The purpose of this book is to correct an imprecise cliché about the history of pilgrimage in Europe, to wit: the idea that medieval Europe's dense web of religious itineraries declined during the age of discovery and Reformation and only resurfaced in modified form amid the nostalgia of the Romantic era. Although long-distance pilgrimage activity decreased between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, F. Thomas Noonan sets out to demonstrate that the iter durum, especially to the Holy Land, remained a meaningful literary reference in early modern travel culture. The author, a specialist in rare books at the Library of Congress, considers the emergence of printing in the fifteenth century to be decisive in this process. Between roughly 1500 and 1800, pilgrimage evolved from liturgical act to literary genre and, in a related process, from collective rite to individual spiritual quest. This culminated with François Auguste René de Chateaubriand's celebrated travelogue of a journey from Paris to Jerusalem, published in 1811. According to Noonan's interpretation, Chateaubriand's work completed the long transformation of literary pilgrimage from a form of travel narrative into a memoir, a voyage of self-discovery.
Several historical developments conspired against pilgrimage during the early modern period. The practice came under attack during the Reformation era as an act of corruption and false piety, while war impeded travel within Europe, a Muslim empire controlled the sea-lanes to the Holy Land, and missionary travel began to follow patterns of discovery and settlement outside of Europe. Noonan argues that the result was not the end of pilgrimage, but its “modernization,” by which he appears to mean its accession to print and its adaptation to post-Reformation and post-Columbian ideals. Exploration did not replace religious travel, but rather grew from it and reflected back onto it. Columbus once depicted his Atlantic voyages as part of a larger goal of capturing Jerusalem, though the author's interpretation of this statement as “a prelude and means to a crusading pilgrimage” (53) seems overdrawn. Nevertheless, several early modern pilgrimage diarists reasonably pointed out that the sense of crusade and missionary zeal predominant in the age of discovery had grown out of the two central motives of medieval pilgrimage.
Noonan gives an impressive tour of this literature, guiding the reader through scores of examples of pilgrimage diaries and treatises. The progression is loosely chronological, moving from the early printing of medieval pilgrims’ chronicles to a selection of sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century travelers who recorded their experiences fully aware of the changing position of pilgrimage in European culture. Noonan identifies an evolution “away from the phenomenal to the noumenal” (157): the later examples were most concerned with the subjective experience of travel and less inclined than their predecessors to describe or give news about the current state of the pilgrimage route. As reportage, literary pilgrimage simply could not compete with the correspondence of far-flung explorers and missionaries. Pilgrimages by definition cover the same ground over and over again, while travel increasingly implied contact with the unknown and exotic. Pilgrimage diarists tried to overcome this disadvantage by depicting their travels as a formative, cultivating experience, a kind of forerunner to the Bildungsreise of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie.
This thesis on the whole is persuasive, though it is also vulnerable to several common pitfalls of cultural history. Singular focus on literary sources carries inherent weaknesses that the author leaves largely unqualified. Noonan's major task is to establish the documents’ relationship to one another rather than to their audience, but he also presumes to make a broader argument about the history of travel in the early modern period. The extent of the historiographical discussion does not match the ambitiousness of this goal. Nonreligious travel writing blossomed in this period as well, not only from overseas adventurers, but also from continental Grand Tourists, who have been the subject of numerous studies. Moreover, literature was only one, albeit an instructive one, of several threads connecting medieval and modern pilgrimage. Philippe Boutry, a French early modernist who has advanced a similar thesis about the evolution of pilgrimage from a liturgical act to a holistic travel experience, has deployed elite literary sources as indicators, however flawed, of the ordinary pilgrim's motives and attitudes. It is also surprising that more attention is not given to Rome and Santiago de Compostela—which appear mainly as early modern alternatives to Jerusalem rather than important medieval destinations in their own right—and to the proliferation of regional pilgrimage centers in the early modern period. Readers also might be frustrated by prose that often strives for flair at the expense of clarity, and the author's exuberant use of foreign phrases is occasionally marred by incorrect spellings and diacritics.
Shortcomings aside, this book is likely to make readers think deeply and in novel ways about the connection between pilgrimage, travel, and even modern tourism. It yields significant insights into the relationships between religion, culture, place, and movement and overall is an ambitious and worthy contribution to the history of travel and of early modern European culture.
