The Afterword probes the afterlife of the practices of revivalism and mythologization that remade the sixteenth-century cityscape. Drawing on letters, pamphlets, and printed books that bound Palermo to Mexico, it traces the global exportation of the local cult of Saint Rosalia, a twelfth-century Norman noblewoman who eschewed her royal birthright in favor of the life of an ascetic. Rosalia’s instrumentalization in practices of colonial conversion by Jesuit missionaries dispatched to the Mexican hinterland in the early eighteenth century reveals not simply the persistence of Palermo’s past but its implication in the infrastructures of power that globalized the early modern world.

The Coda revisits the book’s principal arguments about theatrical profanation while carrying these claims forward to the twentieth-century stage. It centers on Lee Breuer’s late opus La Divina Caricatura (2013), a theatrical adaptation of Dante’s Divine Comedy performed as a musical featuring Bunraku-style puppets. Breuer’s production metabolizes Dante’s theology and charges it with elements of the Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata as well as other world religious traditions, ostentatiously defiling sacred iconography. La Divina Caricatura instantiates the profaning theater discussed across the book, while moving beyond my twentieth-century case studies to imagine the life of the artist as a profane form of pilgrimage. This work affirms that religious narratives and practices in the theater do work as theater, producing effects on the spectator that develop on essentially artistic terms. It ends with a short account of the author’s own religious positionality.

Although the contribution of the Italian city communes to the crusades in the East was never on the same scale as the collective efforts of transalpine Europe, the commitment of the population of northern Italy to the crusade was similar to the rest of the Christian West. Men from Lombardy and Tuscany took the cross, fought in the East, raised funds, supported and joined the crusading Military Orders, served as legates, wrote about the crusades and created numerous churches and shrines dedicated to the Holy Sepulchre. After the Christians lost the Holy Land in 1291, north Italians were among the foremost planners of new crusade initiatives, and the ethos of crusading was kept vividly alive in the writing of some of the greatest literary figures of the Middle Ages and Renaissance such as Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75), and Torquato Tasso (1544–95).

A man to whom God grants that he may return will be greatly honoured in this world. Whoever has loved well in his country should preserve the memory of it wherever he goes. And may God allow me to enjoy the best lady, so that I might find her in life and health, when God has completed his business!

The concept of crusading is inextricably linked with men, both in medieval sources and in modern imaginations. The quote above, from an anonymous twelfth-century Anglo-Norman crusade recruitment song, extols the benefits gained by a returning crusader. It links crusading with the manly pursuit of honour, encouraging men to take the cross as a devotional sacrifice, leaving behind women and love. Returning to ‘the best lady’ was the crusader’s reward for completing ‘God’s business’. The idea that crusades were for men, and not for women, was probably widespread at the end of the twelfth century. Crusading had been conceived of and promoted by the medieval Church as a manly endeavour since the preaching of the First Crusade.

At a diet in Mainz in January 1103 the German emperor Henry IV (r. 1056–1105) announced his intention to undertake a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. His public proclamation was accompanied by a celebratory mass during which the bishop of Würzburg delivered a sermon emphasising the penitential nature of Henry’s journey. The temporal proximity to the First Crusade and the public ceremonial nature of the episode suggest the bishop aimed to situate Henry’s pilgrimage in the orbit of the nascent crusading movement. A few months later Henry wrote a letter to his godfather, Abbot Hugh of Cluny, revealing a main objective in undertaking the trip. Henry planned to visit the places where Christ had lived, and he hoped this act of public penance would help reach a permanent settlement with the papacy over the Investiture Contest. Though scholars have been aware for some time of the resounding impact of the First Crusade on nearly all facets of medieval society, it is worth underscoring the significance of the German emperor – no great supporter of the reforming popes – floating the idea of associating himself with an inherently papal-centric institution as a means of achieving his political agenda.

The First Crusade was a primordial event, inaugurating a movement that lasted for at least seven centuries. There was no medieval precedent for an army – or rather a cluster of armed contingents accompanied by many non-combatants – marching, with barely any logistical support, into Asia. Breaking almost every generally accepted code of military practice, the crusaders laid siege to cities in spite of the threat posed by armies of relief, which they defeated on five separate occasions, and in the later stages they chose to by-pass strongholds that could have obstructed the passage of their own reinforcements. Within a year of crossing into Asia almost all their horses and pack animals were dead. After two years, the number of men and women in the army had been reduced by over 50 per cent. Nevertheless, in July 1099 they took the city of Jerusalem by assault after five weeks’ of siege. They inspired a cycle of epic chansons de geste and their achievement was etched into the collective memory of Western Christians.

When the Islamic Umayyad state, which had dominated the Iberian Peninsula for three centuries, unexpectedly imploded shortly after the millennium, it brought about a dramatic shift in the regional balance of power. Thereafter, the states of the Christian North – León, Castile, Navarre, Aragon–Catalonia and Portugal – exploited Muslim political divisions and made a series of spasmodic territorial incursions southwards. As a result, major cities such as Toledo (1085), Zaragoza (1118), Lisbon (1147), Córdoba (1236), Valencia (1238) and Seville (1248) were brought under Christian authority. By c. 1250, the Nasrid state of Granada was the only significant Islamic centre of power remaining. Whether these wars were the product of pragmatic geopolitical calculation on the Christian side, or were driven by a long-standing ideology of Reconquista (Reconquest) – which aspired to the complete recovery of the peninsula from Muslim rule (Map 13.1) – has been much debated.

The Holy Land, conceived of as the patrimony of Christ, was the defining centre of crusade ideology. In an age when the cultic power of the physical locations connected with saints and events was flourishing, the potency of the land in which Jesus himself lived and died was bound to surpass all other sacred destinations. In the words of Guibert of Nogent: ‘If you think that you ought to take great pains to make a pilgrimage to the graves of the apostles or to the shrines of other saints, what expense of spirit can you refuse in order to rescue and make pilgrimage to the cross, the blood and the sepulchre?’

This chapter explores the practices and economies of pilgrimage within the Byzantine cultural sphere. The development of Christian pilgrimage sites in the early Byzantine period contributed to the consolidation of Christianity by offering performative spaces for forming and asserting Christian identity. Attention in the first half is given to the origins of Christian pilgrimage, travel economies and the intersections between religious groups within the ritual spaces of pilgrimage sites, along with a brief survey of scholarly approaches to the phenomenon. The second half of the chapter offers two ‘multi-religious’ sites, the Oak of Mamre and the Baths of Ḥammat Gader, as case studies to further explore pilgrimage centres as locations that facilitated experimentation and readjustment in religious identification. Material and literary evidence suggest that pilgrimage activities at these two sites were not simply expressions of Byzantine piety but were instrumental in transforming and maintaining cultural identifications.

The essay explores pilgrimage to the sanctuary of Dodona, in Epirus, through a phenomenological lens, aiming to reconstruct the experience of ancient pilgrims. The study highlights the significance of landscape, movement, and motivation, on the basis that Dodona’s natural features and architectural layout deeply influenced pilgrims’ perceptions. The phenomenological approach draws on landscape archaeology, analyzing human interaction with sacred spaces. The analysis examines not only motivations behind oracular activity, but also other purposes, such as attending the Naia festival, and emphasizes the interplay of visibility and movement as pilgrims approached the sanctuary. Although reconstructing individual experiences is challenging, common patterns in collective behavior, such as rituals, processions, and religious practices, offer insights into the ancient pilgrimage experience. In short, the study uses literary, epigraphic, and material evidence to discuss how Dodona’s sacred landscape shaped its visitors’ religious and emotional experiences, contributing to a broader understanding of Greek pilgrimage traditions.

Religion is central to Seamus Heaney’s work. Alongside his preoccupations with Catholic and Celtic belief, ancient Greek and Roman religions are significant in Heaney’s methodological palette, in which ‘low intensity’ allusions to aspects of religious culture can inform operations of poetry and ritual. Greek and Roman culture provides Heaney with a repository of spirit-guide figures, symbolic characters such as Heracles and Tiresias, forms and tropes, including funerary rituals, burial, pilgrimage, and katabasis, and entire works which the poet reimagined, such as Sophocles’s Philoctetes and Euripides’s Antigone, in which civic and religious duties intersect in ways germane to the poet’s reflections on his own time.

Chapter 5 brings together two entirely remote and distinct religious systems: the Vineyard Evangelical Church in the United States and the pilgrim worshipers of Krishna in Vrindavan, India. In both cases, religious actors report sensory experiences of God: auditory in the United States and visual in India. The chapter provides a systemic explanation for these reports, considering them as responses to a profound dissonance in systems of faith among committed adherents to a personal God. The chapter also examines psychological theories such as porosity, absorption, decentering, and other mechanisms for altering states of consciousness toward sensory experiences of the divine.

Catholics continued to make pilgrimages, near and far, during the early modern period, despite the challenges of the Reformation. Drawing on examples from Western Europe and beyond, this chapter follows pilgrims on their quests for healing, penitence, and spiritual growth and demonstrates that shrines and saints continued to act as focal points for devotion.

The clergy were important to the crown because they were (compared with today) very numerous – historians have described the country as ‘swarming with clerics’ and their ‘vast numbers’ as ‘one of the surprises of medieval history’; collectively they were very rich, owning perhaps 20–30 per cent of England’s landed wealth; many had skills which few laymen possessed; and, most importantly, they could, through their performance of religious ritual, send souls to paradise or perdition – hell – in the everlasting world to come. Religion was the way that medieval people made sense of the world; it was not an optional extra in life but affected all aspects of society. Everyone was a church member.

Many late medieval travellers left us extensive accounts about their experiences, but they often do not differ from each other in significant ways, commonly because they copied from previous sources and followed the same routes, such as coming from Germany, crossing the Alps down to Venice, from there taking the ship traveling along the coast of the Adriatic Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean, to reach the Holy Land. German merchants who travelled south to reach the Italian markets were all required to stay in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice. Those who travelled north, often members of the Hanseatic League, found necessary trading centres in the various harbour cities along the coastlines of the Scandinavian cities, the British Isles, and Russia. In a way, we have thus to perceive German medieval travellers as being part of a mass European movement. The motifs for travels were commonly shared: religious desires, economic interests, diplomatic purposes, intellectual curiosity (learning), and professional needs.

The joint centre of this book is Europe and the Middle East, because the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries CE marked what I would call an era of global contact. It was during this time that a series of interlocking conflicts enmeshing the Christian and Islamic civilisations that started with the conquest of Iberia in the eighth century and continued through the Crusades to the Ottoman wars of the early modern period shaped and expanded both Europe and the Middle East. At the same time, Europe and the Middle East explored and expanded into Asia, Africa, and eventually North America. I combine Europe and the Middle East into one cultural entity because for all their differences, the longue durée stresses the shared logocentric tradition of the Abrahamic faiths, the common heritage in science and philosophy, and the centuries of interwoven experiences, often painful and violent, but just as often culturally enriching and mutually beneficial. And while the political entities of medieval Europe play a more significant role in structuring this book than other areas, there are attempts to balance this by foregrounding the role of literatures and writers from other parts of the world.