Age of Pilgrimage: The Medieval Journey to God by Jonathan Sumption

Age of Pilgrimage: The Medieval Journey to God Reviews

• 
  Nathanimal

  What happened in shrines all over Europe in medieval times makes the screaming girls of Beatlemania look like as prim and proper as a tea party. People died in that mad crush, howling, eating holy dirt and slivers of the true cross and guzzling wine washed in saint corpses, to the tumult of vigils and feast days with their jugglers and miracles and smoke, and a mosh pit right there in the basilica with crowd-surfing and everything. And there was all that wild business of the pilgrim roads, too, the bandits, the deceitful beggars, and the avaricious innkeepers (one of whom had 80+ murdered pilgrims in his shed) and the abbeys and orders competing with each other to see whose saints could do the biggest wonder and draw the biggest crowd.
  
  It was a very colorful, chaotic time, and this generously detailed, well-written book did it tremendous justice.
• 
  Betsy

  4.5 rounded up.
  
  I expect if this book was written today it would have a wider focus, given that the discipline has expanded to the Global Middle Ages instead of just Europe. Today such a work would include lengthy chapters on the hajj to Mecca, which really should be included anyway since large chunks of Spain were under Muslim control for nearly the entire time period covered in this book, and Islam is the only religion of the three that actually requires a pilgrimage. Not to mention that Jerusalem alone is a major pilgrimage site for more than one religion - how did Muslims make pilgrimages to Jerusalem, or even to Mecca, during the years of the Crusader kingdoms? Were the journeys to the Western Wall or Masada done by medieval Jews the way they might be today? Even within Christianity, did Eastern Christians make the journey to Rome? The journey to Jerusalem must have been easier, and Constantinople itself was largely ignored despite holding more relics than almost anywhere else.
  
  As with all else involving the Middle Ages, I ask again, where is the Byzantine Empire? Stop ignoring it!
  
  That said, what is covered is fascinating. I often think that my interest in medieval history is primarily because I unabashadly love how absolutely bonkers medieval Catholicism was, and in that respect this book did not disappoint. I have a degree in medieval history, which translates loosely into a degree in medieval Catholicism because you cannot get away from the Church during this period and I didn't know some of the more outlandish expressions of popular piety during these years.
  
  Nowhere else do you get people enthusiastically drinking wine that had cement from some saint's tomb mixed in it, and that was one of the less ridiculous expressions I found. As usual, most of early Catholicism had far too much to do with dead bodies, and if you think today's Catholic Church is messed up (which it is, don't get me wrong) at least they're no longer saying you have to drink water that had been used to wash a saint's mummified head to get a few years off your sentence in Purgatory.
  
  Pilgrimages being one of the few things that lasted throughout the entire thousand year period known as the Middle Ages, they do form a useful throughline to follow the development of Catholicism, from expressions of extreme piety by the laity in the early years to their local saints, to the more centralized long journeys to Santiago, Rome, Jerusalem or Canterbury, to the transition from local saints to the overwhelming focus on the Virgin Mary that popped up around the eleventh and twelfth centuries, back to more local shrines as so many people couldn't afford to make the long, dangerous journeys to major pilgrimage centers.
  
  It is no coincidence that today's most well-known pilgrimages, when they aren't to the traditional centers of Rome, Jerusalem or Santiago, are almost entirely to Marian shrines like Lourdes, Medjugore or Fatima, among many, many others. The veneration of the Virgin Mary, like much else in the Catholic Church, was popular first and only then sanctioned by the Church, until you get the situation today, where a church supposedly devoted to Jesus appears to anyone with eyes to like his mom better.
  
  The author makes a salient point in the danger of pilgrimages, from people being crushed by throngs of overexcited pilgrims, to the expense both on the pilgrims themselves and on the places that hosted often too-large crowds, and how this directly led to the sale of indulgences which became such a sticking point for the reformers of the sixteenth century. Like many things, the sale of indulgences started as a simple way to solve a problem - pay some money if you are physically incapable of making a giant pilgrimage to Rome - and ballooned out of proportion until it was completely corrupt. The other excellent point made was that as the Church centralized, it had less patience for enthusiastic displays of lay spirituality which in previous years, it would have absorbed easily, leading to the final break of the Reformation as the sixteenth century Church was totally unable to abide a popular uprising of the sort.
  
  I particularly enjoyed the later section on political saints, because it seemed to me very timely, given the way certain orange political figures are venerated by their supporters, which would be bizarre for any political figure even if they weren't utterly devoid of redeeming qualities to begin with. But it seems there was always that impulse, and perhaps the Church is owed some tiny amount of credit for insisting on waiting until the person is actually dead to start venerating them, and for eventually instituting an official vetting process before canonization so every random who died on Easter didn't gain a cult following (which was an actual example from the book). It's a low bar, but if you can't stop the impulse you may as well try to harness it and control it just a little.
  
  On a personal level, I really enjoyed whenever Margery Kempe is mentioned, because I could practically hear the author sighing in exasperation about her as he wrote. As someone who had to suffer through reading her autobiography, this seems to be how she was received everywhere, which probably had a lot to do with her habit of crying nonstop about Jesus and also telling you how much your deceased loved ones hate Purgatory, where they're stuck because you aren't praying for them enough. 0/10, can absolutely understand why her companions on pilgrimage left her on the side of the road.
  
  If you enjoy the Middle Ages, or the history of pilgrimages, or if you're looking for some minor explanation of why the Catholic Church is like that, this is a good start even if I would love to see someone update it for the more modern study of the medieval period.
• 
  Johnny

  Despite the dry title, this is a fascinating insight into the Medieval world of Christianity and held my attention through out.
  
  From the cult of relics, to the rise of pilgrimages and jubilees to raise money for skint Popes and crusades, it never loses focus and is chock-full of anecdote but also adroit interpretation.
  
  Pilgrimage according to Sumption seemed to offer escape because every spiritual ritual was done via the parish priest and Christians were not allowed to visit another church: "A surprisingly large number of pilgrims seem to have left their homes solely in order to deny their parish priest his monopoly over their spiritual welfare."
  
  Sumption gives the interesting origins of pilgrimae such as the habit of the pious Irish aimlessly wandering in pilgrimages across Western Europe in the seventh and eight centuries. "Wandering is an ineradicable habit of the Irish race" observed a ninth century monk of St Gall. The Irish essentially invented the pilgrimage as a penitent act which was later adopted by the Church. Fascinating still was the use of judicial penitent pilgrimage for crimes committed which was a recurring problems and according to Sumption not only "endangered the salvation of the sinner but "set loose upon the roads large numbers of dangerous criminals who terrorises peaceful travellers." Sumption quotes
  Jacques De Vitry who complained of the hordes of

  "wicked, impious, sacrilegious, thieves, robbers, murderers, parricides, perjurers, adulterers, traitors, corsairs, pirates, whoremongers, drunkard, minstrels, jugglers, and actors"

  who were unleashed on the Holy Land by the courts of Europe.
  
  And you would not easily be able to escape the criminal jugglers because "a long tradition of the the Church held that walking was the most virtuous method of travelling." And when you got to Rome for example you would have been surrounded by them.
  According to Sumption: "above all places, Rome was the destination of those 'nudi homines cum ferro' who plagued the roads in the time of Charlemagne, the convicted criminal who had been exiled by their communities and sent to wander across the face of the earth."
  
  But Rome had not always been the "general fountain of forgiveness" and the bishops tried to preserve their authority but by the end of the twelfth century Rome was pre-eminent. According to Sumption again:

  "For the remainder of the Middle Ages the prospect of confessing to an anonymous penitentiar and of being absolved from even the most enormous transgressions added considerably to the spiritual attractions of Rome."

  
  
  Pilgrimage as evidenced by the Jubilees to Rome which were called by multiple popes as an indulgence for the remission of sins were hugely popular (almost too popular for small medieval Rome). Even during the papal Schism the pilgrimage to the Jubilee in Rome was hard to resist even for those opposed to the decadent pope in residence there. **On a side issue, The Schism is a poorly neglected area in English and needs an historian so I nominate Sumption**
  
  Sumption also reveals that belief of thee indulgences that could be obtained from pilgrimage could release the dead from Purgatory which he says was "a cornerstone of late medieval piety, but its origins lay firmly in the past". In fact professional pilgrims existed particularly in Scandinavia who would go on pilgrimage on behalf of those who could not either because they were dead or incapacitated.
  
  And what about relics, which cropped up in churches across Christendom without any proof of provenance (the foreskin and umbilical chord of Christ for example which even
  Innocent III (Pope )(1198-1216) was sceptical of "were they too resurrected?"). Or the two heads of John the Baptist which rival churches claimed is all fascinating stuff. And despite Church scepticism it could not afford to dismiss the claims from devout Christians, especially when miracles occurred. Sumption states that "the extraordinary repetitiveness and lack of originality" of these miracles that were collected by each church was down to the model account of St Martin by Sulpicius Severus.
  
  In the sudden appearance of obscure shrines, a marked characteristic of the late Middle Ages in its devotion to the cult of saints Sumption lays some of the blame on women. Who were often barred from entry, especially Benedictine sanctuaries for the usual prejudiced reasons, or for fear of them being trampled (a common enough occurrence was a stampede with many deaths and injuries) and which Sumption finds favour in.
  
  The Crusades do not dominate his book as they could have done, but Sumption makes clear that the liberation of the Holy Land and the pilgrimage indulgence which was obtained by going on crusade was significant in the development of pilgrimage as a whole. It was also the most expensive of all. "Good intentions, stout heart, ready tongue, and fat purse" were needed according to Greffin Affagart. Costs, guide books, what a pilgrim would wear and see once they arrived are all covered in a fascinating chapter, "The Journey".
  
  I found a number of aspects of Medieval Christianity in Western Europe emerge which really fascinated me: A number I'll include here:
  
  The attitude of the Church towards illness was reflected in edicts against "doctors" whose inadequate knowledge often harmed patients and the insistence on spiritual healing with a priest instead because it was thought illness was a symptom of sin. This is fascinating stuff - as is a common fear of the dark in this period.
  
  Self flagellation became a common spiritual practice in the western Church in the tenth and eleventh century and was still practised in private in the late Middle Ages, particularly by the Carthusians. But when it became thousands of lay people in squares across Italian cities for example and became independent expressions of hysterical enthusiasm it was stamped out - mass movements raised suspicions. Less intimidating but all the more alarming were spontaneous children's pilgrimages in this period, literally thousands of children set out from Germany and France to shrines such as St Michel. What is fascinating is the suspicions of others that this was merely to escape hard labouring and the field; an understandably impulse.
  
  According to Sumption, Pilgrimage and the indulgences that abounded as a result were exactly what most uneducated simple people wanted: the ritual purgation of sin:

  Pilgrimage, like almsgiving, had begun as an accessory to the moral teaching of the Church, and ended as an alternative. In extreme cases it could be regarded as a licence to sin.

  
  
  The book was written in the 1970s and is likely to be improved by the addition of more recent scholarship if it was ever updated (by how much it is not for me to say). But the scholarship on show may negate this:
  Jonathan Sumption (who is now one of the judges in the Supreme Court of England and the first to be appointed without having been a judge) displays an impressive command of multiple primary sources in multiple languages.
  
  I cannot recommend this book enough.
• 
  Roger

  A well written and interesting book, Pilgrimage gives us a view of the medieval Church that is as eye-opening as it is informative. It is worth quoting Sumption from early in this work - "But to make an assessment of mediaeval religion solely on the basis of the last hundred and fifty years of its history is a seriously misleading procedure...". Indeed based on current life, and even current Church practice, medieval religious practices seem bizarre and almost fraudulent at times. Based on the logic of the times though, they begin to make sense.
  
  Sumption uses the early part of his work to explore and discuss the base that the Medieval Church was working from, which drove the huge pilgrimage activity of the times. He first talks about relics - how changes in the laws of the church in the early Middle Ages, which decreed that every Church had to have a relic in order to be consecrated, and that allowed relics to be "parted out" - whole bodies of Saints could be dismembered into parts - created the conditions for fraudulent relics to be peddled, and for Churches to compete with each other for the "best" or "authentic" relics which would put them higher in the pecking order for pilgrimages. Sumption also notes that many ecclesiastics were well aware of the problems in the requirement for and trade of relics, but felt that the tangible and human face that Saints and relics brought to the liturgy was worth the risk. The tangible nature of relics, and the enthusiastic espousal of the miracles they brought about, helped the Church keep and gather believers in what was an age of completely uneducated masses. The miracles for which they were responsible were also quite different from today, although it could be argued they had the same basis - some unexplained benefit to the recipient. Before the Renaissance there was much that was unexplained and unknown about the World, so that many things that were then portrayed as miracles can now be explained as natural, with our increased knowledge. Sumption points out that even things such as diet led to miracles being declared, with malnutrition common in Winter, which a pilgrimage to a shrine that might have more food, or even waiting until Spring would alleviate, with the result being laid at the feet of the appropriate Saint. Even the more sophisticated people of the time who could reason out some of these things still could go along with a miraculous explanation, as philosophically everyone believed that all things came from God, therefore all good things were down to him, and not natural or man-made forces.
  
  Pilgrimage was also used in the Middle Ages as a punishment, both self-inflicted and imposed. Many people who had sinned believed that they could only be freed from sin by visiting a pilgrimage site, and in fact sometimes visited many until they got it right. France in particular had a history of sending offenders on a pilgrimage in payment for their crimes, although this morphed over time into something that could be avoided by payment of a fine.
  
  What of the sites of pilgrimage? Sumption counters what might be our modern interpretation of why a Church or Abbey sought to be a site of pilgrimage - there actually wasn't a lot of money in it initially. Elaborately be-jewelled reliquaries were often melted down, as the Church used the gold and jewels as its "savings account" and often had to access it to pay ransoms or debts. The Churches requirement to look after pilgrims often meant that perversely the more pilgrims, the bigger the cost - the shrine of Thomas Beckett in Canterbury actually lost more money in jubilee years than other years. Even the ability to issue indulgences didn't help much, as Rome took a lot of that revenue. Why do it then? - in a word, prestige. Churches moved up the hierarchy of importance depending on the "power" of their relics and the number of pilgrims and miracles they had. Sumption point out that Santiago became a Metropolitan Church purely on the basis of its power as the resting place of St. James.
  
  In what might be the medieval equivalent of Flash Mobs, many sites of pilgrimage bloomed, flowered all to briefly and died - some only lasted a matter of weeks. Even major shrines such as that of Thomas at Canterbury saw large ebbs and flows in the number of pilgrims attending the shrine. Sometimes the decline of a pilgrimage site had little to do with the Church itself - St. Gilles in Provence declined once pilgrims, owing to war and banditry, no longer passed it on the way to the larger pilgrimage destination of Santiago.
  
  Sumption explains the journey that pilgrims undertook, where they were routinely fleeced of their gold and sometimes lost their life, and how saintliness and sobriety were not necessarily in the front of pilgrim's minds. The business that grew out of pilgrimage gathered speed up until the 1300s, which was the great age of pilgrims. Venetian entrepreneurs organised fleets to take pilgrims to the Holy Land, which sometimes ended in ruin for the organisers, owing to the changing nature of taxation in the Middle East. Rome, the other bastion of early Christianity, did its best to usurp Jerusalem's place as the centre of pilgrimage, with an ever increasing array of indulgences to be gained by visiting the Eternal City and the appropriate Churches. The claims for the powers of various Churches grew and grew, and these were often driven by forces external to the hierarchy of the Church, as each place tried to grab a piece of what (by the 1300s) was become a more lucrative pie.
  
  The final section of the book moves into the corruption of the ideal of pilgrimage - the actual journey became almost a touristic event, and the explosion of indulgences offered turned pilgrims into people who were ticking off locations and events to increase their stocks in Heaven, rather than making a true penitential journey. As successive Popes used the power of granting indulgences to make money, the pilgrimage moved from the sublime to the ridiculous, with thousands of years of remission available to the astute pilgrim. This was the beginning of the end for the great era of pilgrimage, as the next logical step was the ability to purchase the indulgence without going on the journey. Combined with the increasingly fragile political situation in both Europe and the Middle East, the great pilgrimages became a less attractive option.
  
  This led to the great explosion in Marian pilgrimages, an upwelling driven by the poorer sections of society. These people, who couldn't afford to go to a major shrine, would travel locally to a miraculous statue of Mary. Many of these local shrines were frowned on by the Church, but that didn't stop their popularity.
  
  The Reformation dealt a death blow to the pilgrimage in Northern Europe, which lasted until a revival in the seventeenth century, which is beyond this book's scope.
  
  Pilgrimage is a fascinating insight into Medieval society and the Church - well worth a read if you're interested in that sort of stuff.
  
  Check out my other reviews at
  http://aviewoverthebell.blogspot.com.au/
• 
  Nicholas Najjar

  A thorough study of Medieval Christianity viewed through the lens of pilgrimage. At times difficult to slog through due to the incredibly detailed and specific style of Lord Sumption but still very informative and interesting.
  
  The act of pilgrimage, once viewed as an integral part of the Christian life (despite it being only an accessory to official Christian morality), has now fallen to the wayside. The 15th and 16th centuries’ reforms laid waste to the notions of pilgrimages and indulgences. Reduced to nothing more than superstitions and corrupt practices, and oft misunderstood ever since in the minds of the “reformed” masses.
  
  Penance in the modern Christian era is as simple as loving Jesus and everything being forgotten. Those who journeyed across most of the known world to Rome, Santiago, or the Holy Land had a much harder time receiving penance it would seem.
  
  Shrines, relics, miracles, and pilgrimages. All subjects Lord Sumption spends considerable amounts of time discussing which have become afterthoughts for many modern “Christians”. Mega churches and televangelism have taken their place in the world. Tik-Tok pastors and the screaming preacher at your nearest college campus have filled the void where Popes and Kings once nobly defended the Christian faith.
  
  Reformed. Enlightened. Unshackled from the burden Catholic corruption and evil. Liberated from the institution of Catholicism and set free into the amorphous and fractured world of reformed Christianity.
  
  And yet, the peasants and pilgrims of the Middle Ages are looked down up as the foolish, superstitious people who are so deserving of pity from our modern scientific minds. This notion will persist so long as modern “academics” would like it to. Whatever they may say, it cannot be denied that the peoples of the Middle Ages were far more spiritually enriched and had a deeper connection with their local community and parish than those of the modern Christian age.
• 
  Alexandra Smithie

  Good book for its instructional value, but the tone is ridiculous and presumptuous. Acting like all medieval people were incredibly primitive. I don’t like historians like this.
• 
  Sarah

  I enjoyed many of the historical aspects of this books. Some of the anecdotes were well told, and it was in general easy to read. The author seemed to move around in time a lot, sometimes within the same paragraph. In many instances he took care to describe the changes pilgrimage underwent through the middle ages, but then he would describe one phenomenon with examples from both the 12th and 15th centuries.
• 
  Katrinka

  Very interesting; the insanity just kept snowballing.
• 
  Jose Garrido

  Detalhado e interessantíssimo trabalho de investigação histórica sobre o fenómeno da peregrinação no contexto da religião na idade média.
• 
  Metal Nyankos

  This is such a fantastic book; so fantastic that ever since I finished reading it (more than a week ago) I have been agonizing over how exactly to write a review of it. This book was illuminating and one I imagine I will revisit again, whether for research purposes or just for the pleasure of immersing myself in Sumption's prose and knack for storytelling. Sumption writes in a clear, lucid style. He brings the world of pilgrimages to life in such a way that is both satisfying and edifying to the reader. This book has the feel of being essential to anyone desiring to understand or 'come to grips' with the medieval world.
• 
  Simon Mcleish

  Originally published on my blog
  here in September 2000.
  
  A fascinating study of the defining feature of the Middle Ages, its devout Catholicism, Pilgrimage views its subject through the aspect of it which provides the book's title. There are deliberate limitations to keep the book within manageable bounds - concentration on the period between 1100 and 1500, an emphasis on France and England rather than Germany, and interest in popular religious belief rather than the abstract theological arguments of scholars. Some important parts of medieval religion are sketchily covered as a result, though these are subjects easily accessible in more general histories of the period: the development of monasticism; the relationship between the papacy and Holy Roman Emperor (and, more generally, between religious and secular authority); the crusades (except in relation to religious enthusiasm and the invention of indulgences, both topics of great relevance to the history of pilgrimage in the later Middle Ages).
  
  The importance of pilgrimage is really that it is probably the principal distinguishing feature of (popular) Western Christianity in this period. Its development and debasement - from a penance for serious sin to tourism and an indulgence to be gained by visiting particular shrines to obtain early release from Purgatory to an indulgence gained by cash payment - show much of the character of medieval belief as it developed and fed into the reaction against its excesses of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. (The Reformation is not an important a theme in the book as it perhaps could be, and relating what Sumption says to the ideas of Luther, Calvin and other reformers is an interesting exercise for a reader with some knowledge of developments in the sixteenth century.)
  
  Pilgrimage is also one of the areas in which it is possible to gain an insight into normally unrecorded, popular ideas about Christianity as opposed to those of the theological schools. It is of course a relative extreme of enthusiasm - a lot of the evidence for the beliefs of the common people is gained through official condemnation of its excesses - and the picture it points to is not particularly surprising - a greatly simplified and superstitious version of the intellectual subtleties of the church's official views - but it is of great interest none the less.