely disappeared with the Reformation. The best-known pilgrimage confraternity for the Mont was in Paris, founded by King Philip Augustus in 1280 in a chapel which was later incorporated into the palace precinct on the Île de la Cité.²¹ It survived down to the French Revolution. In the Mont’s own province of Normandy, the importance of the Counter-Reformation pilgrimage is shown by the large number of confraternities. We have only passing references to many of these, but we know, for example, that at Évreux, the confraternity Saint-Michel took part in general processions in the city dressed in a long cape, a pilgrim’s satchel and

    

Julia, “Pèlerinage au Mont Saint-Michel,” 298. Hebert, “Pèlerinages dans les statuts,” 211. Bouyssou, “Confréries religieuses,” 42. Castelao, “Chemin de Saint-Jacques,” 127. Lombard-Jourdain, “Confrérie parisienne,” 105, 141– 45.

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staff.²² A confraternity in the parish of Gloët, near Pont-Audemer, had statutes of an ancient association dedicated to St. Michel confirmed in 1664.²³ A group at Laval-au-Maine have left a register of entrants.²⁴ A confraternity of St. Michael erected in the church of Freneuse, near Périers, had thirty-three members in 1665.²⁵ At Pont-l’Évêque, an ancient confraternity of St. Michael was refounded in 1719 by thirty-four men who had made the pilgrimage together and who wanted an association to perpetuate the memory of that journey.²⁶ In the archdeaconry of Blois, there were three pilgrimage confraternities dedicated to the archangel, all close to the episcopal city, at Saint-Solenne de Blois, Saint-Victor and at Villebarou. We have only ephemeral evidence for their activities. That of SaintSolenne dated back to the fifteenth century but was reunited with the fabric of the church in 1630; at Villebarou, a female testator invited all confrères and consoeurs to dine at her house after their participation in her funeral obsequies, a practice observed several times in this parish for the confraternity, and that of Saint-Victor had its own pew in the parish church.²⁷ Examples could be multiplied. These groups provided a visible, on-going tradition of sacred journeying. The tradition of the Mont Saint-Michel pilgrimage was particularly strong in the city of Rouen. Here, there were three confraternities re/founded in the seventeenth century, specifically to promote or support journeys to the Mont. The earliest of these was established in the parish of Saint-Jean, for which statutes were approved in 1606 and reconfirmed in 1655.²⁸ A second confraternity was re-erected in 1623 in the parish church of Saint-Niçaise by the curé Jean Champion and several parishioners, who obtained its official recognition from the archbishop.²⁹ A third was established in 1655 in the parish church of Saint-Maclou. Its statutes stipulated that its master had to have accomplished the pilgrimage and that he was obliged to lead a pilgrimage of others to the Mont, if a party presented itself with this request. To perpetuate veneration of the archangel, the confraternity organized weekly and Sunday masses at the altar of St. Michael, as well as feast day services on September 29 and October 16.³⁰ Numerous communities in Nor-

        

Baudot, “Diffusion et évolution,” 109. A.D. Seine-Maritime G 1332. Confraternities of the deanery of Pont-Audemer. Roche, “Confrérie de Saint-Jacques.” A.D. Seine-Maritime G 1457. Confraternities of the deanery of Périers. A.D. Calvados 6 G 580. Confraternities of Pont l’Evêque. Bouyssou, “Confréries religieuses,” 42. A.D. Seine-Maritime G 6788. Saint-Jean de Rouen. A.D. Seine-Maritime G 1241. Saint-Niçaise de Rouen. A.D. Seine-Maritime G 1235. Saint-Maclou de Rouen.

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mandy had religious and cultural attachments to the pilgrimage, fostered by confraternities. Within Spain, there were few pilgrimage confraternities of this traditional type in the early modern period. For St. James, there is no surviving evidence for confraternities for former pilgrims of the French and Italian types; Vázquez suggests that those who visited the shrine from within the Peninsular did not need or wish to commemorate the journey in the same way. There were, however, confraternities erected to support the pilgrimage itself, by providing hostels or alms along the routeway and funerals for pilgrims who died on the journey. For example, a 1785 copy of statutes of a confraternity of Rio Negro in Zamora stated that the chaplains of the fraternity would assist in the burial of poor pilgrims who died in the town and the “abbot” of the group would pay for a mass for the soul of the deceased.³¹ Of other long-distance pilgrimage cults examined in this work, evidence for confraternities is poorer. In France, dedicatees of Saint-Méen have left little trace of confraternal association. This pilgrimage seems to have been the resort of smaller groups or families, making the journey by using the routeways and hospitality structures evolved for the Mont Saint-Michel pilgrimage and it has left little trace of its existence. In Ireland, the repression of Catholic institutions meant that formal confraternities dedicated to Saints Patrick, James, or Michael, are unknown for the early modern period. Even if they existed, they have left no trace. Other shrines such as St. Radegonde in Poitiers, had an associated confraternity but it was confined to the city where the cult was centered, more to support the shrine than to provide for ex-pilgrims. The great, Atlantic edge shrines of James and Michael elicited a special and ongoing response of confraternal activity among their devotees whose parallels are perhaps Roman-based cults and Jerusalem. These were prestigious pilgrimages, which needed support and commemoration.

Membership The origins of pilgrimage confraternities were to provide associations for pilgrims who had traveled an arduous journey and as such, they were select in membership, at least when they were founded. Thus, the confraternity of St. James of Chilhac was founded in 1527 by a party of returning pilgrims from Com-

 Parga et al., 1:251.

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postela and was for future pilgrims who made the journey to Santiago on foot.³² The confraternity of St. James of Gisors was founded in the church of Saints Gervase and Proteus sometime before 1608 by a group of sixteen male parishioners who had made the journey to Compostela, and it remained only for pilgrims.³³ The confraternity of St. Michael founded in Saint-Vivien of Rouen in 1656, was for pilgrims who had either visited Monte Gargano in Puglia or the Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy.³⁴ A confraternity of St. Michael created in Fréneuse in the archdiocese of Rouen in 1665 was solely for those who had visited the shrine; there were thirty-three founding members and a priest, eight of whom were members of the Grospoisson family.³⁵ Around the year 1712, a number of inhabitants of Pont l’Évêque undertook the pilgrimage to the Mont Saint-Michel together and on their return, decided to found a confraternity to honor the saint, who was also the parish’s patron, and to keep company and celebrate the pilgrims who visited the Mont. Forty years later, in 1752, this foundation was remembered by another group of thirty-four returned pilgrims who wanted to restore the confraternity to its previous energy, for only six of the former group of pilgrims remained alive.³⁶ Membership demonstrated participation in the exclusive experience of long-distance pilgrimage. Both before and after the Reformation, some pilgrimage confraternities allowed for a wider membership, however. Wives could benefit from the spiritual privileges of their husbands even if they had not been on pilgrimage. Some groups allowed aspirant pilgrims to join, to encourage and assist them on their journey. In the extant sixteenth-century registers, the confraternity of St. James of Bordeaux listed confrères and confrairesses (sic).³⁷ From 1583, the confraternity of St. James of Aurillac was no longer exclusively for former Jacquets, but open to travelers, merchants, transport workers, and messengers as well as pilgrims.³⁸ That of St. James of Chalon-sur-Saône, had in 1594, thirty-nine men and eleven women, rising in 1599 to fifty-three men and sixteen women. In 1701, the confraternity had twenty-one members who had achieved the pilgrimage and eighteen who had not yet been to Compostela; in 1717, they were respec-

 Chaize, “Pèlerinage de Saint-Jacques de Compostelle,” 43.  A.D. Seine-Maritime G 1752. Confraternities of Gisors.  Laghezza and Juhel, “Saint-Michel-du-Mont-Gargan de Rouen,” 33.  A.D. Seine-Maritime G 1457. Confraternities of the deanery of Périers.  A.D. Calvados 6 G 580. Confraternities of Pont l’Evêque.  A.D. Gironde G 2118. Confraternities of Saint-Michel de Bordeaux; Mensignac, Confrérie bordelaise, 15 ff.  Barret and Gurgand, Priez pour nous, 191.

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tively forty-five and twenty-seven in number.³⁹ The confraternity of St. Michael in the parish of Saint-Jean, Rouen, for which statutes were approved in 1606 and reconfirmed in 1655, was primarily for pilgrims who had made the journey but recognized that if there was someone who wanted to travel but who was unable to do so, they could be received into the association.⁴⁰ The St. James confraternity of Moissac is one of the best known, because of the publication of its registers by Camille Daux.⁴¹ It was founded in 1523 by expilgrims “all having made the pilgrimage and romerage to Monsieur Saint Jacques in Compostela” and only those who could prove they had made the journey by showing their Compostela certificates could be members. In 1615, the confraternity reorganized, and new statutes were issued, again for pilgrims only. The confraternity has entry registers for members kept sporadically over the period 1525 to 1670. Across time, the decades with the largest entry figures—and probably those with the best record keeping—were the 1520s and 1530s, 1590s through to 1620s, and then the 1650s. The average entry was nine new members a year, but some years had only one and others, over twenty, new confreres recorded. Some confraternities were also mixed, part pilgrim and part parish guild. Within these confraternities, there was a status division between pilgrims and other members. At the confraternity of St. Michael in Saint-Maclou parish, Rouen, new members were admitted to the general part of the confraternity on a first payment of 5 sols and an annual subscription thereafter of 4s 4d. Only those who had made the pilgrimage to the Mont could become master of the confraternity, however, and he was expected to be able to lead a pilgrimage there during his tenure, if demand arose.⁴² At Chalon-sur-Saône, the later seventeenth century saw a relaxation of the strict rule that members had to be pilgrims: those who had not traveled but who wanted to be part of the confraternity were allowed to join, at an elevated entry rate in 1682 of 3 livres where pilgrims paid 10 sols. ⁴³ Not everyone joined a confraternity immediately on their return. The registers of the confraternity of St. James at Moissac show this could occur several years later: in 1597, two tailors joined, one had completed the pilgrimage in 1586, the other in 1596; in 1600, four new members joined, having

 A.D. Saône-et-Loire E 1490. Livre de la confrérie Saint-Jacques; for a discussion of the sixteenth-century confraternity see Pétouraud, “Registre de la confrérie”; A.D. de la Saône-etLoire E 1490.  A.D. Seine-Maritime G 6788. Parish of Saint-Jean.  Daux, Pèlerinage à Compostelle.  A.D. Seine-Maritime G 1235. Confraternity Saint-Michel in Saint-Maclou, Rouen.  Pétouraud, “Registre de la confrérie,” 9.

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Table 5.1: St. Michael Confraternity membership of Notre-Dame de Vire, 1652 – 1691. Year

Men

Men and Sons

 – 





 – 

Men and Wives

Widows

Total











 – 







 – 







 – 







 – 







 – 









 – 









 – 









 – 







 – 











(incomplete)

completed their journeys one in 1589, two in 1592, and one in 1600 itself; in 1606, five new members joined, having journeyed one in 1593, one in 1602, two in 1603, and one in 1604.⁴⁴ The members who enrolled in pilgrimage confraternities were largely male and mostly of the middling sort, artisans and merchants in towns including younger journeymen, and solid farmers and craftsmen in the countryside, along with their sons. In 1703, the confraternity of St. James of Laval had fiftyeight members, all tradesmen, of which nineteen were weavers, five butchers, three ditchers, two masons, two roofers, two laundrymen, two carders, and a range of other crafts.⁴⁵ The register of the confraternity of St. Michael in the parish church of Notre-Dame de Vire shows the level of membership across the seventeenth century (table 5.1). It was clearly for pilgrims and their sons, occasionally wives and widows.⁴⁶

 Daux, Pèlerinage à Compostelle, 43 – 46.  Julia, “Pour une géographie européenne,” 108.  A.D. Calvados G 1236. Parish of Notre-Dame de Vire.

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At Moissac, similarly, the majority of members—where occupation is stated— were artisans. One visible change over time was the recorded number of clergy. In the years to the 1590s, there were always recorded new clerical admissions; after this date, they become very rare. The list of members recorded when new statutes were issued in 1615 were typical of the broad membership: there were fifty-eight members present, of whom there was one priest, one monk, six law officers, one bourgeois, thirty merchants and artisans, one farmer, six manual laborers, eleven of unknown occupation, and one youth.⁴⁷ The confraternity of St. James in Campan in the Bigorre is unusual for a rural confraternity in that its register survives. Between 1645 and 1817, over 1000 members enrolled into the fraternity. Out of a community of around 3000 inhabitants, around six pilgrims a year enrolled. Here, we see family involvement in the confraternity over several generations: four Bailacs of which two were brothers enrolled on November 3, 1696; two brothers Galiay enrolled on September 23, 1696; and three members of the Sastorne family enrolled in 1701. The Jumère family saw eight members from three generations enroll between 1650 and 1714.⁴⁸ Similarly, at Chalon-sur-Saône, pilgrimage could be a family tradition: the family Quinquant had close associations with the confraternity of St. James, along with pilgrimage to Galicia; Zacharie, active 1600 – 1621, Jean, blacksmith, active 1612– 1622, Louis in 1627 and the grandchildren of Zacharie were still paying for membership in 1636.⁴⁹ It is clear that numbers in pilgrimage confraternities were never huge at any one time and the question remains as to whether the majority of pilgrims ever enrolled in a confraternity at all. It may be that most of them traveled independently of institutional support and returned to parish life and perhaps other confraternities such as the Holy Sacrament or Rosary, if at all. This was probably particularly true of poorer pilgrims. The confraternal framework was mostly for men and their relatives with a certain solid position in the community. For those, however, the confraternity offered a wide range of spiritual supports which in turn could be influential on the wider parish.

 Daux, Pèlerinage à Compostelle, 43.  Provost, “Identité paysanne,” 385 – 86.  A.D. Saône-et-Loire E 1490; Pétouraud, “Registre de la confrérie,” 15.

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Types and Functions of Confraternities Pierre Charpentrat observes that Counter-Reformation shrines typically developed associated confraternities with spiritual benefits, such that the early modern pilgrim joined a group benefitting from particular privileges rather than launching him or herself heroically onto the routes of adventure, to conquer graces.⁵⁰ Such confraternities had been a common feature of the medieval Church and as R.N. Swanson writes, membership “generally meant sharing in the benefits for the devotional works performed within the house, as something distinct from sharing in indulgences … Moreover, these confraternity grants were issued as fully personalized documents, not the mass-produced forms intended for later completion characteristic of confessional letters.”⁵¹ The Reformation witnessed the disappearance of many of these guilds, perhaps superseded by the aggregated form of confraternity, where a local “branch” was linked to a wider network of groups, with a central base in Rome, such as that of the Holy Sacrament first created in the church of Santa Maria della Maggiore in 1537.⁵² However, the shrine confraternity which enrolled geographically distant members in a prayer society re-emerged in the seventeenth century, usually linked to nationally and internationally important Marian shrines. For example, the Spanish shrine-monastery of Nuestra Señora of Montserrat regularly sent out collectors or commissioned local agents into France and the Spanish Netherlands to raise funds. There is evidence for an agent looking after the monastery’s interests in the Toulouse region in 1328 and in 1593, a Catalan merchant from Monistrol was operating for the monks in the same area. In 1606, the monastery acquired a property in Cazères, 50 kilometers southwest of Toulouse, which it used as a permanent base for its operations in France and the Low Countries. Its agents acquired episcopal licenses to collect alms; 350 survive for the period 1603 – 1662 and cover 111 of the 144 dioceses of seventeenth-century France and parts of the Spanish Netherlands. The agents traded candles and images in return for donations and inscribed members into the confraternity, recording their names on the guild roll. The members received prayers and indulgences for a subscription fee.⁵³ Within France, an example is provided by the shrine of Notre-Dame de Liesse in northern France, which stimulated two types of confraternity: the “great” confraternity, based in the shrine church, with members

   

Charpentrat, “L’architecture et son public,” 92. Swanson, Indulgences, 142. Tingle, Indulgences after Luther, 88 – 89. Julien, “Quête pour la Vierge Noire.”

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enrolled from all over the kingdom, and independent local confraternities in the churches of northeastern France. The former association was for spiritual purposes, with adherents such as Cardinal Richelieu, who wanted to participate in the prayers of the shrine. Indulgences were available, and an annual mass was said for confreres. The latter were normal confraternities of devotion, based in parish churches.⁵⁴ Another restored ancient shrine, that of SainteReine, also stimulated a network of confraternities. In 1603, some pilgrims and a priest who had visited Flavigny for cures founded a confraternity in Saint-Eustache church in Paris, then in 1614, a “brother” confraternity was founded in the chapel at Sainte-Reine itself. This was both devotional and charitable, with a mission to aid pilgrims at the shrine, and throughout the early modern period, there remained close links between the Parisian group and that at the shrine itself with a formal “twinning” taking place in 1674.⁵⁵ At a more regional level, the shrine of Notre-Dame-de-Verdelais, at Aubiac near Bordeaux, had a confraternity which radiated throughout Aquitaine with close to 6000 members by the close of the seventeenth century.⁵⁶ These confraternities did not require active membership and most of their adherents joined to acquire indulgences rather than to participate in pilgrimage. The ancient, long-distance shrines dedicated to saints such as James, Michael, Méen, and others, do not seem to have sponsored “out-reach” confraternities of this type. But from the early seventeenth century, enthusiastic expilgrims founded their own groups, sometimes reviving medieval ones. The main functions were threefold: to venerate the saint to whom the members had journeyed, to maintain their religious devotion, and to encourage others to undertake the pilgrimage. In addition, pilgrimage confraternities provided a range of spiritual services to their members similar to those of other fraternal associations, while recognizing the special status of the pilgrim in his or her community. Confraternities were also important institutions by which clerical influences and new devotions were introduced into local communities; they were places of ongoing spiritual development for their members after the “heroic journey” had ended. Through an examination of surviving statutes of pilgrimage confraternities for France, which exist sporadically but in reasonable numbers, detailed examination of the activities of these groups can be made. While there was variation between individual groups and across regions and bounda-

 Maës, Notre-Dame de Liesse, 68.  Boutry and Julia, Sainte-Reine au Mont Auxois, 57, 120 – 22.  Duclot, Verdelais à travers les siècles, 44.

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ries, the core activities of these groups were fundamentally similar and underwent parallel changes over time. The primary function of all pilgrimage confraternities was ritual veneration of the special saint through commissioning of masses, prayers, and processions, and to provide special reverence on the feast day of the saint. The statutes of the confraternities of northern and central France dedicated to the pilgrimage to the Mont Saint-Michel, and thus to the Archangel Michael, provide a good case example of this function. The confraternity founded in Paris by King Philip Augustus in 1280 had as its central purpose to perpetuate devotion to the Archangel through weekly liturgy and feast day celebrations, amongst confreres who had achieved the journey. On October 16 each year, the confraternity organized a public procession through the capital.⁵⁷ In Rouen, the three confraternities dedicated to St. Michael were also primarily liturgical in their function. The confraternity at Saint-Maclou church held a high mass in its chapel on the first Sunday of every month. On the other Sundays, a low mass was said in the chapel, between the two parish masses, so as not to draw parishioners away. A high mass was celebrated on the feast of St. Michael and All Angels, on September 29 annually.⁵⁸ The confraternity of St. Michael at Saint-Niçaise church held a high mass on the fourth Sunday of each month and a low mass on all other Sundays. Confreres were expected to take their turn in paying the costs of these masses.⁵⁹ St. James confraternities did likewise. Article One of the 1615 statutes of the confraternity of Moissac stated their obligation to hold a high mass every Sunday, at 7 a.m., in their “usual” church.⁶⁰ The real liturgical highlight of the year for all these confraternities was the annual feast day of the saint. Church liturgies were often combined with processions, sometimes elaborately theatrical. In fact, the pilgrimage confraternities seem to have been patrons of “miracle” plays or mummeries, performing stories about their patrons, at least across the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The confraternity of St. Michael in Paris held two annual processions. One, through the streets of the capital on the Sunday after October 16, the feast of the apparition of the archangel to St. Aubert in 709, was described in detail by the seventeenth-century historian Henri Sauval: “traditionally in the procession of St. Michael a man was chosen for his height, dressed in the costume normally depicted on the archangel, who led a great devil in chains, who struck out at ev-

   

Lombard-Jourdain, “Confrérie parisienne,” 141– 45. A.D. Seine-Maritime G 1235. Confraternity Saint-Michel in Saint-Maclou, Rouen. Le Charpentier, Instructions pour la confrérie, statutes of 1623, article 16. Daux, Pèlerinage à Compostelle, 56.

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eryone he could.”⁶¹ The second was an annual procession-pilgrimage to SaintCloud on May 8, the feast of the apparition of the archangel at Monte Gargano in Italy, to commemorate the pilgrimage to the Mont. All confreres were obliged to participate under penalty of a 6 livre fine. The procession was led by a mounted standard-bearer, accompanied by pipes and tambours, with singing.⁶² The confraternity of St. James in Paris also had an annual procession with a play. Henri Sauval again describes their activities, with disapproval: their gourds they filled with wine at the first tavern on their route, and they drained them as they processed. At the rear was a great rascal dressed as St. James, a merchant with the face of a picklock who pretended to be an honest man. On their return, they dined in the great hall of the hospital, with St. James dining between two men who were only allowed to watch, not eat, because the saints ate nothing.⁶³

Such plays seem to have been common among the urban St. James confraternities. At Provins, the play/procession was revived in 1578 and once again confreres and former pilgrims dressed as Christ and the twelve apostles, as well as in pilgrim clothing, for their annual feast day progress.⁶⁴ At Rheims a similar playprocession took place on the Saturday after July 25 and again the following Sunday, with a progress to the cathedral. Along the route, they sang and recited a canticle composed by the priest of the parish of Saint-Jacques, Gérard de la Lobe (1564– 1609), comprising a metrical version of the Creed and profession of Catholic faith.⁶⁵ At Limoges in 1596, Bernard Bardon de Brun wrote a 3626verse poem, La tragédie de Monsieur saint Jacques, performed by the confraternity of the apostle. Based on the Golden Legend, it recounted the life of the saint and the triumph of Catholicism, mocking Protestantism along the way.⁶⁶ At Chalon-sur-Saône, the annual procession was led by fourteen “apostles,” elected for the year and expected to wear their appropriate costume; in addition to the twelve apostles of Christ, there was the honorary apostle St. Paul, St. Christopher, and a hermit. The confreres sang a Chanson de Saint-Jacques, a special anthem for their group.⁶⁷ Bishops viewed such activities with increasing disdain and acted to augment the devotional focus of these processions. Already around 1619, the mummeries and feasts of the confraternity of St. James of Paris were

      

Cited in Lombard-Jourdain, “Confrérie parisienne,” 144. Lombard-Jourdain, “Confrérie parisienne,” 141. Cited in Lombard-Jourdain, “Confrérie parisienne,” 144. Haton, Mémoires (1553 – 1582), 4:74– 75. Julia, Voyage aux saints, 165. Bardon de Brun, Tragédie représentée à Limoges. Pétouraud, “Registre de la confrérie,” 7.

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criticized, by Sauval above and by another reforming cleric of the city, Antoine Fusi: “they dance, gambol and prance the merits of their journey to Galicia. It is blasphemous to honor the memory of the apostles and the servants of God in such a shameless way.”⁶⁸ For the confraternities of St. Michael, such processional activity was found all over northern France, as was its increasing regulation. An episcopal ordonnance of the Archbishop of Paris of October 1636 forbade the dressing of confreres as St. Michael and devils during their processions.⁶⁹ The statutes of 1660 no longer mention this play-acting so it seems to have been eradicated, although the participation of children dressed as angels surrounding a model of the Mont Saint-Michel continued.⁷⁰ At Saint-Niçaise of Rouen, on the feast day of September 29, members of the St. Michael confraternity went in procession to the chapel of Saint-Michel adjacent to the convent of Sainte-Catherine on the hill above Rouen.⁷¹ The clergy members wore copes and led devotions at stations along the way. Each participant carried a white candle and they were accompanied by children dressed in white. In returning to the parish church, mass was celebrated.⁷² Later, in the seventeenth century, the archbishop of Rouen forbade children from dressing as angels in the procession.⁷³ In 1687, the bishop of Châlons-sur-Marne forbade the confraternity of St. James from carrying children on their shoulders during their annual procession.⁷⁴ More acceptably and more commonly, the confraternity of St. James of Moissac celebrated two annual feast days, on May 1 and July 25, with vespers the evening before and high masses on the day, with the confreres in attendance in their pilgrims’ hats. Before this, they processed solemnly around the abbey church of Saint-Pierre, where the masses were held, together with the monks of the monastery. The confreres were all expected to have confessed so they could take communion together in an act of reconciliation on the day. Blessed bread would also be distributed by the marguilliers of the confraternity. On the feast of St. James the Less, the confraternity processed from their regular church, accompanied

 Fusi, Franc-Archer de la vraie Eglise, 910.  Lebeuf, Histoire de la ville, 1:287.  Lombard-Jourdain, “Confrérie parisienne,” 145.  A.D. Seine-Maritime G 1241. Saint-Niçaise de Rouen.  Le Charpentier, Instructions pour la confrérie, statutes 1623, article 6.  A.D. Calvados 6 G 580. Confraternities of Pont l’Evêque.  Archives Municipales de Châlons-sur-Marne FF 26 Registre Folio 270. Mandement de LouisAntoine de Noailles évêque de Châlons-sur-Marne 20 avril 1687.

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by their priest, to that of St. Martin in Moissac, where they made a donation to St. Orens’s altar there.⁷⁵ Confraternities often provided new and more elaborate liturgies for their parishes and as such, were important patrons of new devotions for their members and the wider community. In 1717, the confraternity of St. Michael in the parish church of Vaucelles, near Caen founded an exposition of the Holy Sacrament on three feast days, those of the apparition of St. Michael, his patronal feast day, and the Sunday following the feast of St. Sebastian. The confreres contracted to pay an annual rent of 17 livres for the services. Their stated motive was “to thank the Lord for the fortunate return of pilgrims from their journey and to attract to the whole church the protection of the patron saints [Michael and Sebastian] during the life and after the death of its members.”⁷⁶ Confraternities were also important in promoting the Catholic reformation practice of more frequent confession and communion. In many statutes, confreres were exhorted to take frequent communion, or at least on the feast days of St. Michael. Indulgences were only available after confession and communion had been received, thus encouraging confreres to do so at least five or six times a year as we will see below. This was an important means by which the new practice of frequent eucharistic participation was introduced into parish communities. There might even be sermons. The confraternity of St. Michael in Saint-Maclou parish, Rouen held an annual sermon on its feast day of September 29.⁷⁷ The furnishing of altars and chapels was an important corollary of ritual, to provide an appropriate space for veneration of the saint and for the site of the eucharist. New forms of representation of saints and devotions came into parish churches in this way. Confraternities as groups or the individual members could contribute embellishments, as good works. In this way, the individual bound him or herself into the prayers of the group and individualized their membership of it. The foundation documents or statutes of confraternities frequently stated the obligation of the group to furnish an altar with appropriate ornaments. The confraternity of St. James of Chalon-sur-Saône had a chapel in the Carmelite church; in 1511, the confraternity contracted with a local painter, Grégoire Guérard, for a triptych for their altar and in 1600, another commission was given to Georges Millot for 40 livres “to paint the picture which is in the chapel of the said confraternity … for the painting only, not including the wood, which should also

 Daux, Pèlerinage à Compostelle, 56 – 57.  A.D. Calvados G 947. Parish Church of Saint-Michel de Vaucelles.  A.D. Seine-Maritime G 1235. Confraternity Saint-Michel in Saint-Maclou, Rouen.

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be new.”⁷⁸ The subject of the image is unknown. The confraternity of St. Michael in the church of Saint-Niçaise of Rouen enshrined in its statutes of 1623 the provision of an image of the archangel for the chancel of the parish church, to be placed near to the high altar.⁷⁹ In 1634, the pewter tableware of the confraternity of St. James of Moissac was sold and the proceeds used to purchase vestments for their altar, a red chasuble and a red dalmatic with a stole and maniple, the total cost being 48 livres, no doubt used for the saint’s feast days and other important festivals.⁸⁰ Many confreres went beyond the stipulated minimum requirements to provide a range of high-quality adornments of their communal space. There are numerous examples (figure 5.1). The confraternity of St. James of Paris possessed a relic of the saint: one of his ribs was purportedly housed in a silver reliquary image of St. James seated on rocks, holding a book in one hand and his staff in the other, supported by six lions. It was given in 1539 by Jean Morin, conseiller du roi and lieutenant criminel of Paris, who inherited it from his uncle.⁸¹ In the 1580s, the confraternity of St. James at Orleans repaired the chapel of the saint, commissioned a silver statue with a magnificent staff and robe, housed in a case of boiled leather, at a cost of 75 écus. ⁸² In 1595, three pilgrims to Santiago from Sint-Maartensdijk in Zeeland commemorated their journey with the gift of a silver gilt cup engraved with a figure of St. James, inscribed with their names, to their local confraternity altar.⁸³ The Rheims confraternity of St. James commissioned a tapestry for the church of Saint-Jacques from local workshops in the early seventeenth century, showing the saint preaching, and decorated with borders showing scenes from the life of the saint, and cockleshell and staff signs of the confraternity.⁸⁴ In 1676, Jean Bonnet, weaver of Puy, donated 100 livres to the confraternity of St. James based in the church of Sainte-Claire to provide a statue of the saint and to renovate the area of the chapel in which the statue would be placed.⁸⁵ Such donations were part votive, part ornament: in the Parisian church of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas, a wooden tableau of St. James dressed as a pilgrim, venerated by two kneeling figures of a man and a

 Pétouraud, “Registre de la confrérie,” 4.  Le Charpentier, Instructions pour la confrérie, statutes 1623, article 3.  Daux, Pèlerinage à Compostelle, 81.  Bordier, “Confréries des pèlerins de St Jacques,” 2:391– 92.  Barret and Gurgand, Priez pour nous, 191.  Exhibit 398 in Santiago de Compostela. 1000 ans de pèlerinage Européenne, ed. Parga, 387.  Image reproduced in the exhibition catalogue of La Coste-Messelière, Avec les hospitaliers, item 82.  Chaize, “Pèlerinage de Saint-Jacques de Compostelle,” 44.

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Figure 5.1: Image of St. Michael, Parish Church of Pleyber Christ, Finistère, seventeenth century? (© Martin Tingle)

woman in front of a church, possibly that of Compostela, with staff and scrip in front of them and cockleshells on their clothes, was probably given by the donor recorded on the piece, Pierre Denaymet, Sieur de Crozefont.⁸⁶ There are surviving visual records of pilgrimage devotion on chapel walls. In Dreux, in the chapel of the confraternity of St. James in the church of Saint-Pierre, a fresco shows a long line of pilgrims kneeling before St. James and an inscription of the names and

 Lombard-Jourdain, “Confrérie parisienne,” 136.

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dates of each who went on pilgrimage to Compostela, more than twenty confreres across the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.⁸⁷ A second central function of confraternities was the fostering of personal devotion through good works and pious acts. What distinguished pilgrimage confraternities from others was their stated association with sacred travel to a specific shrine as a special form of “good work.” There may have been change over time in the relationship between members and pilgrimage. For example, Catherine Vincent argues that medieval confraternities dedicated to St. Michael gave very limited attention to pilgrimage and do not seem to have actively promoted this form of suffrage.⁸⁸ The direct association with pilgrimage to the Mont seems to have been a post-Reformation development. However, from the later sixteenth century, statutes show clearly that pilgrimage was primal to the activity of such confraternities. Such associations afforded practical support for pilgrimage in a number of ways. Firstly, they provided ritual frameworks for the journey. As discussed in chapter 2, confraternities organized rites of departure for pilgrims commencing their journeys. Some also provided party leaders or written guides for pilgrims. It was for the returning pilgrim for whom confraternities provided most support, however. A related form of good work for some pilgrimage confraternities was the maintenance of hospitals and hostels for pilgrims. The most famous of these in France was the hospital founded by the confraternity of St. James in Paris on the rue Saint-Denis in the early fourteenth century, which they maintained until its appropriation in 1672. It offered free accommodation for pilgrims primarily to Compostela but to other shrines as well.⁸⁹ It was in Spain that urban confraternities on major routeways had as their major purpose, hospitality for pilgrims traveling to and from Compostela. For example, confraternities in the towns in Valrojo, Doñado, Junquera, and other towns along the Camino, were responsible for the upkeep of bridges and roads as well as hospitality, confirmed in a bull of Paul III in 1538.⁹⁰ In rural communities, local residents and confraternity members might provide support for passing pilgrims. In Jean-Jacques François’s study of Tremblay-le-Vicomte, 25 kilometers north of Chartres, pilgrims would be greeted by members of the confraternity of St. James, taken to the church for prayers, and accommodation would be organized for them for the night; in the morning, the priest would give a blessing and along with con-

   

Lelièvre, “Papiers d’un pèlerin,” 6. Vincent, “Confréries et le culte,” 199. Bordier, “Confréries des pèlerins de saint Jacques,” 1:186 – 228. Parga et al., 1:251.

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fraternity members, accompany them to the village boundaries, on their way to Galicia.⁹¹ Counter-Reformation historiography emphasizes the role of confraternities in promoting new forms of piety and especially interior devotion. Jacques Chiffoleau argues that medieval fraternities were not designed to promote a richer spirituality or pedagogy of prayer, except for attendance at weekly or daily mass, and the recitation of basic prayers such as the Pater and the Ave. That stated, he acknowledges that, limited as it was, the activities of late medieval confraternities did encourage participation in pious activities which surpassed the ordinary level of religious obligation.⁹² For the sixteenth century, Nicole Lemaitre argues that in confraternities of the Rouergue, membership did presuppose an interior disposition towards piety. While the obligation of prayer remained medieval in form, confraternal life favored a program of moral reformation. The fraternity was a place of mutual service and piety, offering an education of interior prayer and intercession.⁹³ Marie-Hélène Froeschlé-Chopard’s numerous works have shown that statutes and devotional works reveal an evolution in spirituality amongst these groups from the late fifteenth century onwards, but particularly in the seventeenth century, she argues for a rise in individual prayer and direct dialogue between the faithful and God.⁹⁴ This is supported by Terpstra’s work. He observes that confraternities offered members training in and exercise of the communal rituals of the Catholic faith, mass, confession, communion, but that encouraged by the mendicant example they also inculcated and encouraged intense spirituality of private devotions that led members towards vocational worship.⁹⁵ Historians such as Bruno Restif argue that these marked a departure from the past. Rather than a concern with intercession, their chief activities were multiple exercises of collective piety and they were places where individual pious behavior was formed and encouraged.⁹⁶ It is this type of activity with which pilgrimage confraternities were concerned: confession, communion, indulgences, masses, and prayers, individual responses with a collective environment, increasingly following Roman styles. David Gentilcore characterized this as a vocation to internal missionism, “manifested in a religious drive to create a liturgical and sacramental consciousness within the brotherhood coupled with an increased awareness of the plight of one’s neighbor and the need to harmonize

     

François, “Pèlerins de Normandie,” 18. Chiffoleau, Comptabilité de l’au-delà, 286. Lemaitre, Rouergue flamboyant, 307– 8. Froeschlé-Chopard, Espace et sacré, 599. Terpstra, Lay Confraternities, 49. Restif, Révolution des paroisses, 179 – 80.

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with the activities of the clergy.”⁹⁷ Not content with simply evoking the aid of a saintly protector, these associations expected their members to engage personally in repeated acts of piety or asceticism. This was an important means by which Counter-Reformation piety spread into popular practice in early modern communities. Confraternities therefore provided a range of devotional supports for their members, which were important in propagating individual and group spirituality and new forms of piety. An increasingly vital support was the provision of printed books and images, which the works of Simiz and Froeschlé-Chopard have shown to be fundamental to the activities of many confraternities, which were active commissioners of pious tracts for their members.⁹⁸ Simiz argues that the main use of such booklets was to define the object and the ends of devotion, to nourish piety, and to encourage a certain interiorization of practice; all in vernacular languages, for a popular audience.⁹⁹ One form of devotional literature commissioned by pilgrimage confraternities was the flysheet print. Typically on one piece of paper, these had a title, image, and commentary text, usually a combination of the history of the cult, its major church, a prayer for the saint, something on the statutes, and the names of the current wardens of the guild. They were for both communal and individual use.¹⁰⁰ From the mid-seventeenth century, confraternities of all sorts distributed annually a print of their patron saint, which acted as a ticket of membership and could also be used for votive use in the home. For example, the Parisian confraternity of St. Michael commissioned printed pictures on a single sheet to give to its adherents once a year: a copy of the 1662 version survives—of St. Michael on a cloud, lancing a demon, with a background of pilgrims crossing the bay to the Mont—and a new version was engraved in 1706. Such prints were pinned to walls or used for private prayer and meditation.¹⁰¹ The confraternity of St. Michael of SaintNiçaise in Rouen commissioned a four-page booklet of prayers, fronted by a woodcut. It offered a prayer to the archangel in which St. Michael acts as a viceregent for God, leading sinners to salvation: Worthy chief of heavenly spirits, minister of the living God, defender of His people, protector of the Christian Church, prince established to watch over the salvation of the elect, give us aid. Light us with the light of God, with which you are filled; help us to discover all the

 Gentilcore, From Bishop to Witch, 78.  Simiz, Confréries urbaines; Froeschlé-Chopard, Dieu pour tous.  Simiz, Confréries urbaines, 215, 217.  Chartier, Cultural Uses of Print, 159.  B.N.F. Estampes Re. 13, 179. Lombard-Jourdain, “Confrérie parisienne,” 133 – 35.

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depths of Satan, by which he makes us lose ourselves; fight for us, fight for our Mother Church, bride of Christ, against the dragon which seeks to devour it. Deign to fight in us the monster of pride and the demon of self-love which ravages our hearts. Gain us the grace to return to God, whom we have offended, with a humble and sincere penitence, to attach ourselves to him by a true zeal for His glory and His interests, to seek truly His kingdom and His justice, so after having glorified Him on earth, we will merit to be able praise with you in heaven, for all eternity.¹⁰²

Better known are booklets which acted as handbooks for members. They detailed the history of the confraternity, its statutes and its indulgences; they explained the liturgy of the mass and its utility for confreres; they provided prayers to use during services and outside of the church; they encouraged meditations and private prayer. One of the earliest surviving booklets was for the Compostelan pilgrimage, sponsored by the confraternity of Orleans in 1595, commissioned from a Franciscan, Jean Gouyn, Histoire de la vie, predication, martyre, translation et miracles de st Jacques le majeur … Plus la guide du chemin qu’il faut tenir pour aller de la ville d’Orleans aux voyages de Saint Jacques en Galice. This was both a life of the saint and a pilgrim’s guide.¹⁰³ In Rouen, in 1668, the confraternity of St. Michael of Saint-Niçaise sponsored the publication of a booklet authored by Pierre Le Charpentier, their chaplain. It provided details of the statutes and indulgences available to the confraternity and provided prayers for confreres to say in church and at home, for the feast of St. Michael.¹⁰⁴ Occasionally, confraternities published extraordinary works of commemoration of notable events. In 1634, a large-scale pilgrimage of the St. Michael confraternity of Caen was recorded and published by one of its clerical members, Michel de Saint-Martin. The reason was its high status, for at the head of the journey was Pierre de Rosivignan, eldest son of the royal governor of Caen, and the journey took the form of an ostentation of his family’s status as well as a religious event.¹⁰⁵ Such printed works could be used by individuals, read aloud to groups, and generally offered the literate and semi-literate access to short, pithy, contemporary prayers and devotions through the veneration of the chosen saint. A second devotional support provided by some pilgrimage confraternities, as with other similar associations, was the provision of indulgences. One of the most popular new devotional practices of larger or wealthier confraternities

   

A.D. Seine-Maritime G 1242. Saint-Niçaise de Rouen. Gouyn, Histoire. Le Charpentier, Instructions pour la confrérie, see all. Saint-Martin, Voyage fait au Mont Saint-Michel.

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from the early seventeenth century onwards was the acquisition of plenary indulgences from Rome. Philippe Desmette argues that it appears to have become normal practice in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for newly-founded confraternities—and those already in place—to solicit the Holy See for indulgences, as a matter of course.¹⁰⁶ This had not always been the case. Early sixteenth-century confraternities did not endow their members with lavish pardons and indeed, not all seventeenth-century associations did so. Indulgenced confraternities seem to have originated in Italy and spread into France and the Low Countries from the later sixteenth century; they were particularly associated with new devotional forms and were widespread by the end of the period. By the later sixteenth century, plenary indulgences issued for confraternities assumed a standardized form. Full remission of penance was given to members on the day of their admission to the fraternity, on the death bed and for visiting the church on the annual festival. In addition, partial pardons of seven years and seven quarantines (forty days) were given for those who visited the church on each of the four secondary feasts, along with sixty days’ pardon for a range of pious works whenever they occurred, including attendance at the religious offices and meetings of the confraternity, succoring the poor, making peace between enemies, attending funerals, and accompanying other processions.¹⁰⁷ The plenary indulgence acquired in 1608 by the confraternity of St. James in the church of Saints Gervase and Proteus of Gisors is typical. It granted a plenary pardon to all members upon registration, if they had confessed and received the eucharist, and similarly, on their death bed. A plenary pardon was available to members who attended the annual feast on July 25, again having confessed, taken communion, and said prayers for peace between Christian princes, for the exaltation of the Holy Church, the extirpation of heresy, and the salvation of the pope, all standard for plenary indulgences of this period. Four further feast days brought lesser pardons of seven years and seven quarantines, to be selected by the Gisors confraternity with permission from the bishop. Confreres were also granted sixty days of indulgence at any time they did a variety of good works from attending divine service and processions, visiting the sick, and accompanying the viaticum, to burial of the dead, giving alms to the poor, and making peace between enemies.¹⁰⁸ There were also special occasions on which confraternities gained pardons for their members. In Puy in 1634, a special jubilee was held for the

 Desmette, Brefs d’indulgences, 27.  Tingle, Indulgences after Luther, chapter 3 on confraternities.  A.D. Seine-Maritime G 1752. Confraternities of Gisors.

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city’s five churches and certain days were reserved specially for confraternities: that of the pilgrims of St. James were granted the Tuesday for their pardon.¹⁰⁹ But local confraternities with plenary indulgences were only ever a minority of all associations. Most groups did not acquire such privileges. The main reason was the high cost of acquiring a papal pardon. Episcopal indulgences were obtained instead. From the Acts of the secretariat of Rieux diocese for 1605 – 1606, it appears that the approval of confraternity statutes by the bishop would include a forty-day indulgence for membership, whether or not there was a plenary acquired from Rome.¹¹⁰ There could be further grants as well. For example, in 1606, Cardinal Archbishop François de Sourdis of Bordeaux, “desiring to augment the piety and devotion of confreres who go on pilgrimage to visit the holy places of St James in Galicia,” granted the confraternity of St. James of Libourne a 100–day indulgence for participation in the two feast days held in their chapel on May 1 (Saints James and Philip) and July 25 (Saints James and Christopher).¹¹¹ A third important function of the pilgrimage confraternity, again similar to other guilds, was commemoration, the provision of funerals, prayers, and masses for dead confreres. For the Middle Ages, historians have stressed the role of confraternities in burial provision and perpetual intercession for dead members, that is, their function as communal chantries. Chiffoleau comments that their essential function was funerary, with devotional and charitable functions having secondary importance.¹¹² But confraternities were not simply poor men’s chantries. Wealthy individuals, some of whom founded private masses, also joined confraternities and some did so in preference to individual acts. Rather, the development of confraternities from the mid-fourteenth century onwards is good evidence for the increasing penetration of a belief in Purgatory into majority culture. It seems that among late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century confraternities, there was a return to the late medieval concern for the souls in Purgatory and a resurgence of collective activity for the departed. Confraternities were concerned to provide “decent” funerals, prayers for the dead, and continuing perpetual intercession, as they had in earlier decades.¹¹³ The statutes of the confraternity of St. James in the parish of Saint-Jean-leVieux in Bayonne of 1660 undertook to visit and support sick confreres and to encourage them to confess and take communion; if a confrere died, the confra    

Chaize, “Pèlerinage de Saint-Jacques de Compostelle,” 43. A.D. Haute-Garonne 2 G 73. Acts of the secretariat of the Bishop of Rieux. A.D. Gironde G 8. Acts of the Archbishop of Bordeaux. Chiffoleau, Comptabilité de l’au-delà, 267. Tingle, Purgatory and Piety, see chapter 6.

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ternity would commission three masses for deceased members, on the day of the funeral, after nine days (neuvaine), and on the first anniversary of the death.¹¹⁴ At Moissac, when a confrere died, the confraternity’s crier went dressed as a pilgrim, with his handbell, around the town, to alert members to gather at the deceased’s house, from where they accompanied his body to the church wearing their pilgrim hats. A similar crier, elected annually and given the name denonsseur in the sixteenth century, changed to bastonnier after 1600, was part of the confraternity of Chalon-sur-Saône. Failure to attend was fined to the sum of a pound of wax. Where the family of a confrere was too poor to meet the costs of burial, the confraternity covered the expenses. The day after the burial, the confraternity held a requiem mass for the confrere’s soul, for which each member contributed 1 denier. ¹¹⁵ The confraternity of St. Michael of Gloët in the archdiocese of Rouen had its ancient statutes reconfirmed in 1664. Each confrere, male and female, was obliged to provide one mass a year at the altar of the confraternity for recently deceased brethren, and to attend funerals.¹¹⁶ The confraternity of St. Michael in Saint-Niçaise, Rouen, refounded in 1623, held a requiem mass on the day after its feast day on September 29, for all deceased confreres.¹¹⁷ The guild statutes laid out in detail the funerary rights and rites due to members and their wives. After the death of an officer of the confraternity or his wife, there would be a vigil held with nine lessons and nine psalms, three high masses and a sung Libera, followed by a distribution of alms to the poor. For ordinary members, there would be a vigil with three lessons and three psalms and all members were expected to contribute 12 deniers to the costs.¹¹⁸ Each year, every member was expected to contribute prayers for the deceased of the company: priests were expected to say a mass; those who could read, should read and pray the seven penitential psalms, and those who could not, should say fifteen Pater Nosters and fifteen Aves for the intention of the company’s souls.¹¹⁹ The confraternity of St. Michael at Pont l’Évêque held its feast day on September 29 with high mass, after which a Libera and De profundis were sung on the tomb of the most recent confrere to die.¹²⁰

 Statutes reproduced in Haristoy, Pèlerinage de St Jacques, 45.  A.D. Saône-et-Loire E 1214. Confraternity saint Jacques; Pétouraud, “Registre de la confrérie,” 5.  A.D. Seine-Maritime G 1332. Confraternities of Pont-Audemer.  A.D. Seine-Maritime G 1241. Saint-Niçaise de Rouen.  Le Charpentier, Instructions pour la confrérie, statutes 1623, article 9.  Le Charpentier, Instructions pour la confrérie, statutes 1623, article 13.  A.D. Calvados 6 G 580. Pont l’Évêque. Confrairies.

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The fact of having made a long-distant pilgrimage, especially to Compostela, gave many men a status in their communities that was remembered throughout their lives and sometimes recorded at their deaths. In the parish of Auneau, diocese of Chartres, on August 22, 1631, the curé Denis Coudray recorded the burial of his father and added “he was at St. James in Galicia on 25 May 1584”; in 1651, he recorded the burial of another parishioner, Louis Godet, shoemaker, eighty years old, and added “he made the journey to St. James of Galicia.”¹²¹ Such acts were special, marking out an individual in their community and in their perceptions of themselves, for the rest of their lives. In conclusion, the motive for joining pilgrimage confraternities was to commemorate and celebrate the sacred journey of an individual, within a group of like-minded people. For the returnee, they served a variety of devotional support functions. As Forster observes, “confraternities certainly brought people together to practice their Catholicism. At the same time, they also promoted individual devotion … confraternities generally required attendance at mass and processions, but they also emphasized regular individual prayer, as well as frequent confession and communion.”¹²² To separate out pilgrimage, charity, devotion, and mortuary intercession makes no sense: a fraternity’s purpose was veneration and worship, the support of the living by charity, understood widely, and the dead through prayers. Terpstra comments that they activated a faith meant as much to protect the body from evil as to console and save the soul.¹²³ Pilgrimage to the long-distance shrines led to a life-long commitment to prayer and community, at least for those impelled to join a confraternity of fellow travelers. They adopted new pious practices and demonstrated them, as outstanding members of their community, to their village or town neighbors.

Materiality and Remembrance: Pilgrimage Souvenirs For pilgrims of all social groups, whether members of confraternities or not, the shrine souvenir was perhaps the most important memorial of the journey. Almost every holy traveler wanted to take home some item that reminded him or her of the visit to the saint, whether collected or purchased. By giving gifts to their family and friends, their nearest, too, participated in the sacred power that the pilgrim had experienced, while the traveler her or himself would have

 A.D. Eure-et-Loir GG 3. Register 1623 – 56.  Forster, Catholic Revival, 134.  Terpstra, Lay Confraternities, 66.

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a life-long, material and salvatory memento of the meeting with the “extraordinary” at the sacred site. For this reason, pilgrimage towns had good numbers of shops and artisans producing objects for sale. Cissie Fairchilds has even argued that the merchandising of mass-produced religious articles in the Counter-Reformation, as well as their diffusion over long distances by pedlars, was an important factor in the modernization of habits of consumption in western Europe. The scale of production of small goods for sale was immense: at the relatively modest pilgrimage site of Notre-Dame de Grace at Loos, near Lille, in the year 1599 – 1600 the shrine sold 2940 silver religious medals, 29,700 glass ones, 7776 crosses, 4880 “tableaux,” 3000 holy water fonts, and 1392 rosaries.¹²⁴ Small, portable items, usually made of commonplace materials such as paper, lead, or bronze, fabric, wood, water, or shell, remained prized possessions, such that some were buried with their owners. Their acquisition was a fundamental part of the pilgrimage experience. For the historian seeking to uncover the individual experience of pilgrimage, material objects give an insight into the meaning and importance of the activity to people who mostly left no written accounts, and when they did, were reticent about the spiritual impact of their travels. Pre-modern devotional practices depended heavily on sacred objects for “material ontologies inspired human theories of the divine in the late Middle Ages, for incarnational theology celebrated the reified body in which Christ lived on earth, and also the things he lived among.”¹²⁵ Thus the experience of Christianity was shaped by the created environment of things. Objects can be used to identify space for prayer; they can be a stimulus for private devotion; they can be used performatively; they can be symbols of prestige; they can act as outward manifestations of piety; they can give talismanic protection; and they bring remembrance of the person who gave it as a gift.¹²⁶ As David Lowenthal states, objects from the past “remain essential bridges between then and now. They confirm or deny what we think of it, symbolize or memorialize communal links over time, and provide archaeological metaphors that illumine the process of history and memory.”¹²⁷ Pilgrimage souvenirs worked in these ways. Shrine mementos were commonplace in the Middle Ages, as evidenced in archaeological contexts and museum collections. But Protestant Reformers rejected sacred materiality, and the use of holy images and objects, and stressed the importance of immateriality to spirituality. Catholics, however, retained the be   

Fairchilds, “Marketing the Counter-Reformation,” reference to Loos on 48. Brantley, “‘In Things,’” 287. See Ritchey, Holy Matter, 23. Lowenthal, Foreign Country, xxiii.

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lief that grace could work through physical objects and that one of the best ways to express transcendence was through materiality. The greatest expression of this was in the real presence in the eucharist and also in saints’ remains and holy places, the rationale for pilgrimage. Objects such as badges, medals, beads, rosaries, and crosses were also revived as signifiers and transmitters of grace and sometimes, indulgences. The relationship between images and religiosity in the Reformation has received a great deal of historiographical consideration, for their visual and material powers were disputed and rejected by Protestants. Holy relics have also received detailed study, being considered by Catholics as physical embodiments of divine power.¹²⁸ Portable objects have received less attention until recently because they attracted less contemporary attention. But objects could be inextricably linked to heavenly power, as Caroline Walker Bynum has shown in her work on sacred materiality.¹²⁹ The sixteenth century witnessed changes in the perceptions and use of such objects, a greater formalization of their relationship to clerical authority, and their bestowal with enhanced spiritual power, largely through the granting of indulgences. Material “things” allowed for the expression of faith and the acquisition of salvation in different ways and for this reason, their acquisition was an essential part of pilgrimage.

Souvenirs and Their Changing Forms over Time Pilgrimage souvenirs from medieval shrines are very well known. Archaeological and artifact evidence shows that two object types in particular were extremely popular in the pre-Reformation period, the metal badge and the lead ampulla holding holy water or oil, both decorated with the cult image of the shrine. Pilgrimage badges were available at almost all shrines and were the most frequently acquired souvenir. Made of tin, bronze, or silver for the most part, each shrine had its “brand” image of its patron saint or cult. For example, badges purchased at Compostela were made in the form of a scallop or the saint himself, such as that revealed in archaeological work at Ardfert Cathedral in Ireland in 1992, which uncovered a pewter scallop shell brooch on which a bronze figure of St. James was mounted, found under the wall of a late medieval tomb.¹³⁰

 Walsham, “Introduction,” 12.  Bynum, Christian Materiality.  Fitzpatrick, “Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela,” 17.

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By the early modern period, a wide variety of souvenirs were being manufactured at shrines, for a range of prices, to be accessible to different customers. A question arises of the degree of control that churches had over the production and distribution of goods with their images. Did they make the goods themselves, or by artisans under license, did they provide models for the stamps and images and did they own and manage the shops where they were sold? It depended on the shrine, but by and large production was by independent artisans, recognized or licensed by the municipal authorities. At Compostela, Guillaume Manier observed that in the great square adjacent to the cathedral, there were eight small shops which sold small, portable souvenirs for pilgrims.¹³¹ There was also souvenir sellers around the city. At the Mont Saint-Michel, the road leading from the lower gate to the abbey church was flanked by shops and inns. For the shrines of St. James and the Mont Saint-Michel, the most frequently acquired souvenir was a natural cockleshell, of the larger scallop variety at Santiago and the smaller variety at the Mont. The first Compostelan shells were sold at the shrine at the beginning of the twelfth century and thereafter became the archetypal pilgrimage symbol. Fairly quickly, metal versions of the shell were also fabricated and sold at the shrine. They have been found all over Europe in medieval and early modern contexts. In Ireland, scallop shells associated with human remains have been found at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Tuam, the Magdalen Tower in Drogheda, and St. Mary’s Augustinian Priory, Mullingar, for example.¹³² In France, a burial of a Jacquet pilgrim of the later Middle Ages was found next to the church at Trausse near Carcassonne. In it were twenty-six scallops, two pierced shells, three medals of lead representing St. James, and some worked bone in the shape of mini-pilgrim staffs, which were attached to the hat.¹³³ At Moissac on the Garonne river, excavations in 1934 of the ancient infirmary of the abbey revealed five pierced cockleshells dating from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century: sick pilgrims who died in the hospital on return from Compostela were interred with their badges.¹³⁴ Similarly, the museum at Lourdes possesses a seventeenth-century pilgrim’s collar made of leather and decorated with scallops, silver cockles, and lead figures of the saint, found in the parish cemetery.¹³⁵ The smaller cockleshell was adopted by pilgrims to the Mont

    item 

Manier, 80. Fitzpatrick, “Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela,” 17. Journet, “Pèlerinage de Saint-Jacques de Compostelle.” Image reproduced in the exhibition catalogue of La Coste-Messelière, Avec les hospitaliers, 238. Desplatz and Blazquez, Jean Bonnecaze, 36, note 32.

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Figure 5.2: Pilgrim badge from Santiago de Compostela in the shape of a cockleshell. (© Trustees of the British Museum)

Saint-Michel by the fifteenth century, almost certainly in imitation of Compostela. In 1517, the secretary of Cardinal Louis d’Aragon noted of their visit to the Mont that the main employment of the town’s inhabitants was collecting cockles from the bay and “coloring the seashells … which they sew to cloth bands, coloring some red, some yellow, others grey, and they sell them to pilgrims who wear them across their shoulders like a stole.”¹³⁶ In the later eighteenth century this was still the style, as recorded by the English traveler William Wraxall: “their hats were covered with cockle shells, laced round the edges, and on the crown was a guilt coronet, above which was the cross. A ribbon in the same form was tied across their breasts and all over their clothes were placed little images of St. Michael vanquishing the devil.”¹³⁷ Pilgrimage badges (figure 5.2) continued to be produced, although during the sixteenth century, they were overtaken in popularity by religious medals, often small and worn pinned to the hat or suspended from the neck with a chain, next to the skin. At Compostela, the later seventeenth century saw a resurgence in metal plaque or badge production, with representations of either St. James as a pilgrim or the Holy Door. As badges, they were fixed directly to

 Beatis, Voyage du Cardinal d’Aragon, 174.  Wraxall, Tour, 32.

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hats or to clothing.¹³⁸ The mid-eighteenth-century pilgrim’s pouch held at the Musée de Dreux had on its cover a badge or medallion of St. James on horseback along with small cockleshells and walking staffs, in pewter. Jean Babelon observes that pilgrim badges rarely showed St. James as a Moor-slayer or Matamor, a frequent depiction in other media such as sculpture. Rather, peaceable and edifying images were preferred by the Church of the Catholic Reform period.¹³⁹ Rosaries and crosses or crucifixes were other popular items. By the sixteenth century, the rosary was the main physical object of personal devotion. Its popularity grew across the early modern period with the heightened Marian piety and creation of Rosary confraternities. Again, they were made for all markets, cheap bone or wooden beads, polished metal, glass, coral, and silver, all were available. At Compostela, Guillaume Manier purchased rosary beads, scallop shells, and badges “and other small items” he did not name.¹⁴⁰ He also acquired rosaries of copper and wood either at the shrine or in Oviedo.¹⁴¹ At Sainte-Reine, an inventory of a souvenir-seller’s shop of 1735 shows that chaplets were the most common item sold, 11,364 being listed. The most expensive were made of aventurine, a mica-rich quartz stone, then crystal, with the cheapest being made of bone and coconut wood.¹⁴² In Ireland, small, personal “penal crosses” were associated with the pilgrimage to St. Patrick’s Purgatory. The earliest one known carries the date of 1702. They were carved from one piece of wood, the earliest ones of yew and later examples, of softwood and bone; they were decorated on the front with a relief of Christ and IHS, along with Passion symbols and sometimes the date, possibly of the pilgrimage, on the shaft. They were around 200 – 300 mm in length, on average, with a projection for a suspension cord at the top. These and “penal rosaries” which were also sold, were often decorated with the Arma Christi. A. T. Lucas comments that “their manufacture in the district grew to supply a customary need of the pilgrims and the pilgrimage served as a means for dissemination of the objects over a wide area … In the absence of woodcuts, pictures, statues and other religious emblems which discrimination, poverty and isolation prevented them from acquiring, they must have formed the sole focus of family devotions in thousands of homes.”¹⁴³ Statues or statuettes were commonly purchased, representing the saint. At Compostela from the later Middle Ages into the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-

     

Koster, “Coquilles et enseignes,” 87. Babelon, “Thème de la violence,” 345 – 47. Manier, 88. Manier, 112. Boutry and Julia, Sainte-Reine au Mont Auxois, 256 – 58. Lucas, “Penal Crucifixes”; Ryan, “Arma Christi.”

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Figure 5.3: Jet statuette of St. James, from Santiago de Compostela, seventeenth century? (© Trustees of the British Museum)

turies, figurines and amulets made of jet were popular: there are a number of examples, of rosary beads carved with St. James with a book on one side and a crucifixion on the other, in the collections of the Victoria and Albert and the British Museums, London (figure 5.3).¹⁴⁴ There was a street dedicated to workshops and stalls of azerbache and a guild of craftsmen, dedicated to St. Sebastian. The jet, a form of workable lignite, came from the Asturias region, where suppliers of the raw material and artisans traded with merchants from Santiago.

 For example A12– 1953. V&A Collection, London.

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There are a number of surviving contracts showing the large scale of this trade. In 1553, Fernando Rodríguez of Santiago drew up a contract for 15,000 badges in the form of pilgrim staffs; in 1560, Diego Menendez, jet worker from Quintelos, contracted with Gomez Garcia, merchant of Santiago, for sixty dozens of polished jet St. James’s, delivered within three months; in 1585, Bastien de Miranda undertook to supply 12,000 beads, presumably for rosaries, as well as large numbers of other items of jewelry; and in 1603, a similar contract between Juan de Miranda of Compostela and Juan Picoy of San Pedro de Borrifáns near La Coruña, ordered 7000 pilgrim’s staff badges for hats.¹⁴⁵ Guillaume Manier purchased a number of figurative souvenirs on his travels in the 1720s. In Burgos, in the Augustinian convent which housed a miracle-working sculpture of Christ, he purchased “paper Christs” and three silver Christs, all of which were touched against the statue.¹⁴⁶ More commonly acquired because easily portable and cheap, were small printed pictures, which might also have an indulgenced image or invocation on them as discussed in chapter 4. They were produced by printers and booksellers in their thousands, although very few survive.¹⁴⁷ The municipal museum at Dreux holds the scrip of a pilgrim which has a single-sided print of St. James, with the text “Memoría de las santas reliquías que hay en esta santa Iglesia de nuestro Glorioso Patron Sant-Iago,” produced in the city by the printer Sebastian Montero.¹⁴⁸ Equally ephemeral, a range of textile souvenirs were also sold at shrines. There were images on cloth, whether painted or embroidered; these could be simple kerchiefs or garments such as bonnets for children, belts for pregnant women, coats, flowers, or rosettes.¹⁴⁹ At the Mont Saint-Michel, ribbons were frequently mentioned by pilgrims. The author of the pamphlet recording the 1634 visit to the Mont by Pierre de Rosivignan and the confraternity of SaintMichel of Caen records that on arrival home, Rosivignan gave ribbons as gifts to his companions, described above.¹⁵⁰ Such objects, once acquired, needed to be sacrally charged with the power of the shrine, either through a blessing or by contact with the saint’s relics. At Compostela, it was customary for pilgrims to take their badges and other souvenirs to the saint’s altar, where the custodian would touch them to the saint’s statue. Guillaume Manier records that at Burgos,

 Osma y Scull, Catálogo de azabaches compostelanos, 102– 4; Mata, “Valores artísticos y simbólicos.”  Manier, 59.  Maës, “Artisans et commerçants,” 144.  Lelièvre, “Papiers d’un pèlerin,” 6 – 7.  Bercé, Lorette aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles, 60.  Saint-Martin, Voyage fait au Mont Saint-Michel.

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his images of Christ were touched against the statue of Christ and again at Burgos, rosaries were touched against the sacred relics in the cathedral.¹⁵¹ Each shrine also had its own associated special objects. At Santo Domingo de Calzada, on the route to Compostela, the cathedral housed a cockerel and hen, symbols of a miracle wrought by St. James when he revived a hanged man in the town, rectifying a miscarriage of justice. Pilgrims sought feathers as souvenirs.¹⁵² Domenico Laffi records: “we saw the cock and hen which are shut in an iron bird cage on the left as you enter. As we entered the church, wearing our pilgrim’s garb, they began to crow with joy. They do this to all pilgrims. We asked the sacristan for some feathers which he gave to us and, out of piety, we brought them home with us.”¹⁵³ At the Mont Saint-Michel, blowing-horns or cornets were a specialty. They are evidenced from the late fourteenth century onwards.¹⁵⁴ The secretary of Cardinal d’Aragon noted in 1517 that the artisans of the town made an infinite number of horns in wood, brass, colored terracotta, and glass.¹⁵⁵ A gilded pewter cornet decorated with the Archangel Michael slaying the dragon was found in the Seine in Paris in the mid-nineteenth century, it was a luxury item, and an archaeological excavation of the Mont in 1986 uncovered thirty-six fragments of ceramic instruments, of which five horns and nineteen cornets could be identified.¹⁵⁶ Pilgrims acquired these to sound over the bay, all the way home, and to act as souvenirs of the journey. A similar horn or cornet, made of iron, was sold at Saint-Hubert, this time for heating up and branding animals, to which it gave protection from rabies. For humans, a key-shaped metal object was on sale, which again, could be heated and applied to people who had suffered animal bites.¹⁵⁷ At Sainte-Reine, the shrine speciality was a small wooden box or “reliquary,” which opened to show a three-dimensional figure or scene from the life of the saint.¹⁵⁸ Relics had been important shrine souvenirs for high status pilgrims and clergy in the Middle Ages. They would continue to be so in the early modern period at some shrines, particularly in Rome where the wealth of the catacombs could be distributed to well-placed visitors. However, there were important changes in clerical attitudes to sainthood and relics in the post-Tridentine period. At the

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Manier, 59, 112. Vega, Historia de la vida y milagros. Laffi, 129. Jigan, “Instruments à vent.” Beatis, Voyage du Cardinal d’Aragon, 175. Jigan, “Instruments à vent,” 130 – 31. Fétis, Légende de saint Hubert, 81. Boutry and Julia, Sainte-Reine au Mont Auxois, 258.

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local level, there was greater control over authentication of relics, which necessitated their formal recognition and approbation by the local bishop.¹⁵⁹ This made their acquisition more difficult. Indeed, the growth in indulgenced pilgrimage objects may have been a result of a gap in the market for sacred portable objects, while the authenticity of relics was under scrutiny. Effectively, indulgenced objects became substitute relics, as conduits of sacred power, channeling redemptive and intercessory forces to their owners and acting as vehicles of grace.¹⁶⁰ The most important souvenir of all was the certificate of pilgrimage, given at the shrine. Bruno Maës comments that these took the role that lead badges had in the Middle Ages, proving that the journey had been made.¹⁶¹ They might also give information such as the alms given, and masses commissioned by the pilgrim. Domenico Laffi records of his time in Compostela: “in the morning we went to St. James’s to say mass and afterwards we obtained the certificates that are called ‘Compostelas.’ Then, having made our devotions, we went to see the great reliquary chapel of St. James … After looking at the relics, which are shown to all pilgrims, we were granted our indulgence at the altar of St. James.”¹⁶² Guillaume Manier records that on November 2, All Souls Day, 1726, he made confession to a French-speaking priest in the pilgrim hostel, who then gave him a ticket for communion; Manier took the eucharist as was traditional for pilgrims, in the French chapel in the cathedral, after which he received his certificate of communion and travel to the shrine, which cost 2 sous. ¹⁶³ For unfortunate pilgrims who died on the way home, the certificates attested to their name, origin, and purpose in traveling. They could be sent back to their home parishes, as a notice of their death. Examples from the Saint-Méen pilgrimage have been detailed, above. Some returning pilgrims were professional hawkers of sacred goods acquired at shrines. They purchased souvenirs and trinkets at the shrine, then peddled them in the countryside back home. The maréchaussée records of eighteenthcentury France have numerous references to such pedlars, picked up as vagrants on their travels. Denis Vesraquin, aged 55 from the parish of Tuboeuf in Le Mans diocese, was arrested in Caen in 1788. He moved constantly around the shrines of

    

Johnson, “Holy Fabrications,” 275 – 76. Walsham, “Introduction,” 13. Maës, “Artisans et commerçants,” 144. Laffi, 179. Manier, 74– 75.

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western Europe including Compostela and the Mont Saint-Michel, buying little books and medallions, which he sold.¹⁶⁴

Functions and Use of Pilgrimage Souvenirs Pilgrimage souvenirs were used in a variety of ways, in continuity with but also in departure from medieval practices. Firstly, the carrying and use of pilgrimage souvenirs as amulets, for their apotropaic, protective, and healing qualities is certain and so widespread as to be almost ubiquitous. They worked as a form of sacramental, understood by the Church to be an observance that was not a formal sacrament but which bestowed divine protection and assistance to the supplicant.¹⁶⁵ To the clergy, the ritual was the source of power; to the users of the sacramental, it was the object itself. Although the official view of the Church was that “sacramentals did not automatically guarantee divine grace, but depended on the disposition of those using them,” there seems to have been a widespread popular tendency to use them as though they did.¹⁶⁶ Diego Velázquez’s 1659 portrait of the three-year-old infante Philip Prosper, son of Philip IV of Spain, shows him with numerous amulets hanging over his clothing, including one that appears to have been of jet.¹⁶⁷ In the nineteenth century, a plaquette of bronze some 20 cm × 7 cm was found in an old wall in the parish of Haux, south of Bordeaux. It was a piece of the late sixteenth century, possibly part of a banner as it had a fixing on the back, showing St. James with two kneeling pilgrims and the initials SIBEQR [St. James blesses those who pray]. Whether it was hidden for safekeeping during the religious wars or the Revolution, or whether it was a votive deposit made during the building of the wall, is unknown but either is possible.¹⁶⁸ Some pilgrims were even buried with their badges as we have seen above. In March 1672, Bernard de Busquet was buried in Bruges churchyard, near to Bordeaux, dressed as a pilgrim, the curé noting in the parish register that the deceased had made the pilgrimage to Compostela some years before.¹⁶⁹

 Detailed in Julia, “Aveux de pèlerins,” 447.  Muir, Ritual, 164. See also Trevor Johnson’s work on sacramentals, “Blood, Tears and Xavier Water.”  Scribner, “Cosmic Order and Daily Life,” 24.  Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna. Image at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: Prince_Philip_Prospero_by_Diego_Vel%C3 %A1zquez.jpg.  Mensignac, Confrérie bordelaise, 25 – 28.  Desplatz and Blazquez, Jean Bonnecaze, 36.

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The use of such objects in prayer routines was also traditional. As Tara Hamling states, “there is … widespread agreement that external resources in the environment can function as tools to facilitate and support mental processes … According to this model, images and objects can function as tools to think through, which in turn inform and shape thought.”¹⁷⁰ For seventeenth-century religious writers such as Archbishop François Fénélon, external stimulus was an inspiration for the act of prayer, which should take place in a state of silent meditation.¹⁷¹ Shrine souvenirs, whether object or images, could be mnemonic devices, recalling particular ideas and prayers. The rosary is perhaps the best example. Rosaries, which could be blessed or touched to a holy relic, were perhaps the most important portable religious object in the early modern period in terms of numbers and scope. Individual beads and whole strings could also carry indulgences, so using the rosary could gain multiple pardons. Rosaries came in a dazzling variety of forms. After Trent, this was systematized and to some extent standardized at least for different confraternities and there was a move towards greater Christology. Guillaume Manier records that he gave a small rosary of red wood, acquired in Compostela or Burgos and touched against the relics in Burgos cathedral, to the wife of Lescuru of Carlement, his native town, upon his return.¹⁷² Objects could also be used to define spaces for prayer and meditation, by providing a visual focus. Small pictures and images acquired from shrines could be pinned to walls or put on surfaces such as tables and shelves or used to make a small domestic shrine. As Robert Swanson states, they were “clearly constructed and construed to function as a unit to be used to stimulate devotion and contemplation as part of an everyday normality.”¹⁷³ An object could be used to demarcate sacred space for prayer, symbolizing a retreat into personal meditation or providing a focus for individual or group devotions. The recitation of rosaries and prayers in conjunction with pardon-carrying medals and crosses became regular, private devotions for some, supported by confraternities which encouraged members to take prayer into their daily lives. A further function of portable objects was the signaling of identity. Membership of a religious order, confraternity, devotional group, or simply confessional allegiance was traditionally shown by the carrying of certain signs and symbols. This was achieved most frequently by dress items. The shells of the pilgrims returning from Compostela and the Mont Saint-Michel are type-piece examples of    

Hamling, “Old Robert’s Girdle,” 147. Phillips, “Sacred Text and Sacred Image,” 310. Manier, 112. Swanson, “Two Texts,” 240.

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this phenomenon. The many pierced and looped medals held in numismatic collections throughout Europe are evidence that such items were worn on cords or chains or attached to garments. This was for protection, prayer, and as symbols of Catholic orthodoxy. Internal piety and external display were combined with the use of portable items as apparel. A particularly important change across the Reformation period was the ability of objects to transmit indulgences to their owners. According to Henry Lea, there was an historical tradition in the Catholic Church that the “invention” of pardoned objects was the work of Sixtus V. In 1587, during building works on the church of St. John Lateran, a hoard of gold coins was discovered, which the pope distributed after attaching indulgences to them. After this, his successors indulgenced a range of portable objects, mostly medals, crosses, beads, and images, considering that their use would stimulate piety and devotion. There are actually earlier, medieval examples but what is clear is that portable indulgenced objects took off from the 1580s and increased in popularity thereafter. Their use became a marked feature of Tridentine Catholicism. The blessing of medals, small crosses, and images, beads, and rosaries by the pope himself was the most prestigious source of portable indulgenced objects in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and continued earlier practices.¹⁷⁴ For pilgrims to the ancient, Atlantic-world shrines, the main source was through the touching of an artifact to an indulgenced item, similar to a contact relic. They acted as direct conduits of grace accessed by orthodox religious acts, controlled by the hierarchical Church. Souvenirs were therefore sites of memory and devotion, acting in three ways: material, symbolic, and functional. The pilgrim imagination invested souvenirs with a symbolic aura and they became objects of ritual.¹⁷⁵ It was the materiality of the object which made pilgrimage souvenirs special. They were touchable, portable, and above all, personal. The substance of the artifact was imbued with divine power, easily accessible, and ever present. The touch and sight of the object was used to elicit and recall emotional responses and prayers. Seeing and holding blessed objects created “salvific display,” a desire to have the mysteries of religion made visible, presented to the bodily eye, rather than just apprehended through an inner vision. An emotional link was created between the object and the viewer or holder, such that the object “made present the holy.”¹⁷⁶ Effectively, their owners possessed an artifact with powers similar to those of rel-

 Lea, Auricular Confession, 3:514.  Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 19.  Scribner, “Cosmic Order and Daily Life,” 25.

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ics. These were available to all social groups. The ability to draw down grace was personal, portable, and inexpensive, making salvation available, on demand, to their owners.

Spiritual Journeys: Pilgrimage in the Mind For the educated and literate pilgrim, physical travel was only one means of accessing the shrines of the saints. The early modern period saw the expansion of another long-standing, alternative means of travel, spiritual pilgrimage, where journeys took place in the mind. For those who could not travel, enclosed religious orders, women and children, the old, sick, and young or those whose business and work gave them little time for leisure, voyages of the mind opened the world to them. Also, for returned pilgrims, traveling inwardly gave them the opportunity to relive the spiritual experience of the shrine they had visited as well as other centers. As has been discussed above, early modern Catholic reformers encouraged personal prayer and individual meditation as much if not more than ostentatious, external gestures. Centered on Christ and particularly his holy sacrament, true piety did not need to be exteriorized through processions and pilgrimages. The parish church and its high altar, where the sacrament was celebrated, reserved and occasionally exhibited, was sufficient travel; confession to a local priest was better than walking penitentially for miles to a distant place. The best place to find God was in one’s own interior space. Pilgrimage literature was designed to help the holy traveler find this place, whether on location in the sanctuary or increasingly, at home. Much of this literature and therefore spiritual travel was to Jerusalem or Rome. But over the early modern period, the travelogues expanded outwards to include alternative sites as well, even to the Atlantic edge of Europe. Spiritual travel was already a devotional tradition before the Reformation centuries.¹⁷⁷ The earliest “soul travelers” in Europe appear to have been male and female religious, and anchorites, whose enclosure in monastic communities meant they were unable to travel, and whose religious culture “commonly insisted that physical stability, together with a corresponding degree of detachment from the world around, was a prerequisite for spiritual growth.”¹⁷⁸ In the central Middle Ages, lay piety also came to incorporate spiritual travel, and its popular-

 For a detailed discussion of the historiography, see Hillman and Tingle, “Introduction,” in Soul Travel, 1– 43.  Dyas, Pilgrimage, 205 – 6.

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ity grew subsequently, promoted by the mendicant orders and particularly the Observant Franciscans, who sponsored new religious sensibilities that gave prominence to the life of Christ as a subject of meditation.¹⁷⁹ The believer was encouraged to use her or his imagination to visualize the sacred events of Christ’s life, in proper sequence and full details, in their appropriate setting. It was to involve all the emotions and self-presencing in metaphorical space and time.¹⁸⁰ This trend towards inwardness augmented greatly in the Catholic Reformation and interior pilgrimage took a wide variety of forms. As Dee Dyas reminds us, inner journeys included prayer, dreams, visions, and use of the imagination, influenced by texts, images, artifacts, and landscapes.¹⁸¹ The two most frequently experienced by “ordinary” Catholics were the imagined pilgrimage, a journey to a sacred destination carried out in the mind which aimed at imagining presence in a particular place, and spiritual journeying in a physical place but conducted in a facsimile landscape, whether a reconstruction of a shrine or site, or an allegorical landscape of chapels and altars standing in for real places. Such activities expanded the numbers of pilgrims experiencing sacred sites, even if they never visited the authentic locations themselves.

Imagined Landscapes of Christ and His Saints: From Jerusalem to Compostela and Beyond in the Mind The earliest sites of imagined pilgrimage did not lie in western Europe but were the landscapes inhabited by Jesus Christ during his earthly life, death, and resurrection, in the Holy Land. Spiritual journeys to Palestine and guidebooks to inform them are almost as old as Christianity itself. The central importance of Jerusalem for the history of salvation made it the object of intense study and devotion throughout the Middle Ages, and the most literary prominent destination for spiritual travel.¹⁸² The widely read Giardino de oration of 1454, probably by Nicholas of Osimo, proposed a way of meditating that was described as locative memory, “when thinking of the passion he or she was supposed to figure out the urban space of Jerusalem as if it were that of a familiar town … each scene had to be staged and set up in one’s own imagination.”¹⁸³ Such texts abounded in the fifteenth century. For example, the account of the Jerusalem pilgrim and     

Encyclopedia of Medieval Pilgrimage, 693. See for example Kelly and Perry, Devotional Culture. Dyas, Pilgrimage, see introduction. Donkin and Vorholt, “Introduction,” in Imagining Jerusalem, 1. Osimo is discussed in Bacci, “Locative Memory,” 70.

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Dominican friar Felix Fabri, prepared in 1492 and often known as Sionpilger, offered a guidebook for imagined journeys for the sisters of the convents of Medingen and Medlingen.¹⁸⁴ One of the most popular guides, real and virtual, was the 1486 pilgrimage account of Bernhard von Breydenbach, Peregrinatio in Terram Sanctam with woodcuts produced by Erhard Reuwich actually en route. Its impact is shown in the twelve reprints of the work down to 1522 and the use of the images in several centers across Europe.¹⁸⁵ This guidebook remained popular well into the sixteenth century. The period after 1520 saw reduced opportunities for European pilgrims to visit the Holy Lands, for the Ottoman invasion of the Balkans and eastern Mediterranean reduced pilgrim traffic. However, the period saw increased popularity in spiritual travel to Jerusalem as Marie-Christine Gomez-Géraud’s study of more than eighty early modern pilgrimage accounts has shown.¹⁸⁶ Wes Williams argues that the expansion of print allowed even greater numbers of people who had never traveled, to experience an imagined Jerusalem.¹⁸⁷ The practice of harnessing the imagination to undertake spiritual journeys was central to Jesuit spirituality in particular and the technique of constructing biblical scenes in the mind—the composition of place (or compositio loci)—was the cornerstone of Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. It was adapted by many writers of devotional guides. Popular works included Nicolas de Leuze’s reworking of Jean Pascha’s La peregrination spirituelle vers la terre saincte, a day-by-day, year-long guide to meditation in the form of a journey to Jerusalem.¹⁸⁸ Louis Balourdet’s La guide des chemins pour le voyage de Hierusalem, et autres villes et lieux de la Terre Saincte (1601) and Henri de Castela’s La guide et adresse pour ceux qui veulent faire le S. voyage de Hierusalem (1603) offered updated versions of the same genre.¹⁸⁹ The Dominican Luis de Granada, La guia des peccadores and Le vray chemin et adresse pour acquerir et parvenir à la grace de Dieu, were highly influential.¹⁹⁰ Such texts were certainly meditational. The English version of Jan van Paeschen’s The Spiritual Pilgrimage of Hierusalem, Containing Three Hundre Sixtie Five Dayes Iourney, Wherein the Devoute Person May Meditate on Sondrie

 Beebe, “Jerusalem of the Mind’s Eye,” 409, 414.  Breydenbach, Peregrinatio in Terram Sanctam.  Gomez-Géraud, Crépuscule du grand voyage.  Williams, “Mirrour of Mis-Haps,” 210.  Loyola, Spiritual Exercises; Pascha Peregrination spirituelle. Discussed in Williams, “Mirrour of Mis-Haps,” 211 ff.  Balourdet, Guide des chemins; Castela, Guide et adresse. Discussed in Williams, Pilgrimage and Narrative, 51.  Granada, Guia des peccadores and Vray chemin et adresse.

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Pointes of His Redemption. With Particular Declaration of Divers Saints Bodies and Holy Places Which Aare to be Seene in the Said Voyage (1604 – 1605) was clearly for daily use at home.¹⁹¹ For European shrines of the Middle Ages, Thomas Noonan argues that there was not the same tradition of extensive literary description of pilgrimage as there was for journeys to Palestine, the implication being that spiritual pilgrimage concerning such sites was also less frequent.¹⁹² However, with the Catholic Reformation, spiritual aids to European pilgrimage expanded greatly. The period saw three developments that augmented virtual journeys to European shrines. First, religious conversion and experience continued to be—and indeed perhaps more so—a highly introspective and interiorized process. Secondly, with greatly reduced travel to the Holy Land from the mid-sixteenth century, and the augmented status of Rome as a destination in the post-Tridentine Church, spiritualization of the Holy See also grew in devotional importance. Even in the Middle Ages, Rome as an imagined destination was used for devotions in some churches, such as those at St. Katherine’s Convent in Augsburg studied by Marie-Luise Ehrenschwendtner.¹⁹³ It was the great post-Tridentine and post-Lepanto Roman jubilee of 1575, organized by Gregory XIII, that began a century of large-scale influxes followed by virtual pilgrimages all over Europe. Gaspard Loarte, Jesuit, produced Trattato delle sante peregrinationi, a devotional handbook for those on the road but also for those who stayed at home, for the Christian life wherever it was led, was a pilgrimage.¹⁹⁴ The English cleric Gregory Martin published two works to encourage visits, in body or more likely, in spirit, Roma sancta (1581) and A Treatyse of Christian Peregrination (1583).¹⁹⁵ This tradition continued into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly in jubilee years. Thirdly, regional and even some local shrines produced literature for pilgrims that could be used for spiritual as well as practical travel, either by the returning pilgrim who practiced devotions in remembrance of the journey, or for a wider public. One of the most import was the Holy House of Loreto on the Adriatic coast of Italy, associated with the Roman pilgrimage, for it lay within the papal jurisdiction and pilgrims often visited both sites. The Holy House was claimed to be the cottage where the Annunciation had taken place, the meeting between the Archangel Gabriel and the Virgin Mary where Christ was conceived. The house was miraculously transported from Palestine, via the Dalmatian     

Paeschen, Spiritual Pilgrimage of Hierusalem. Noonan, Road to Jerusalem, 128. Ehrenschwendtner, “Virtual Pilgrimages?” Loarte, Trattato delle sante peregrinationi. Martin, Roma Sancta; Martin, Treatyse of Christian Peregrination.

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coast, to Loreto and a major cult center was developed across the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Holy House became a major inspiration for spiritual journeying in early seventeenth-century Europe, part of a widespread upsurge in Marian devotions in the Counter-Reformation. The earliest and one of the most influential aids was Luis de Granada’s 1575 Instruttione de’ peregrini che vanno alla Madonna di Loreto, et ad altri luoghi Santi. ¹⁹⁶ The Jesuit Orazio Torsellini followed with a Latin text Historiae Lauretanae libri quinque in 1597.¹⁹⁷ One of bestknown guides was Louis Richeome’s work of 1604, Le pèlerin de Lorète which took the form of a travelogue to Loreto over forty days, with meditations to accompany each day.¹⁹⁸ Works on Loreto were translated into several languages. Thomas Price published an English translation of Torsellini’s text in 1608 and John Sweetnam published The Paradise of Delights, Or the B Virgins Garden of Loreto. With Briefe Discourses upon Her Divine Letanies by Way of Meditation (1620).¹⁹⁹ Richeome’s The Pilgrim of Loreto was translated into English by Edward Walpole in 1629. In 1635, Robert Corbington published The Miraculous Origin and Translation of the Church of Our B. Lady of Loreto, a translation of the work of Pietro di Giorgio Tolomei, and in the same year he also translated the work into the Scottish Dialect, The Wondrous Flittinge of the Kirk of Our B. Ledy of Loreto. ²⁰⁰ For beleaguered Catholics in the British Isles, spiritual journeys to pilgrimage sites were necessary substitutes for real travel. On a lesser scale than Rome or Loreto, shrines all over Europe commissioned literature that would serve pilgrims or their spiritual counterparts. For France, Bruno Maës has made a detailed study of almost 600 extant pilgrimage booklets from the later fifteenth to the early eighteenth century. As literacy rose in France, so reading and meditative travel became part of the strategy of salvation for everwider social groups. Many of these were Marian shrines such as Notre-Dame de Liesse, Notre-Dame de Garaison, and Puy-en-Vélay.²⁰¹ The ancient, long-distant pilgrimage shrines that are the subject of this study also had their spiritual counterparts. The Irish histories and descriptions of St. Patrick’s Purgatory discussed above could be no more than spiritual guides for most of their readers, based in exile on the Continent, for Ireland was under English Protestant military rule and difficult for travel. Robert Quatremaires’s history and guide for the pilgrimage to the Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy of 1668 could also be used at home,

     

Consulted for this work: Granada, Instruttione de’ peregrini. Torsellini, Historiae Lauretanae libri quinque. Richeome, Pèlerin de Lorète; English version: Richeome Pilgrime of Loreto. Sweetnam, Paradise of Delights. Corbington, Miraculous Origin and Translation and Wondrous Flittinge. Maës, Livrets de pèlerinage.

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by armchair as well as returning pilgrims.²⁰² To the literate would-be pilgrim or returnee from a shrine, soul travel could replace or reinforce the physical journey, promoting the experience of landscapes in the imagination as devotional tools. Spiritual journey as a practice rippled out from Jerusalem, to Rome, to the Catholic provinces as destinations, as interior travelers expanded greatly in numbers in the post-Reformation period.

Spiritual Landscapes: Facsimile Shrines and Interior Devotions A second form of spiritual pilgrimage combined physical movement with mental imaging, in the context of created landscapes that were designed to evoke and sometimes replicate or reproduce, holy sites. As with textual aids to devotion, there was a movement from the creation of Jerusalems, to Romes and then to a wide range of other shrine-scapes, the latter being a feature of the post-Reformation period. From the early Middle Ages, religious and then urban communities began to construct facsimile or allegorical physical landscapes, primarily representations of Jerusalem or the Passion-scape of Christ.²⁰³ As Kathryn Beebe states, “virtual pilgrimage sought to re-appropriate Jerusalem as a Christian city by … transposing Jerusalem to the pilgrim’s own convent or town … [V] irtual pilgrims enact, through the contemplation of textual guides as well as the material fabric of their own convents, the transformation of their surroundings into Jerusalem itself.”²⁰⁴ Such reconstructions of pilgrimage landscapes permitted small-scale travel around the sites themselves—virtual pilgrimage “enacted through bodily movement” as Kathryn Blair Moore has put it.²⁰⁵ Before the twelfth century, Bianca Kühnel argues, reconstructed landscapes focused almost entirely on Christ’s sepulcher, such as the rotunda built by the bishop of Constance near to his cathedral in 940. From the twelfth century onwards, reconstructions incorporated a greater number of holy sites as increased interest in the Holy Land and the period of the Crusades gave an incentive and provided first-hand knowledge about Palestine: Bologna, one of the earliest known Italian Jerusalem sites, probably had a complex that extended over a good portion of the town.²⁰⁶ Larger-scale landscape transformations really

 Quatremaires, Histoire abrégée du Mont Saint-Michel.  Discussion of the historiography can be found in Rachman-Schrire, “Sinai Stones on Mount Zion,” 57.  Beebe, “Jerusalem of the Mind’s Eye,” 413.  Moore, Architecture of the Christian Holy Land, 162.  Kühnel, “Virtual Pilgrimages,” 246– 48.

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began in the fifteenth century. The most famous facsimile landscapes are northern Italy’s sacri monti sites. The oldest of these, Varallo, was begun in 1481, by the Franciscan Bernardo Caimi, former Custos in the Holy Land. The site was a combination of architecture (chapels), sculpted figures, and frescos linked by pathways, with scenes in each chapel representing either the Passion narrative or major topographical features of Jerusalem. Pilgrims progressed around the landscape, spiritually envisioning the scene in Jerusalem itself.²⁰⁷ These landscapes allowed for individual and group devotion, exercised inside or outside the official liturgy, and were particularly suited to the laity. Allegorical use of the interior fittings of church buildings also presenced Jerusalem for the purpose of meditation and spiritual travel.²⁰⁸ The reconstruction of Jerusalem continued after the Reformation, at least in Catholic territories. For example, in Paris, a shrine of Calvary on Mont Valérien was granted letters patent from Louis XIII in 1640. To support the pilgrimage, a Confraternity of the Cross was established in 1644, and its statutes confirmed in 1707. René-François du Breil de Pontbriant in Pèlerinage du calvaire sur le mont Valérien (1779), considered Mont Valérien “a Calvary that ceaselessly calls to mind that of Jerusalem where Jesus Christ was sacrificed and died for our salvation,” where one enters into “transports” of sympathy in imagining the sufferings and triumphs of the Savior.²⁰⁹ The model landscape provided a site of spiritual travel in time and space, back to Golgotha. Rome’s sacred sites—especially its church-scape—were also being reconstructed in the rest of Catholic Europe in the later Middle Ages, which again expanded further in the early modern period. The main driver of this was the expansion of provision of plenary indulgences to churches throughout the Catholic world, to encourage the adoption of Roman devotions. The Jesuit Amable de Bonnefans, writing in the 1640s, provided a handbook for penitents seeking the “stations of Rome” indulgence, commonly available in many towns and religious communities by visiting a series of specified altars in one or several churches. To gain the indulgence, it was necessary to pray at each altar, to pray for peace and the Church. Recognizing that “good souls desire to visit the seven altars with devout thoughts,” Bonnefans recommended treating each of the altars as a stage of the Passion of Christ beginning with Gethsemane and ending with the crucifixion, and provided mediations and prayers for each of these “events.”²¹⁰ In 1601, to achieve the Roman jubilee indulgence transferred

   

Julia, “Identité pèlerine,” 243. Beebe, “Jerusalem of the Mind’s Eye,” 409; Mecham, “Northern Jerusalem.” Noonan, The Road to Jerusalem, 123. Bonnefans, Petit livre.

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to Paris, the bishop stipulated visits to the five churches of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, the chapel of the Hôtel Dieu and the churches of the Cordeliers, the Feuillants, the Filles Pénitentes, and the Filles de l’Ave Maria.²¹¹ In the 1640s, the Tiercettes or sisters of the Third Order of Franciscans in Toulouse erected a ladder in one of the chapels of their church. This was a symbolic representation of the Scala Santa in Rome and the same indulgence available at the Holy See was granted to the sisters, if they knelt and prayed before the ladder, duly confessed and having taken communion, four times a year.²¹² Other shrines stimulated facsimile pilgrimage landscapes as well. The Holy House of Loreto was “transported” over the Alps, when replicas were built to exactly the same dimensions as the original house and enshrined in churches: 158 facsimiles have been recorded north of the Alps before 1800, particularly in Bohemia, Bavaria, and Austria.²¹³ The Mont Saint-Michel pilgrimage stimulated a number of substitute, shorter pilgrimages which confreres could take to honor the archangel rather than going to the Mont. The Parisian confraternity undertook an annual walk on May 8 to Saint-Cloud, about 12 kilometers from the capital, wearing pilgrim garb.²¹⁴ Several of the Rouen confraternities organized pilgrimages to the nearby priory of Saint-Michel, as discussed above.²¹⁵ Similarly, in the parish of Denestanville near Dieppe, a confraternity seems to have journeyed regularly to the local chapel of Mont-Sainte-Chapelle dedicated to SaintMichel.²¹⁶ Archdeacon Henri-Marie Bourdon of Évreux, who had a special devotion to the Holy Angels, went as a pilgrim to the Mont but when he founded a confraternity of the Holy Angels in his home town he did not prescribe the long-distance pilgrimage. Rather, the statutes enjoined the members on the first Tuesday of every month to visit the chapel of Saint-Michel-des-Vignes on the hill above Évreux.²¹⁷ By these means, the Mont Saint-Michel pilgrimage was made accessible to wider groups of people and was also more closely supervised by local clergy. With more archival research, similar votive pilgrimages may be found for other long-distant sites. What facsimile pilgrimages show is that holy journeys were never either corporeal or spiritual, but a confluence of the two. It is unhelpful to categorize pilgrimage as either physical or “imagined”—with virtual pilgrimage cast as a con-

      

Déclaration catholique du jubilé, 4. A.D. Haute-Garonne 212 H 1. Tiercerettes of Saint François, Toulouse. Bercé, Lorette, 266. Lombard-Jourdain, “Confrérie parisienne,” 141. Le Charpentier, Instructions pour la confrérie, statutes 1623, item 6. Vincent, “Confréries et le culte,” 192– 93. Anon., La Vie de M. Henry-Marie Boudon.

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solatory devotional act for those unable or forbidden to travel. In practice, pilgrimage appears to have been more various, conducted with different kinds of physical, external stimuli and requiring varying degrees of sensory, or imagined mental participation. Overwhelmingly, contemporary writers stress that the most important devotional activity is prayer. Pilgrimage was the allegorical clothing of prayer, the ultimate aim of which was to walk with Jesus Christ or his saints. Pilgrimage could therefore be completely interiorized, an essential tool of the devout life, while walking in the Picos de Europa or sitting in a convent in France. It could reinforce the emotions of a physical pilgrimage or stimulate intense devotion through imagination and text.

Conclusions The pilgrim returning from his or her travels to a distant shrine had a number of ways in which he or she could remember and build on the experience of the holy journey. This depended on status, gender, place of residence, and inclination, of course. For those who went to shrines for cures, perhaps bodily healing or mindful refreshment was the best memento. However, most of our travelers journeyed for other reasons. For them, the tangible souvenir was the most common form of mnemonic. Whether acquired en route, gathered from natural sites, or purchased at the shrine, the object was carried home and carefully looked after, providing a visual recollection, an amulet, a prayer device, and a status symbol. Such things could be treasured for a lifetime, evidence of the tremendous impact of these pilgrimages on individuals, as the Dreux pilgrim’s picture-print, and the cockleshells found in burials, attest. For certain pilgrims—mostly men of the middling sort who had traveled to one of the prestigious sites such as the Mont Saint-Michel or Compostela—the memory and significance of the pilgrimage could be perpetuated in community with other pilgrims, in a confraternity. It was in the company of like-minded fellows that the devotional impetus of saintly veneration combined with new forms of Catholic reform piety. The confraternity was a formal group where ex-pilgrims with sufficient interest and enough collective resources could uphold their favored cult and demonstrate their own special status as pilgrims. Confraternities’ main activities were liturgical: regular masses, annual feast-day celebrations, funerals, and commemoration. But they also introduced novelties to their members. These were frequently through traditional routes, for example, the practice of acquiring plenary indulgences from Rome, where a confraternity could afford the costs, encouraged the adoption of more frequent confession and communion, perhaps the most important means by which this practice was introduced

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to parish-level groups. Partial indulgences granted by bishops were given for a whole range of good works, liturgical and charitable, again using the language and ideals of Catholic reform, even if the tradition was of long standing. Confraternities might introduce new rituals, witnessed in other places or parishes which also spread the cultural reach of Rome outwards: adoration of the Holy Sacrament, Salves and canticles on special occasions, new forms of funerary and commemorative prayers. Confraternities were also important patrons of art for their chapels, even in rural parishes with limited wealth. New imagery and symbolism entered the church decorative repertoire in the seventeenth century, giving different visual stimuli to devotional prayers. The individual experience of continuing fervor or piety is difficult to gauge, for evidence is extremely limited. For confraternity members, devotion largely took place through participation in formally structured liturgies and rituals. There was collective remembrance, publicly expressed, a formal statement of faith in the Roman Catholic Church and of obligation to the local community of believers. Although the Counter-Reformation brought with it a growing emphasis on the household as a site of piety, existing statutes did not by and large require individual meditation and prayer of their members. Yet Catholic reform practices may have been encouraged in more informal ways. The commissioning of prints and booklets, frequently with prayers, encouraged their use in a domestic space. There was also virtual pilgrimage, to revive spiritual ardor. Most confraternities held an annual procession on their feast day, mostly an ordinary defile in honor of their saint and themselves. But a number went further, creating symbolic pilgrimages to chapels and other places, to stir up the memory or to create a virtual journey, for the participants. As there were clearly families taking part in these processions, certainly there were children, and probably mothers, and wives as well, this was a proxy experience even for those who had never traveled to the shrine in question. For the well-educated pilgrim, texts offered the possibility of imaginative travel to many distant places, Jerusalem, Rome, the great Marian shrines, to perpetuate the concept of pilgrimage in what was truly soul travel. Just occasionally there are hints as to the lasting impact of the long-distant holy journey, in the same way that the Hajj marks out permanently the returnee from Mecca in the Islamic pilgrimage. When in 1607, the son of Fleury Chartier was laid to rest in the churchyard of Chambon-sur-Cisse near to Blois, the parish priest noted in the parish register that the son, like his father, was a pilgrim of St. James, attesting to a family tradition; in 1632, Louis Gaingnart was laid to rest at

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Assé-le-Boisne near to Le Mans, the parish priest recording him as “a pilgrim of St. James.”²¹⁸ Once a pilgrim, always a pilgrim, right up to the gates of heaven.

 Examples taken from the Inventaire du Patrimoine de Saint-Jacques website http://www. saintjacquesinfo.eu/index.php.

Chapter 6 Conclusions Louis de Jarcourt’s entry on “Pilgrimage” in the Encyclopédie de Diderot, written in the early 1760s, defined the term as: A journey of misunderstood devotion; men’s ideas have changed as to the merits of pilgrimage … We have turned away from our eagerness to visit faraway places in order to get relief from heaven, for you can find it much better at home, through good works and enlightened devotions.¹

For Jarcourt and other Enlightenment writers, pilgrimage had little place in a modernity which valued stability, order, moderation, and local, dignified, religious observance. Those who chose to leave their domesticity, to travel long distances to visit the saints, were not truly religious. Rather, such journeys were “made only by professional debauchees, beggars, who, by superstition, idleness or libertinism, go to Notre-Dame de Lorette or to St. James of Compostela in Galicia, asking for alms on the way.”² This view of the pilgrim was not novel, it had its origins in the state regulation of movement and mendicity of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But in the eighteenth century, it became perhaps the most prominent publicly expressed view of long-distance sacred travel. Even within the Church, pilgrimage to cult sites was increasingly disapproved of by disciplinarian clerics, such as Jansenists and Rigorists, on the grounds of superstition and disorder. Again, this had a long gestation, the changing post-Tridentine spiritual preferences for interiority and localism, under clerical supervision and counsel. This is exemplified by the disdain of Jean-Baptiste Thiers for the claims of the shrine of Saint-Hubert to cure rabies. In his Traité de superstitions, Thiers cast doubt on the efficacy of the neuvaine and other techniques promoted at Saint-Hubert as a treatment for the disease. One of his own parishioners, Damien Montandouin, whose death bed Thiers had attended, undertook the pilgrimage in 1687 following a bite from a mad dog. Montandouin still developed hydrophobia and died, despite claims that the cure was always successful.³ A polemical dispute then followed, between the shrine’s supporters

 Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné. Digitized at: http://xn–encyclopdie-ibb.eu/index.php/ histoire/1614321522–histoire-moderne/1008419151–P%C3 %89LERINAGE.  http://xn–encyclopdie-ibb.eu/index.php/histoire/1614321522–histoire-moderne/1008419151–P %C3 %89LERINAGE.  Thiers, Traité des superstitions, 1:511– 15. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501514388-009

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and medical skeptics, about the worth of the sacred journey.⁴ However, debates such as these occurred primarily among elites, while traditions of shrine visiting and saint veneration continued in local communities.⁵ The numbers of the faithful visiting the traditional shrines of the Atlantic regions of Europe did, however, fall across the mid-eighteenth century. Although a little way off the Atlantic routes, where serial data is lacking, the shrine at SainteReine provides a material illustration of this decline: the sick cared for at the pilgrims’ hostel fell from an average of 250 per year in 1700 – 1708, to 123 in the years 1763 – 1777; similarly, the bread consumption was maintained at about 20,000 rations across the period to 1750, but declined thereafter.⁶ Fewer people traveled to the shrine. Changing cultural attitudes against pilgrimage and for interior devotions seen among elite writers had an impact on the practice of longdistance journeys at all social levels. So did the effects of large-scale and endemic warfare in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Europe, along with economic and financial crises that rocked these years. Eric Nelson argues that an important cause was the development of regional and national consciousness in the eighteenth century, which led to a preference for domestic places of veneration rather than the great international pilgrimages. Also, when long-distance journeys were undertaken, there was an ongoing shift in preferred destinations, to Rome and the great Marian shrines such as Loreto.⁷ Even so, the most profound challenge to pilgrimage and saintly veneration came only at the end of the century, with the French Revolution, spread by international wars, and its sustained attack on the culture of Catholicism and the Church itself. Before this, the demise of pilgrimage has been overstated, even for the eighteenth century. Plenty of pilgrims still traveled; as Wraxall observed in the opening quote of this book, tens of thousands were still visiting the Mont Saint-Michel; Compostela and Lough Derg still attracted many pilgrims and other ancient, healing shrines were still in business. There seem to have been fewer elite travelers, but popular and middling folk still went on heroic, long journeys. To return to the original question framing this study, of the motives of the pilgrim, these are key to understanding the resurgence of shrines in the period after 1580, and the spiritual opportunities cult centers made available to even the humblest visitor. The importance of pilgrimage as a popular, grass-roots Catholic phenomenon cannot be overstressed. The pilgrim drove the revival of pilgrimage in this period; this was, put crudely, a demand-driven economy.    

Fétis, Légende de saint Hubert, 76 – 77. Nelson, Legacy of Iconoclasm, 122. Boutry and Julia, Sainte-Reine au Mont Auxois, 247– 48. Nelson, Legacy of Iconoclasm, 122.

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First and foremost, the humble, young, male pilgrim who made up the majority of holy travelers, was journeying “out of devotion,” to make personal contact with the saint of his choice, to experience something of the power of divinity that was present at the site. This was a personal impulse. The obligation of “devotion” came out of the pilgrim’s membership of a society of honor, where a vow to a saint answered with a heavenly response—a cure, rescue, escape from accident—gave an obligation of reciprocity, to visit and venerate, and perhaps give a gift as well. Also vital was the pilgrim’s membership of a living community, with its many obligations. While some pilgrims traveled alone, most went with companions and an obligation to pray for family and friends; some went as formal representatives of a larger community, whether confraternity, parish, or city.⁸ Clerical pilgrims had a particular responsibility for intercession. To go on pilgrimage was a personal choice, consciously made, with a religious intent, but it was also strongly rooted in communal duty and collective benefit. There was continuity in this practice of vow, journey, and gift giving, from the middle ages and probably even Antiquity and it continued across the early modern period. The Counter and Catholic Reformation movements brought changes to pilgrimage practice. The northern European experience of religious strife, civil and international war, and the need to combat the “infection” of heresy was a fundamental driver of shifts in the Catholic Church. It had a profound effect on the spirituality, material culture of religious life, and on the expectations of the institutional Church. It impacted on visiting pilgrims and on clergy who operated shrines. While confessionalization is an overstatement of the cultural processes at work, participation in pilgrimage was a clear manifestation of Roman Catholic belief, a form of activism consciously and ostentatiously undertaken by individuals and by communities in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Pilgrimage was still conceived of as an anti-Protestant action throughout the 1600s. Catholicism also witnessed the hugely important movement of spiritualization and interiority of devotions; a pilgrimage was to be a program of penitential prayer and meditation, to give access to an interior God. Although dévôt purists such as Monsieur Queriolet journeyed in this fashion, and more earthly pilgrims sang, fought, and ate along the way, even the latter engaged in “stational” interiority and piety, at the shrines along the routeway and at the holy destination. Confession, always a feature of shrine visiting, was now accompanied by communion, to access plenary indulgences and because it was an increasingly expected way of accessing God. The pilgrim had concentrat-

 Julia, Voyage aux saints, 10.

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ed moments of interiority, again often shared in community with companions, and for the intention of friends and kin as well as themselves. In Eric Nelson’s words, the activity “reflected their understanding of an ideal community and its relation to the sacred.”⁹ Ancient shrines adapted relatively quickly to the demands of their pilgrims, in terms of offering new devotions within reshaped architectural settings. They participated in and promoted post-Tridentine ideas about sacred space and holy behaviors. The Counter-Reformation impetus to enhance the worshipper’s experience of the mass meant reshaped chancels and altars, expenditure on vessels and vestments, bells and music, different modes of displaying relics and sacred objects. The luxurious, enveloping, sensuosity of ritual and liturgy was a major attraction of shrines. As Emma Jane Wells argues, the materiality of a church defined and communicated the identity of a saint to the faithful, “immortalizing the saint’s majesty, numinism, and power.”¹⁰ Through the material and sensory, pilgrims were elevated to the spiritual plane of communication with the saint. Each cult had its own riches and provided a unique experience for the pilgrim. All except Lough Derg, where a virtue was made of the starkness and martyrdom of destruction, set within the magnificent natural landscape. This was a reciprocal movement of ideas and requirements, however. As Catholic reform spirituality penetrated parish life, with rosary devotions and prayer groups, adoration of the sacrament and processions, confraternity embellishments of chapels and altars, so pilgrims carried with them an expectation that they would encounter similar activities at shrines, but in even more gorgeous form. They then took back this impression to their home communities, sometimes with a mission to perpetuate and extend the devotions of their favored cult, through confraternity membership, display and use of souvenir objects, and for some, the reading of pious of works. Pilgrims were agents of consumption and dissemination on their long-distance journeys. New Catholic practices were not imposed from above but adopted and popularized because they were valued for their display and above all, efficacy, at the grass roots level, by individuals and communities eager for better ways to access the divine. Virginia Reinburg argues that landscape and antiquity were fundamental to a pilgrim’s interior response to a shrine.¹¹ For the long-distance traveler, bodily engaged in walking through different terrains and communities, weathers and dangers, pilgrimage was a physical, almost visceral experience. This comes

 Nelson, Legacy of Iconoclasm, 121.  Wells, “Archaeology of Sensory Experience,” 254.  Reinburg, Storied Places, see introduction to the book for her arguments.

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across time and again from first-hand accounts: weather, natural dangers and obstacles, were part of the via Crucis which they trod. A long journey and hazards of landscape made the sacred destination even more exciting. As we have seen, the landscape of hospitality and also the “stations” of local and regional shrines to which the pilgrim paid veneration made pilgrimage a series of journeys rather than a single trajectory. The stunning natural landscapes of and around Compostela, Lough Derg, and the Mont Saint-Michel were important in attracting adherents. Just as important was their antiquity, as it was for the more regionally based healing shrines of ancient saints such as Méen, Reine, Hubert, and Martin. Here, there were no “discovered” statues or inventions of tradition, these sites were authentically ancient as the buildings and objects at the shrine demonstrated. As Reinburg states, such shrines had tremendous authority because of their long existence, linking pilgrims to the early days of the Christianization of northwest Europe, providing, in the words of Simplician Gody, “no small proof” of “the constant and invariable truth of our faith.”¹² The very enterprise or concept of pilgrimage provided a rich seam of allegorical writing for contemplation of God. Bernard du Verger’s, Le pèlerin moral of 1615 offers pilgrimage as an allegorical journey. Each action or stage of the journey is explained for the devout. Thus, the significance of the departure from one’s house and country is the need to leave home to find the house of God; one must give up earthly bonds to find the love of God; the significance of taking on pilgrims’ clothes is shown by the example of St. Paul, leaving off the old life and the putting on a new one, a reformation; the pilgrim’s staff resembled the crucifix of our Lord.¹³ François Arnoulx’s Le pèlerin du Paradis of 1623 advocated that to do penitence for earthly sins, a Christian should depart on pilgrimage; his work was designed to show the true route to take in order to be a pilgrim to paradise. He stated that a pilgrim should always keep the destination in mind, to ensure he took the shortest and safest road. Spiritual pilgrimage was like physical pilgrimage, proceeding a stage at a time, except it was the Christian life itself that was the journey. Such pilgrims walked the earth, with their hearts fixed in heaven, which was the final destination. They walked with constant attention to virtue, taking the safest route, which was that shown by the Catholic Church, observing the law and commandments of God, which were the surest ways to heaven.¹⁴ Thus, considering apparel, “for a hat, they took divine aid; the mortification of their affections was their footwear; penitence their coat and knap-

 Gody, Histoire de l’antiquité, 1– 4; quoted and discussed in Reinburg, Storied Places, 11.  Verger, Pèlerin moral.  Arnoulx, Pèlerin du Paradis, 5 – 8.

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sack; decorum their robe and dress; chastity their belt; meditation and contemplation their scrip and water bottle; love of the cross their staff; faith, charity and good works their purse and money: thus their interior person was spiritually dressed.”¹⁵ As for companions, one should journey humbly and carefully with God. Above all, whether through reading or listening to sermons, Catholic Christians learnt that prayer was the most powerful form of pilgrimage, “the food, the comfort and support of the soul during its pilgrimage on earth. It is a secure bridge for it to pass over the several seas of adversity and prosperity. It is a defense against vices and temptations. A key that opens for us a way to heavenly treasures and lastly an invincible fortress and sure refuge and place of retreat from the violent assaults of our enemies.”¹⁶ Spiritual pilgrimage, moral and interior, was a corollary of physical travel and the two gained strength and ideas from each other. The liturgical and devotional developments of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries also propagated the authority and influence of Rome, even at this remote distance. Shrine liturgies adapted and adopted at least some of the Roman rites, acceding to their influence. In other ways, Rome was culturally influential as well. The widespread demand for plenary indulgences, for churches on pilgrimage routes and at shrines themselves, especially for jubilee celebrations, brought in the standardized pardon form and increased traffic between the Holy See and provincial Europe. Cathedrals and collegiate churches adopted musical forms that were self-consciously Tridentine—the pitch at which chant was sung, for example—and architectural and decorative forms were widely emulated. There was frequent recourse of people and ideas between Rome and other shrines, and with the rest of Catholic Europe. Romanization, the augmentation of the spiritual standing of the papacy and the holy city, spread out and helped to unify even the distant places such as Galicia and Ireland, and of course, beyond. The heroic aspect of long-distance pilgrimage should be stressed. These journeys were adventures with uncertain ends, for numerous people died on the route as is recorded in hospital registers and parish burial records. But the social caché in small communities of being one of the “elect” travelers who achieved the journey was important to individuals for the rest of their lives and even afterwards. In the Musée Regional de l’Orléannais, there is an incised funerary slab of 1603 with a central image of the crucified Christ, with St. James to the left and a kneeling pilgrim to the right. It states “Here Lies Guillaume Ytasse, Master Turn-

 Arnoulx, Pèlerin du Paradis, 9.  Castaniza, Spiritual Combat, 175 – 76.

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er”; Ytasse’s will asked for this to be laid near his burial in Beaugency church, together with his pilgrim’s staff.¹⁷ Many communities and even families, had traditions of travel to a particular shrine and saw off pilgrims most years, most commonly to the Mont Saint-Michel or to Compostela; the same may have been true for Lough Derg, though we lack information. The traditions were woven into the fabric of male youth culture in these communities, an act of endurance, group solidarity, a temporary freedom and a source of distinction back home, for only a minority ever traveled in this way. Also, where elites traveled increasingly in classical and other “grand” tours, so the lower and middling young man went out, on a journey framed with culturally acceptable spiritual overtones, appropriate to his station in life. As Philippe Martin states, pilgrimage was a sufficiently malleable activity to be reinvented in all periods. In the sixteenth century, it was mobilized for the struggle against heresy; in the seventeenth century, it was a site for the display of the ideal spiritual society and a way of lifting souls to God.¹⁸ So, the period after 1580 saw the revitalization of long-distance pilgrimage in northwest Europe, along with local shrine visiting and journeys to Rome. This was part of the revalorization of the cult of saints, relics, and indulgences that proceeded from the Council of Trent. The ancient, northern shrines offered a different experience, of remoteness, independence, and their own traditions. Until the eighteenth century was well under way, “pilgrimage … was a vital presence on the early modern scene.”¹⁹ Large numbers of people moved temporarily every year; it produced a distinctive and hugely popular genre of literature and a form of devotional activity—spiritual pilgrimage—that resulted from this; it was the mainstay of the material economies of many towns involved in the merchandising of holy souvenirs. As Jennifer Webb writes, baroque Catholicism was more than a restoration of medieval traditions against Protestant attack, “it was marked by over a century of reform efforts, war and hardening of confessional boundaries” but part of the construction of clearly Catholic identity was “an insistence on heritage and continuity” within the Church. Along with greater sacramental observance, mental prayer, plenary pardons, and devotional reading, pilgrimage to the traditional shrines of northwest Europe was one of the great hallmarks of Catholic reformed spirituality in Europe and beyond. Above all, it was about experiencing sanctity, personal, communal, and divine. As the well-traveled pilgrim, Ignatius Loyola wrote:

 Santiago de Compostela. 1000 ans de pèlerinage Européenne, ed. Parga, 272, item 110.  Martin, Pèlerins XVe–XXIe siècle, 232.  Noonan, Road to Jerusalem, 243.

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We must remind ourselves that we are pilgrims until we arrive at our heavenly homeland, and we must not let our affections delay us in the roadside inns and lands through which we pass, otherwise we will forget our destination and lose interest in our final goal.²⁰

 Monumenta ignatiana, 6:523. Digitized at https://archive.org/details/monumentaignati01ig nagoog/page/n528.

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Index Albani, Nicolà 81, 104, 111, 124, 140, 161, 222 alms 43 f., 47 f., 60 f., 69 f., 77, 79 – 81, 94, 103 – 110, 112, 154, 156 f., 170, 175, 187, 189, 199, 214 Altötting (Bavaria) 6 angels 49, 54, 87, 142, 151 f., 177, 179, 210 Angers, diocese of 91, 118 Anglo-Irish Wars 29, 66, 85 Anne of Austria 51, 62 Aubert, bishop of Avranches 28, 125 f., 142, 177 Auvergne 38, 42 Baronius, Caesar 27 Bayeux (Normandy) 111, 139, 144 Beauvais 10, 118 Beeldenstorm 5 Benoiste-Vaux, Notre-Dame de 48, 222 Blois 7, 15, 86, 104, 168 f., 212 Bonnecaze, Jean 13, 41, 44, 72, 78 f., 83, 86 f., 89 f., 96, 102, 104 f., 193, 200, 223 Bordeaux – Cathedral chapter of Saint-Jean 43 – Chapter of Saint-André 43, 60 Bordeaux 37, 43, 48, 54, 60, 73, 80, 84, 95 f., 98 – 101, 104, 127, 151, 153, 171, 176, 188, 200, 222 f., 226 Borromeo, Carlo, Archbishop of Milan 20, 108 Breydenbach, Bernhard de 205, 222 Brittany 3, 7, 10, 29, 35, 37 f., 51, 54, 63, 70, 73, 85, 126 Burgos 80, 84 f., 95, 101, 107 – 109, 197 f., 201, 227 Caen (Normandy) 13, 69 – 71, 81 – 84, 87, 110 f., 126, 139, 164, 180, 186, 197, 199, 225, 227 Canisius, Peter SJ 6 Capuchins 9 Catholic League 59, 63

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501514388-011

certificates of pilgrimage 123 – 124, 139 – 140, 164, 172, 199 Charles IX of France 51 Chartres 6 f., 78, 81, 86, 151, 183 – Diocese of Chartres 80, 190 Châteaudun 71, 86 Cluny 27 Coimbra 54 communion see also eucharist 12, 36, 79, 80 – 81, 83, 91 – 92, 101, 109, 117, 124, 127 – 128, 132, 135, 137, 138 – 140, 154, 166 – 167, 179, 180, 184, 187 – 188, 190, 199, 210 – 211, 216 confession 8 f., 11, 20, 47, 54, 60, 65, 80 f., 83, 99, 111, 117, 120 f., 127 f., 132, 135 – 141, 147, 154 f., 162, 166 f., 180, 184, 190, 199, 202 f., 211, 216 confraternity, confraternities 6, 11, 20, 42, 49 f., 57 f., 62, 81 – 84, 86 f., 102, 105, 110, 155, 163 – 190, 197, 201, 209 – 212, 216 f. – confraternity of St James (Saint-Jacques) – Bayonne 39 f., 104, 188 – Bordeaux 171 – Campan, Bigorre 58, 174 – Chalons-sur-Saône 58, 171 – 172, 174, 178 – 180, 189 – Chilhac 170 – Dreux 182 – Gisors 171, 187 – Laval 42, 169, 173 – Libourne 110, 188 – Limoges 178, 222 – Lyons 163 – Mâcon 102 – Moissac 172, 174, 177, 179 – 181, 189, 193 – Orleans 49, 181, 186 – Paris 178, 181 – Pistoia 163, 168 – Provins 166, 178 – Puy-en-Vélay 181, 187 – Rheims 178, 181

Index

– Rouen 50, 86 – Senlis 86 – confraternity of St Michael (Saint-Michel) – Caen 81 – 84, 87, 110 f., 126, 164, 186 – Évreux 168, 210 – Paris 167 – 168, 176 – 179, 185, 210 – Pont l’Évêque 171, 189 – Rouen 169, 171 f., 177, 179 – 181, 185 f., 189, 210. – Vire 11, 63, 173 Congregation of Saint-Maur 30, 146 Council of Trent 5, 18, 115, 145, 147, 165, 220 Coutances, diocese of 54, 91, 111, 139, 223 crosses, wayside 18, 81, 87, 112, 191 f., 195, 201 f. Cuenca 20 Daughters of Charity 100 Devotio moderna 4, 20 Digulleville, Guillaume de 46, 223 Épinal (Lorraine) 41, 69 Erasmus, Desiderius 4, 68, 223 eucharist see also communion 4, 19, 111, 118, 137 – 139, 141 – 142, 145, 149, 154, 162, 167, 180, 187, 192, 199 Fabri, Felix, OP 205 false pilgrims 12, 82 Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain 51, 60 Feudardent, François, OFM 53, 63, 151, 155 Fontana, Bartolomeo 88, 109, 127, 161, 223 Franciscans 30, 61, 66, 131 – 133, 136, 147, 204, 210 – Tertiary order 8 Francis I of France 51 funeral 21, 109, 169 f., 187 – 189, 211 Garaison, Notre-Dame de 59, 207 Gelmirez, Diego, archbishop of Santiago 27 Girona 57 f. Granada, Luis de, OP 60, 83, 205, 207, 224 Gregory XIII, pope 11, 206 Gregory XV, pope 8, 146 Guadalupe, Our Lady of, Spain 39, 159

Guzmán, Diego de, Cardinal 159

243

53, 140, 144,

Harff, Arnold von 85, 118, 224 Haton, Claude 41, 59 f., 63, 88, 125 f., 166, 178, 224 Henry III of France 51 Henry of Sawtry 29, 39 iconoclasm 5, 15, 18, 29, 61 f., 134, 215, 217 imitatio Christi 46 indulgences 5, 11, 19, 34, 36, 57, 102, 107 – 109, 111 f., 146, 148, 152 – 156, 162, 167, 175 f., 180, 184, 186 – 188, 192, 201 f., 209, 211 f., 216, 219 f., 223, 226 Inquisition 61 interior prayer 73 f., 184 itineraries 30, 85 f., 94, 227 Jerusalem 8, 11, 24, 27, 45 f., 49, 81, 85 f., 95, 111, 123, 138, 170, 203 – 206, 208 f., 212, 220 Jesuits, Society of Jesus 6, 9 – 11, 54, 56, 60, 100, 114 Jouvin, Albert 123 f., 150 f., 224 jubilee 5, 11, 35 f., 48, 53, 57, 106, 122 f., 140, 154 f., 158 f., 187, 206, 219 – Roman Jubilee 5, 36, 143, 206, 209 Keating, Geoffrey 65, 224 Kempe, Margery 1, 224 La Coruña, Spain 40, 83 f., 120, 197, 222 Laffi, Domenico 13, 25, 43, 57, 87 – 90, 103 f., 107 – 110, 122 f., 137, 154 f., 161, 198 f., 225 Laon, Spain 84, 101 f., 104 Lassota, Erich von Stebelow 120 – 122, 139, 159 Le Mans, diocese of 43, 69 f., 83, 85, 90, 105, 126, 199, 213 licences for pilgrimage 12, 44, 79, 91, 101, 105 – 106, 112 Liesse, Notre-Dame de 5 f., 12, 51, 55, 57, 59, 86, 115, 127, 149, 175 f., 207 Lille 53, 89, 191 liminality 14, 44

244

Index

Limoges 55, 70, 178, 222 Limousin 55, 78, 81, 227 Lisieux 58, 68, 126 Loreto, Holy House shrine 8, 11, 46, 48, 54, 57, 70 f., 80, 138, 143, 156, 158, 206 f., 210, 215, 223 f., 226 f. Louis IX of France 1 Louis XII of France 28 Louis XIV of France 44, 106 Loyola, Ignatius 68, 205, 220, 225 Lyons, Lyonnais 53, 70, 84, 102, 163 Madrid 13, 21, 102, 111, 222 – 227 Manier, Guillaume 13, 41, 44, 71 f., 78, 81, 90, 99, 101 f., 104 f., 108 f., 114, 127, 140, 193, 195, 197 – 199, 201, 223, 225 Margaret of Austria, Queen of Spain 53, 159 Marian devotions 167, 207 mass, masses see also communion and eucharist 16, 21, 42, 45, 51, 53, 58, 61, 64 f., 69, 81, 99, 109 – 111, 120, 123 – 127, 129, 136, 138 – 144, 146 f., 149, 154 f., 157, 161 f., 164, 166, 169 f., 175 – 177, 179, 184, 186, 188 – 191, 199, 211, 217 materiality 13, 16 – 18, 138, 190 – 192, 202, 217 medal, medals 18, 115, 191 – 194, 201 f. Messingham, Thomas 29, 64, 128, 132, 225 Milan 20, 57, 108 f. miracle, miracles 9 f., 12, 18, 30, 39, 48 f., 51, 53 f., 56, 63 – 65, 92, 110, 115 f., 125, 131, 141, 146, 148 – 150, 157, 160, 177, 186, 197 f., 222 – 224, 226 miracle plays 177 – 178 Montaigne, Michel de 158, 225 Montfort (Brittany) 7, 29, 37, 73, 91, 105 Montpellier 109 Montserrat 54, 58, 111, 175 Morales, Ambrosio de 120, 122, 226 music, liturgical 72, 94, 143 f., 161, 217 Nantes (Brittany) 44, 95, 127, 164, 223 Nuremberg (Bavaria) 11 Oratorians 9 Order of Saint-Michel

51

Orleans, France 15, 49, 86, 143, 167, 181, 186 Ottoman Empire 53, 160, 205 Oviedo, Spain 85, 102, 109, 160, 195 Padrón, Galicia 27, 123 Pamplona, Spain 80, 83 f., 102, 109 pardons see indulgences Paris 13, 21, 29, 37 – 39, 41 f., 51, 54, 57, 78, 84, 86, 95, 99, 104 f., 128, 132, 137, 142, 151, 159, 168, 176 – 179, 181, 183, 198, 209 f., 222 – 227 penal crosses 195 penance 20, 34, 56 f., 65, 92, 112, 132, 153, 167, 187 penitence 46 – 48, 50, 55 f., 74, 93, 111, 133, 186, 218 Perpignan 58 phenomenology 76 f., 91 Philip III of Spain 53 Philip II of Spain 44, 106, 120 pilgrimage booklets 150, 156, 207 pilgrim badges 18, 195 pilgrim hospitals, hostels – Argentan, hôpital Saint-Jacques 37, 39, 68, 85 – Bayonne, hôpital Saint-Jacques 39 f. – Bordeaux, hôpital Saint-James 37, 95 f., 98 – 101, 104 – Burgos, Hostal Real 95 – Cadillac, hôpital Saint-Jacques 99 f. – Dax, hôpital Saint-Eutrope 90, 163 – La Coruña, Hospital Buen Suceso 40, 83 f. – Laon 101 f. – Paris, hôpital Saint-Jacques 95, 99, 106, 183 – Pons, hôpital Saint-Jacques 11, 95 – 99, 104 – Rennes, hôpital Saint-Yves 2, 29, 37, 39 – 41, 52, 55, 79, 85, 100, 105, 127, 163, 223 – Rodez, hôpital Saint-Jacques 37, 99, 106 – Rome, Santissima Trinità dei Pellegrini 11 – Santiago de Compostela, Hospital Real 30, 38 – 39, 50 102 f., 160 – Toulouse, hôpital Saint-Jacques 97, 108 Pius V, pope 27, 145

Index

preaching 9, 46, 146 – 148, 181 processions 6 f., 15, 42, 59, 74, 83, 117, 120, 145, 154, 166, 168, 177 – 179, 187, 190, 203, 212, 217 Provence 7, 10, 71, 156 Provins, France 41, 60, 63, 166, 178 Purgatory 3, 10, 13, 21, 28 f., 38 f., 56 f., 64 – 67, 85, 127 – 129, 131, 133, 135 f., 140 f., 147 f., 152 f., 155 f., 188, 195, 207, 224 – 226 Puy-en-Vélay, Notre-Dame de 35, 59 f., 62, 207, 222 Quatremaires, Robert, OSB 151 f., 156, 207 f., 226

49, 71, 92, 94,

Reboul, Vincent, OP 34, 226 relics 4 – 6, 15, 18 f., 27, 49, 55, 57, 61 f., 65, 70, 107 – 110, 114 f., 117 f., 120 f., 123 – 127, 133 – 135, 137 f., 141, 148, 151 f., 161 f., 192, 197 – 199, 201, 203, 217, 220 Rétif de la Bretonne, Nicolas-Edme 69 f., 226 Rheims 59, 118, 178, 181 Richardson, John 29, 66 f., 72, 132 f., 141, 153, 226 Richeome, Louis, SJ 9, 33, 46 – 48, 50, 71, 80, 137 f., 156, 207, 226 Rinuccini, Cardinal 66, 222 Rocamadour, Notre-Dame de 5, 59 Roman Ritual 81 Rome – Scala santa 11, 210 – Stations of Rome 8, 209 Rome 1 – 3, 7 f., 11, 36, 39, 48, 54 f., 57, 60 f., 66, 81 f., 85 f., 95, 99, 115, 136, 138, 141, 143, 145, 148, 154 f., 159, 175, 187 f., 198, 203, 206 – 212, 215, 219 f., 225, 227 Roncevalles 37 f., 43, 80, 84, 87, 89, 96, 102, 108 f. rosary, rosaries 18, 20, 68, 91, 93, 105, 128, 155, 167, 174, 195 f., 201, 217 Rothe, David, bishop of Ossory 38, 64, 131

245

Rouen 13, 43, 50, 82, 86, 89, 152, 169, 171 f., 177, 179 – 181, 185 f., 189, 210, 224 f. Rozmital, Leo de 117 f., 137, 158, 226 sacred space 4, 6, 13 – 17, 19, 107, 113 f., 116, 138, 162, 201, 217 sacri monti 209 Saint-Antoine de Viennois (Dauphiné) 59 Saint-Brieuc, diocese of 54 Saint-Claude (Lorraine) 71, 86 Sainte-Anne d’Auray (Brittany) 7, 73 Sainte-Radegonde, Poitiers 29, 51, 62, 135, 170 Sainte-Reine, Flavigny (Burgundy) 1, 39, 52, 135, 176, 195, 198, 215 Saint-Fiacre, Brie. 52, 86 Saint-Hilaire, Poitiers 101 Saint-Hubert (Ardennes) 52, 115, 135, 198, 214 Saint-Méen (Brittany) 29, 37, 40 f., 52, 70, 73, 79, 85 f., 90 f., 100, 105, 115, 127, 134 f., 170, 199 Saint-Nicolas-du-Port (Lorraine) 59 Santiago, cathedral chapter 4, 13, 27 – 29, 37 – 39, 45 f., 51, 53 f., 57 – 61, 72, 81, 89, 101, 106 f., 119 f., 122, 124, 143 – 145, 147, 150, 154, 157, 159 f., 171, 181, 193, 196 f., 222, 224 – 226 Santo Domingo de Calzada, Spain 57, 107, 198 Scherpenheuvel 6 scrip, satchell 82, 182, 197, 219 Sens, France 16 f., 21 – 25, 37, 55, 60, 87, 101, 114, 117, 161, 190, 224 sermons see preaching Sixtus V, pope 11, 202 song, singing 93 f., 153 souvenirs 18 f., 127, 138, 163, 190 – 193, 197 – 202, 220 spiritual pilgrimage 8, 31, 203, 205 f., 208, 218 – 220, 226 staff, pilgrim 7, 68, 78, 80, 82 f., 94, 118, 121, 123, 169, 181 f., 193, 195, 197, 218 – 220 St Francis of Assisi 1, 8 St Martin of Tours 2, 3, 5, 29, 69, 132 – 134

246

Index

Toulouse 36, 57, 80, 84 f., 94, 97, 108, 175, 210, 222 f. Tours 2 f., 5, 15, 29, 61, 84, 86, 95, 124, 126, 133 – 135, 162, 220, 222 f., 225 Tridentine see Council of Trent Troyes 20, 36, 94, 222, 227 Tulle 78 Turner, Victor and Edith 14, 41, 44, 114, 164, 220, 223 Urban VIII, pope

8, 146

Verdelais, Notre-Dame de 48, 52, 80, 93, 127 f., 153, 176 votive object, ex voto 54, 68, 74, 78, 134, 140, 143, 156 ff, 164, 181 – 182, 200 vow 1, 4, 9, 34, 52 – 54, 57, 60, 64, 70 f., 74, 89, 124, 156, 159, 216, 226 Wraxall, William

1, 72, 194, 215, 227