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Drzazgowski, Kyla Helena

University of British Columbia

This dissertation explores the important but understudied medieval practice of imagined pilgrimage and four Middle English texts purportedly written by pilgrims who underwent physical journeys of their own. Recent historical and literary scholarship has helped to uncover how English monastic audiences engaged in imagined pilgrimage, which is the act of going on a holy journey in spirit rather than in body. However, to date, less work has been done to explore how secular English audiences turned to texts to undertake non-physical journeys. The focal point of medieval Christian pilgrimage, Jerusalem was largely out of reach for many medieval English men and women due to a variety of personal, political, and economic reasons. Imagined pilgrimage texts such as the ones discussed in this study fulfilled a need in readers for an alternative means to attain the same spiritual benefits that physical pilgrimage offered its participants. This dissertation explores four Middle English texts written in late medieval England: Sir John Mandeville’s Book of Marvels and Travels (14th century), William Wey’s Itineraries (15th century), Margery Kempe’s The Book of Margery Kempe (15th century), and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (14th century). I discuss the history of pilgrimage writing and the complex monastic and secular debates surrounding the shifting benefits, dangers, and definitions of physical and imagined holy travel, as well as the important role that the inclusion of practical information played in these four imaginative pilgrimage texts. In our world of increasing virtuality, where individuals are living their lives more and more online, rather than out in the “real world,” people are choosing to turn to a related practice—virtual pilgrimage—in order to fulfill their desires for pilgrimage; in doing so, they are continuing a practice that, as this dissertation will show, thrived in the late medieval world.

Text

2024-10-17

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/89432

English

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/