The previous chapters have attempted to reconnect and rearticulate medieval pilgrimage with the world in and through which it took place. I now turn to the question which undergirds all pilgrimage studies: what made pilgrimage special? The Turners, as discussed in the first chapter, offered the seductive answer of communitas, yet most social scientists now would balk at the idea of trying to reduce a complex and culturally conditioned practice down to some sort of universally achievable and replicable ideal. In the previous chapters, I have offered several channels through which medieval pilgrimage was rendered immediately significant in its articulation with regional or supra-regional politics and ecclesiological trends. This reconnects medieval pilgrimage with the medieval world, rather than artificially disconnecting it as a unit of study. We simply cannot understand such religious movements without understanding the society in which they occurred. Yet we should never lose sight of the fundamentally inspirational qualities of pilgrimage.

My argument in this chapter is that pilgrimage attained its power through “relationality,” which is the ways in which individuals and groups expressed, realized, and remembered their connection to the sacred site. This encompasses both the stories, behaviours, and objects which pilgrims brought to, acted out, and took from the site, and those impressed upon pilgrims by the custodians and patrons of the site. To attempt a generalized picture of the medieval experience at pilgrimage sites would be a fool's errand, doomed to failure. Each site was unique, its history and development was specific to it, its customs, decoration, resident community, relationship with the society around it, and the pilgrims it drew were all products of its own environment. There were of course broad connections between types of site and regional similarities, but these must be argued on the merits of the evidence of each site.