Journal articles on the topic 'Christian pilgrims and pilgrimages – England'

This article examines the Marian shrines of Walsingham (England) and Meryem Ana (Turkey). Walsingham was a popular pilgrimage site until the Reformation, when Catholic sacred places were disestablished or destroyed by Protestants. Meryem Ana is linked to Walsingham, in that both shrines feature healing springs and devotion to the cult of the “Holy House” of the Virgin Mary. Walsingham is now home to multi-faith pilgrimages, New Age seekers and secular tourists. Meryem Ana is a rare Christian shrine in Islamic Turkey, where mass tourists rub shoulders with devout Christians supporting the small Greek Catholic community in residence. This article emerged from the experience of walking the Walsingham Way, a modern route based on the medieval pilgrimage in 2012, and visiting Meryem Ana in 2015 while making a different pilgrimage, that of an Australian attending the centenary of the Gallipoli landings. Both shrines are marketed through strategies of history and heritage, making visiting them more than simply tourism. Both sites offer a constructed experience that references the Middle Ages and Christianity, bringing modern tourism in an increasingly secular world into conversation with ancient and medieval pilgrimage and the religious past.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with pilgrims on pilgrimages from England to the Marian shrine of Lourdes, this article focuses on the experience of serial pilgrims, those who have made the journey to Lourdes repeatedly for several years. Since the first organized pilgrimage from England to Lourdes in 1883, the Marian apparition site has been the premier destination for English Catholic pilgrims, with several diocesan pilgrimages, religious travel companies, and charitable organizations facilitating the journey each year. I argue that for many serial pilgrims, Lourdes constitutes a “home away from home,” a place that has become intimately familiar, safe, and sacred over several pilgrimages. For young pilgrims particularly, those “raised in Lourdes,” it is a formative site that is integral to their religious identity and sense of belonging. By exploring the rich narratives of serial pilgrims, I highlight the fluid boundaries between perceptions of home and destination within the context of contemporary pilgrimage.

The article begins with an analysis of the relation between space, time and pilgrimage within “various strata and social classes”. From these considerations there first and foremost derives a clear division between on the one hand rural pilgrimage, linked to production from the land, and therefore of a religious nature, and on the other urban pilgrimage, that of merchants related with manufacture, and therefore of a lay nature. There is also a third case, that of judicial pilgrimage, which was particularly common in 14th century Flanders. Secondly, the space is geographically and culturally defined as Mediterranean, determined by the universal character of the Christian religion. Finally, the author deals with the unity of the “Christian space” over the centuries and its repercussion on pilgrimages from the 11th century onwards, when conflict with the Moors and the defence of the unity of the church gave rise to the idea of holy war. During this period the insecurity of the land and sea routes leading to the pilgrim destinations led to the birth of the monastic military orders, with the appearance for the first time of the monacus-miles and the crusader, a phenomenon analysed in the texts by William of Tyre, in Bernard of Clairvaux’s Liber ad milites Templi, and in the Chanson de Roland.

In this article, I identify the Christian “hajj” to Jerusalem as an important Ottoman sociocultural phenomenon. I argue that by the nineteenth century the Balkan Eastern Orthodox communities in the Ottoman empire had restructured and reinterpreted their Holy Land pilgrimages to mirror the Muslim hajj to Mecca. As a result, the ritual trip to Jerusalem was transformed into a mechanism for upward social mobility and communal empowerment. By exploring the structural and functional similarities between the Muslim and the Christian hajj, this article contributes to studies of Muslim-Christian interactions outside “the clash of civilizations” paradigm. It also reveals striking distinctions between the Balkan Christian hajjis and the Russian palomniki, calling into question the influential scholarly assumption of Eastern Orthodox practices' homogeneity, an assumption that stands largely uncontested in the field of Slavic studies.

Drawing on auto-ethnographic descriptions from four decades of my own work as a Jewish guide for Christian Holy Land pilgrims, I examine how overlapping faiths are expressed in guide–group exchanges at Biblical sites on Evangelical pilgrimages. I outline several faith interactions: Between reading the Bible as an affirmation of Christian faith or as a legitimation of Israeli heritage, between commitments to missionary Evangelical Christianity and to Judaism, between Evangelical practice and those of other Christian groups at holy sites, and between faith-based certainties and scientific skepticism. These encounters are both limited and enabled by the frames of the pilgrimage: The environmental bubble of the guided tour, the Christian orientations and activities in the itinerary, and the power relations of hosts and guests. Yet, unplanned encounters with religious others in the charged Biblical landscape offer new opportunities for reflection on previously held truths and commitments. I conclude by suggesting that Holy Land guided pilgrimages may broaden religious horizons by offering an interreligious model of faith experience based on encounters with the other.

The growth in Catholic pilgrimage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is widely acknowledged, but little attention has been paid to how and why many of the mass pilgrimages of the era began. This article will assess the contribution made by the Guild of Our Lady of Ransom to the growth of Catholic pilgrimage. After the Guild’s foundation in 1887, its leadership revived or restored pilgrimages to pre- and post-Reformation sites, and coordinated the movement of thousands of pilgrims across the country. This article offers an examination of how and why Guild leaders chose particular locations in the context of Marian Revivalism, papal interest in the English martyrs, defence of the Catholic faith, and late-nineteenth century medievalism. It argues that the Guild was pivotal in establishing some of England’s most famous post-Reformation pilgrimages. In doing so, it situates the work of the Guild in late nineteenth and early twentieth century religiosity, and demonstrates the pivotal nature of its work in establishing, developing, organising, and promoting some of the most important post-Reformation Catholic pilgrimages in Britain.

The era of the Crusades was also the era of pilgrims and pilgrimages to Jeru­salem. The Russian Orthodox world did not accept the idea of the Crusades and did not consider the Western European crusaders to be pilgrims. However, Russian people also sought to make pilgrimages, the purpose of which they saw in personal repentance and worship of the Lord. Visiting the Christian relics of Cyprus was desirable for pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem. Based on the method of content analysis of a whole complex of the writings of Russian pil­grims, as well as the works of Cypriot, Byzantine, Arab and Russian chroniclers, the author explores the history of travels and pilgrimages of Russian people to Cyprus in the 12th–18th centuries, the origins of the Russian-Cypriot reli­gious, inter-cultural and political relationships, in addition to the dynamics of their development from the first contacts in the Middle Ages to the establish­ment of permanent diplomatic and political relations between the two coun­tries in the Early Modern Age. Starting with the 17th century, Russian-Cypriot relationships were developing in three fields: 1) Russians in Cyprus; 2) Cypri­ots in Russia; 3) knowledge of Cyprus and interest in Cyprus in Russia. Cyp­riots appeared in Russia (at the court of the Russian tsars) at the beginning of the 17th century. We know of constant correspondence and the exchange of embassies between the Russian tsars and the hierarchs of the Cypriot Ortho­dox Church that took place in the 17th–18th centuries. The presence of Cypri­ots in Russia, the acquisition of information, the study of Cypriot literature, and translations of some Cypriot writings into Russian all promoted interactions on both political and cultural levels. This article emphasizes the important histori­cal, cultural, diplomatic and political functions of the pilgrimages.

This article deals with Christian Evangelical Zionist pilgrimages, especially focusing on those from the group of John Hagee, pastor and founder of the Cornerstone Church, and from the lobbyist group Christians United for Israel. Pilgrims from this organization join gatherings which honor and defend Israel, causing the participant to progress from being a simple believer to being a pro-Israel activist. The methodology is based on field studies and interviews with this group.

The transformations after 1989 mark the beginning of a new period in the development of the religious in Bulgaria. This paper focuses on the religious segment of sacred places and pilgrimage, and traces the geography of major sacred places attracting pilgrims. The article discusses trends in the emergence of new centres of worship as well as of temporary ones formed as a result of visits to cult objects (relics, remains, miraculous icons) displayed in a particular location. Owing to the denominational configuration of the country, the main focus is on Orthodox Christian sacred places but Muslim, Catholic and Jewish pilgrimage centres are included as well.

Abstract Even though pilgrimages may often be directed toward what can conventionally be seen as “religious” sacred sites, religious and ritual forms of knowledge and ignorance may not necessarily be the only, or even the most prominent, forms in their workings. Focusing on Greek Cypriots’ return pilgrimages to the Christian-Orthodox monastery of Apostolos Andreas (Karpasia) under the conditions of Cyprus's ongoing division, in this article I explore the non “religious” forms of knowing and ignoring salient to pilgrimages to sacred religious sites, the conditions under which they become relevant, and the risks associated with them. Showing how pilgrimages to the monastery of Apostolos Andreas are situated within a larger framework of seeing “our places,” I will argue that remembering and knowing these places is the type of knowledge most commonly sought out by pilgrims, while also exploring what the stakes of not knowing/forgetting them may be felt to be. An exclusive focus on “religious” forms of knowledge and ignorance would obscure the ways in which pilgrimage is often embedded in everyday social and political concerns.

Abstract More than 20 years after the fall of the Communist regime, we are witnessing the unprecedented development of religious pilgrimage in Romania, a country where, according to the latest census, 84% of the population self-identifies as Orthodox Christian. Apart from the pilgrimages to well-known destinations (Jerusalem, Rome, etc.) organized by the Romanian Patriarchy’s Pilgrimage Bureau, a separate category is the improvised, hybrid pilgrimages, both religious and touristic, organized by individuals using hired minibuses. This paper offers an ethnographic description of a pilgrimage. The focus is on the relationship between music, ritual, the sacred space of the pilgrimage and the public space. Music is used as a barrier and immaterial border to the ritual space, while in its interior it is better suited for the emotional control and the proper management of pilgrims. The analysis of pilgrimages points to new forms of blending of music and ritual, outside established institutional frameworks, as well as to changing notions of pilgrimage, movement, religious practice and piety.

The road, journey, wandering are topics known from works of various historical epochs that still appear in social sciences, philosophy and literature. According to Zygmunt Bauman, as humans, we have gone from the times of solid modernity, when we perceived ourselves as “pilgrims” characterized by the concept of identity, to the times of liquid modernity, when we are “tourists” looking for diverse but ephemeral experiences. In this article, I show that the idea of pilgrimage is still valid and allows us to strengthen our identity. I refer to the broad understanding of pilgrimage in the Christian tradition, to the currently observed increase in the popularity of pilgrimages and, above all, to the interpretation of my own experiences of making pilgrimages on the Spanish Camino de Santiago trails. Finally, I characterize the specificity of the pilgrim’s role and the criteria for shaping his identity.

Deep religiousness, beside a typically agricultural character of employment, was one of the most distinguishing features of the inhabitants of the district of Wieluń. It was manifested by i.e., a huge engagement in new forms of Christian ministry, which were initiated in circumstances of unrestricted activity of the Catholic Church after 1918. Irrespectively of it, the inhabitants of the Wieluń district were characterised by deep Marian piety, which was expressed in many ways. Beside their participation in services devoted to Our Lady, engagement in the Confraternity of the Rosary, distribution of magazines devotedto this issue as well as special respect paid to images of Our Lady, they took part in numerous pilgrimages. The Jasna Góra Monastery was the main goal of pilgrims. The faithful of this area accounted for the biggest group among all the groups from the whole Diocese of Częstochowa taking part in pilgrimages to the city of Częstochowa.

The review of the sources includes the characteristics of such literary monuments as the texts of the Holy Scripture of the Septuagint, sermons, spiritual hymns, and hagiography. The main documental evidences are represented by the Notitia episcopatuum, Synodal acts, canons and decisions, Typika of monasteries, account of the churches, abbeys and nunneries in Christian East. In Christian Byzantium, Jerusalem became the main destination of pilgrims. Many monasteries were built by the monks from Georgia who lived in Palestine. In the countries neighbouring to Palestine there was active monastic building in Byzantine Syria, as well as in the area of ancient monastic formations, Egypt. Therefore, there appeared the picture of energetic monastic building in the Holy Land, which is accounted to by documents, such as various Notitia, as well as the statutes and the journals of pilgrims and travellers. Although not all the monasteries existed for long due to devastating raids of Bedouins, Muslims, and crusaders, many of them were renovated from the ashes to continue servicing to these days. From that time on, Byzantine geographical literature went outside purely literary borrowings from the classical heritage and the environment of theoretical-mathematical and astronomical treatises to the practice of actual travels and pilgrimages. Although the latter kept their importance in all the periods of Byzantine literature, from the Christian topography of Kosmas In- dikopleustes to the ethno-geographical excursions in the History of Nikephoros Grigoras.

Sustainable tourism and local economic development as a mechanism for religious pilgrimages in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN). This is particularly pertinent for religious pilgrimages in KZN province which boosts historical landmarks and pilgrimage destinations. Pilgrimage tourism and several other forms of tourism related to it have significant affinities to the tenets of sustainable development. The purpose of this paper is to examine the complications that could arise from religious pilgrimages' potential as a form of travel that, once implemented, would be beneficial for sustainable tourism and local economic development (LED). This paper further intends to assess the pilgrimage destinations to be viewed as a mechanism for local economic development. A quantitative research design was employed, as the nature of this research necessitates the use of numerical data and descriptive statistics to draw conclusions. A standardised questionnaire was used to collect data from 410 respondents selected using a convenience sampling technique from different pilgrimage destinations in KZN, South Africa. Descriptive, bivariate, and multivariate analyses were conducted using IBM’s SPSS version 28 software. The pilgrims and local communities’ perceptions of socio-economic contribution indicate that the availability of tourism facilities might be perceived as a socio-economic contributor to pilgrimage destinations. The findings further reveal that African religious pilgrimages can be sustainable and be a local economic development catalyst in KwaZulu-Natal. The study recommends that the South African National Christian Forum (SANCF), in collaboration with the South African government (national and provincial), develop an operational plan to provide business education, entrepreneurial skills, and relevant support to local communities surrounding religious pilgrimages or religious destinations, to empower them to contribute to the development of the local economy. This will assist to reduce South Africa's high unemployment rate, particularly in less developed regions.

In 2020, religious celebrations in Romania were greatly affected by restrictions meant to control the COVID-19 pandemic. Easter, the highlight of the Orthodox Christian ritual year, was celebrated in empty churches during the spring lockdown. Participation in religious activities was later progressively permitted. During autumn, pilgrimages were allowed, but only in compliance with strict regulations. This article focuses on the restrictions imposed by public authorities, the solutions found by church representatives, and the faithful’s reaction to the new situation. The Orthodox liturgical year begins in Romania on the 1st of September, marked by a series of pilgrimages, occasioned by feasts for several saints whose relics are venerated in local churches. Some of them, centuries old, attract thousands of people. The celebrations last several days, during which people wait patiently, for hours, to touch the holy relics. In 2020, governmental measures limited participation to local residents, without previous consultation with the church authorities. This caused great discontent. Despite this, the number of pilgrims was not substantially less than in previous years, in large part due to the direct negotiations between the faithful and the local law forces.

In 1534, Henry VIII declared himself the supreme head of the Church of England. In the years that followed, his advisors carried out an agenda to reform the Church. In 1536, the Crown condemned pilgrimages and the veneration of saints’ shrines and relics. By the end of the seventeenth century, nearly every shrine in England and Wales had been destroyed or fell into disuse except for St. Winefride’s shrine in Holywell, Wales. The shrine has continued to be a pilgrimage destination to the present day without disruption. Contemporary scholars have credited the shrine’s survival to its connections with the Tudor and Stuart regimes, to the successful negotiation for its shared use as both a sacred and secular space, and to the missionary efforts of the Jesuits. Historians have yet to conduct a detailed study of St. Winefride’s role in maintaining social order in recusant communities. This article argues that the Jesuits and pilgrims at St. Winefride’s shrine cooperated to create an alternative concept of social order to the legal and customary orders of Protestant society.

This scientific paper aims to identify an important monastery that was established in the fifth century AD southeast of Jerusalem i.e. two centuries before the arrival of Islam. That monastery is: Mar Saba Monastery: After Saint Saba (439-532 A.D.) who lived an ascetic life in a cave 15 kilometers southeast of Jerusalem over a valley that extends from the foothill of Mount Al-Tur in Jerusalem and runs into the Dead Sea. The Valley is mentioned in the Bible as “Kidron” while others call it “Yehushevat” or the Valley of Tears (People call it now Wadi Al-Nar or the Inferno Valley ). Saint Saba was followed by other monks who lived in the surrounding caves. In 483 A.D. Saint Saba and his followers began to build a monastery in the place which became of its proximity to Jerusalem. It hosted a large number of monks from different denominations, and contained a distinguished library throughout history. That monastery became a place of pilgrimages for travelers, researchers, and Jerusalem visitors over a period of sixteen centuries. It was also known for Christian pilgrims, since it hosted thousands of monks. This study also aims to provide sufficient data about Saint Saba and his monastery. It also discusses how the monastery was developed throughout history, its pertinence to Jerusalem, and the role it played in attracting tourists and travelers to the Holy Land as well as in the cultural development in Jerusalem and the vicinity. Keywords: Jerusalem (Bayt al-maqdes), Monastery, Mar Saba

This scientific paper aims to identify an important monastery that was established in the fifth century AD southeast of Jerusalem i.e. two centuries before the arrival of Islam. That monastery is: Mar Saba Monastery: After Saint Saba (439-532 A.D.) who lived an ascetic life in a cave 15 kilometers southeast of Jerusalem over a valley that extends from the foothill of Mount Al-Tur in Jerusalem and runs into the Dead Sea. The Valley is mentioned in the Bible as “Kidron” while others call it “Yehushevat” or the Valley of Tears (People call it now Wadi Al-Nar or the Inferno Valley ). Saint Saba was followed by other monks who lived in the surrounding caves. In 483 A.D. Saint Saba and his followers began to build a monastery in the place which became of its proximity to Jerusalem. It hosted a large number of monks from different denominations, and contained a distinguished library throughout history. That monastery became a place of pilgrimages for travelers, researchers, and Jerusalem visitors over a period of sixteen centuries. It was also known for Christian pilgrims, since it hosted thousands of monks. This study also aims to provide sufficient data about Saint Saba and his monastery. It also discusses how the monastery was developed throughout history, its pertinence to Jerusalem, and the role it played in attracting tourists and travelers to the Holy Land as well as in the cultural development in Jerusalem and the vicinity. Key words: Keywords: Equivalen, Verbs, Words of The Arabs

»At tale med de døde ...« Om sækularisering og hermeneutik i Kaj Thanings forfatterskab. Bibliografi over Kaj Thanings forfatterskab[»Talking with the dead« - On secularisation and hermeneutics in the writings of Kaj Thaning]By Mikkel Crone NielsenKaj Thaning’s thesis that Gr.’s visits to England 1829-31 led to his »conversion to life« and emergence as advocate of ‘secularisation’ has proved both influential and controversial, as has his methodological approach to the interpretation of Gr.’s writings with its underpinning thesis that Gr.’s entire literary production is determined by the one basic problem: how the relationship between human life and Christianity is to be understood.Raised in a Grundtvigian and clerical family, Thaning overtly personalized the theological issues that involved him. From 1922 onwards he was an activist in the Danish student-Christian association (Danmarks kristelige Studenterforbund), which was to voice through the periodical Tidehvery a radical criticism of the inward-turned and exclusive character of contemporary Danish congregational life, which judgmentally isolated itself from those powerful secular movements going on within national life as a whole. He held that it was not the true nature of the gospel, and therefore not the proper business of the Church, to exercise a judgmental power over the secular world.Rather, the congregation instead of clinging to ‘churchliness’ should provide an open place among the people where the gospel, which is for all the people, was proclaimed. The Church must be willing to risk a weakening of Christianity’s spiritual influence in this desirable process of ‘secularisation’.Believing that such ‘secularisation’ was entirely within the spirit of Gr. himself, contrary to the received ‘myth’ of Gr., Thaning proposes (1941) to »work with Gr. in his workshop« - to follow Gr. through his successive writings, as he hammered out his beliefs. Thus he analyses Gr.’s confrontation with himself (opgør med sig selv) in the wake of the England-visits, the outcome of which was Gr.’s rejection of German idealism in favour of an antiidealistic, common-sense thinking which Thaning calls ‘realism’. In the introduction to his Nordic Mythology (1832), Gr. moves towards prioritizing the human experiencing of existence in this world, here and now, over the cultivation of an empowered Christian religion, and towards seeing Christianity as endorsing rather than opposing this existential engagement with the life given in creation and with the moment.Charged by his critics with applying modem existentialist theological concepts alien to Gr., Thaning defends the concept ‘secularisation’ which he has adopted from Friedrich Gogarten - though he can be shown to have trodden his own independent path, especially in that, where Gogarten derives his justification from the Christian faith itself, Thaning derives his from a recognition of the innate worth of created human life without necessary reference to the Christian religion. The Christian gospel disavows any apologetic intention or any imposition of authority over its adherents, and God’s word must wander the world homeless. Redemption is to be understood in terms of the freeing of created human life from its shackles - the very shackles which gnosticism would lay upon human beings, namely utter disavowal and rejection of the world and the human experiencing of it. The critique of religion informing Thaning’s writings is primarily directed against such gnosticism - which he calls ‘pilgrim-Christianity’ (pilgrimskristendom) - as it thrives in latter-day Lutherdom. Gr. is himself aware of his role as a father of such ‘secularisation’ and Thaning, following him, is prepared to find the starting-point for his own ‘secularisation-theology’ even in ‘heathen’, non-Christian human life, because this is what life demands.Central to Thaning’s interpretative method is the assumption that historical distance between an author and a commentator can be bridged when the issue is one of common human existential experiencing. With Rudolf Bultmann (and behind him, Heidegger), Thaning accepts that the neutrality of a systematic, objective analysis is thus relinquished in favour of an existential interest in the shared situation addressed. The exegete meets the text with his own premises in mind, expecting that the text will then cast new light upon them. Thus a dialogue is validated; but subjective arbitrariness in the exegete is constrained by adherence to »a formal anthropology and an existential analysis«.Thaning’s understanding of that life given to human beings in creation is greatly indebted to the religious-historical writings of Vilhelm Grønbech, who in particular rejects the distinctively European concept of human life as a pilgrimage through an imperfect world to the perfection of the heavenly homeland, along with its resultant dualistic perception of a true, spiritual self engaged in a struggle with the natural self. Herein, Thaning perceives not just a European but a universal and historical conflict between religion and human life, which stance furnishes him, in practice, with a theological hermeneutic.Thus Thaning engaged in a generational confrontation with a certain traditional Grundtvigian conceptualisation of the Christian congregation. Though he made little overt declaration of his hermeneutical method, he worked with discernible controlling concepts and brought to the task an enormous knowledge of Gr.’s writings. Accordingly he made an unparalleled impact upon Gr. studies and his work stands as an indispensable reference-point in Gr. research.

<p>The aim of the paper is to characterize pilgrimage as a significant concept in Latgalian culture by emphasizing pilgrimage’s dialectic comprehension and most essential manifestations in culture. The study use a linguistically culturological approach and reviews pilgrimage as a global and multilevel structure, that consists of conceptual, emotively evaluated, historical and etymological layers (Степанов 2001: 84). For this purpose there were used mainly such written sources as vocabularies, periodicals and fiction, that refer to pilgrimage.</p><p>While gathering various interpretations of sacredness and journeys, paper deals with four main comprehensions of pilgrimage in Latgale: firstly, pilgrimage as a religious activity, that means walking to a sacred place along with the prayers, secondly, pilgrimage as a social campaign for the affirmation of ideological efforts, thirdly, pilgrimage as an individual and sensitive search for the eternal values and, lastly, pilgrimage as a type of a religious tourism in contemporary post-modern society.</p><p>The beginning of Catholic pilgrimage tradition in Latgale usually tends to be associated with Aglona, when Dominicans or the so called White Fathers Order began their activities in the region in 1699. Today, within the Rēzekne–Aglona diocese of the Roman Catholic Church, there are several sites, which have been officially acknowledged as sacred on the basis of the corresponding features they possess. Primarily, it’s the altarpiece of the Virgin miracle-worker and other relics, that are special for the Christianity and where pilgrims may pray for health or any other mercy. Secondly, in the territory of the sacred place there may be located objects of nature, that bring health and blessing, for example, sacred spring.</p><p>The appreciation of religious pilgrimage in Latgalian culture has been also affected by the historical context. From 1918 to 1940 pilgrimage activity experienced especially strong prosperity, but it changed during the Soviet-era, when pilgrimage subject in mass media was forbidden and lost its official support, but it still continued to proceed. Organized pilgrimages to Aglona recurred only in 1989 along with the so called Third Latvian National Awakening.</p><p>Pilgrimage in Latgalian culture appears also as a social campaign for the affirmation of ideological efforts, where comprehension of sacredness from the scope of the Christian Religion transfers into secular every-day lifestyle and subjects to ideological dogmas of era. Such interpretation of pilgrimage especially activates during 1920s–1930s, as well as in 1940s and 1990s. The aspiration for such pilgrimage usually is a place, person or monument, but all pilgrimages that are distinctive to the affirmation of ideological efforts possess fragmentation feature. With the alterations within the ideological emphasis the idea of the ideological pilgrimage either disappears either transforms into ceremonial procession or simple memorial tribute.</p><p>Comprehension of the pilgrimage as an individual and sensitive search for the eternal values is more related to the individualized pilgrim’s motive, that is connected to emotional experience, namely, search for the deprecated and irreversible values. This motive is especially noticeable within the exiled Latgalians’ literature, where such personages as motherland, home, mother and mother’s tomb are united and related to the Virgin’s archetype. The pilgrimage process, that Latgalian exiled writers live through in their imagination, shows, that it is one of the most essential values, that is evaluated during the immense influence of foreign countries, that helps to preserve Latgalian identity at times while far away from home.</p><p>One of the most popular type of tourism today is religious tourism. In Latgale it began in the 20th century through periodicals of 1920s–1930s. Now it is an integral part of the global tourism industry, including both national and international projects.</p><p>Meaning diversification in the contextual semantics of the pilgrimage shows its deep roots in the Latgalian culture and how it merges universal, national, ethnic and denominational characteristic marks in cultural traditions.</p>

This essay combines life writing with meditations on the significance of walking as integral to the ritual practice of pilgrimage, where the individual improves her soul or health through the act of walking to a shrine containing healing relics of a saint. Braiding together insights from medieval literature, contemporary ecocriticism, and memory studies, I reflect on my own pilgrimage practice as it impacts the land itself. Canterbury, England serves as the central shrine for four pilgrimages over decades: 1966, 1994, 1997, and 2003.The act of memory was not invented in the Anthropocene. Rather, the nonhuman world has taught humans how to remember. From ice-core samples retaining the history of Europe’s weather to rocks embedded with fossilized extinct species, nonhuman actors literally petrifying or freezing the past—from geologic sites to frozen water—become exposed through the process of anthropocentric discovery and human interference. The very act of human uncovery and analysis threatens to eliminate the nonhuman actor which has hospitably shared its own experience. How can humans script nonhuman memory?As for the history of memory studies itself, a new phase is arguably beginning, shifting from “the transnational, transcultural, or global to the planetary; from recorded to deep history; from the human to the nonhuman” (Craps et al. 3). Memory studies for the Anthropocene can “focus on the terrestrialized significance of (the historicized) forms of remembrance but also on the positioning of who is remembering and, ultimately, which ‘Anthropocene’ is remembered” (Craps et al. 5). In this era of the “self-conscious Anthropocene” (Craps et al. 6), narrative itself can focus on “the place of nonhuman beings in human stories of origins, identity, and futures point to a possible opening for the methods of memory studies” (Craps et al. 8). The nonhuman on the paths of this essay range from the dirt on the path to the rock used to build the sacred shrine, the ultimate goal. How they intersect with human actors reveals how the “human subject is no longer the one forming the world, but does indeed constitute itself through its relation to and dependence on the object world” (Marcussen 14, qtd. in Rodriguez 378). Incorporating “nonhuman species as objects, if not subjects, of memory [...] memory critics could begin by extending their objects to include the memory of nonhuman species,” linking both humans and nonhumans in “an expanded multispecies frame of remembrance” (Craps et al. 9). My narrative—from diaries recording sacred journey to a novel structured by pilgrimage—propels motion, but also secures in memory events from the past, including memories of those nonhuman beings I interact with.Childhood PilgrimageThe little girl with brown curls sat crying softly, whimpering, by the side of the road in lush grass. The mother with her soft brown bangs and an underflip to her hair told the story of a little girl, sitting by the side of the road in lush grass.The story book girl had forgotten her Black Watch plaid raincoat at the picnic spot where she had lunched with her parents and two older brothers. Ponchos spread out, the family had eaten their fresh yeasty rolls, hard cheese, apples, and macaroons. The tin clink of the canteen hit their teeth as they gulped metallic water, still icy cold from the taps of the ancient inn that morning. The father cut slices of Edam with his Swiss army knife, parsing them out to each child to make his or her own little sandwich. The father then lay back for his daily nap, while the boys played chess. The portable wooden chess set had inlaid squares, each piece no taller than a fingernail paring. The girl read a Junior Puffin book, while the mother silently perused Agatha Christie. The boy who lost at chess had to play his younger sister, a fitting punishment for the less able player. She cheerfully played with either brother. Once the father awakened, they packed up their gear into their rucksacks, and continued the pilgrimage to Canterbury.Only the little Black Watch plaid raincoat was left behind.The real mother told the real girl that the story book family continued to walk, forgetting the raincoat until it began to rain. The men pulled on their ponchos and the mother her raincoat, when the little girl discovered her raincoat missing. The story book men walked two miles back while the story book mother and girl sat under the dripping canopy of leaves provided by a welcoming tree.And there, the real mother continued, the storybook girl cried and whimpered, until a magic taxi cab in which the father and boys sat suddenly appeared out of the mist to drive the little girl and her mother to their hotel.The real girl’s eyes shone. “Did that actually happen?” she asked, perking up in expectation.“Oh, yes,” said the real mother, kissing her on the brow. The girl’s tears dried. Only the plops of rain made her face moist. The little girl, now filled with hope, cuddled with her mother as they huddled together.Without warning, out of the mist, drove up a real magic taxi cab in which the real men sat. For magic taxi cabs really exist, even in the tangible world—especially in England. At the very least, in the England of little Susie’s imagination.Narrative and PilgrimageMy mother’s tale suggests how this story echoes in yet another pilgrimage story, maintaining a long tradition of pilgrimage stories embedded within frame tales as far back as the Middle Ages.The Christian pilgrim’s walk parallels Christ’s own pilgrimage to Emmaus. The blisters we suffer echo faintly the lash Christ endured. The social relations of the pilgrim are “diachronic” (Alworth 98), linking figures (Christ) from the past to the now (us, or, during the Middle Ages, William Langland’s Piers Plowman or Chaucer’s band who set out from Southwark). We embody the frame of the vera icon, the true image, thus “conjur[ing] a site of simultaneity or a plane of immanence where the actors of the past [...] meet those of the future” (Alworth 99). Our quotidian walk frames the true essence or meaning of our ambulatory travail.In 1966, my parents took my two older brothers and me on the Pilgrims’ Way—not the route from London to Canterbury that Chaucer’s pilgrims would have taken starting south of London in Southwark, rather the ancient trek from Winchester to Canterbury, famously chronicled in The Old Road by Hilaire Belloc. The route follows along the south side of the Downs, where the muddy path was dried by what sun there was. My parents first undertook the walk in the early 1950s. Slides from that pilgrimage depict my mother, voluptuous in her cashmere twinset and tweed skirt, as my father crosses a stile. My parents, inspired by Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, decided to walk along the traditional Pilgrims’ Way to Canterbury. Story intersects with material traversal over earth on dirt-laden paths.By the time we children came along, the memories of that earlier pilgrimage resonated with my parents, inspiring them to take us on the same journey. We all carried our own rucksacks and walked five or six miles a day. Concerning our pilgrimage when I was seven, my mother wrote in her diary:As good pilgrims should, we’ve been telling tales along the way. Yesterday Jimmy told the whole (detailed) story of That Darn Cat, a Disney movie. Today I told about Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey, which first inspired me to think of walking trips and everyone noted the resemblance between Stevenson’s lovable, but balky, donkey and our sweet Sue. (We hadn’t planned to tell tales, but they just happened along the way.)I don’t know how sweet I was; perhaps I was “balky” because the road was so hard. Landscape certainly shaped my experience.As I wrote about the pilgrimage in my diary then, “We went to another Hotel and walked. We went and had lunch at the Boggly [booglie] place. We went to a nother hotel called The Swan with fether Quits [quilts]. We went to the Queens head. We went to the Gest house. We went to aother Hotle called Srping wells and my tooth came out. We saw some taekeys [turkeys].” The repetition suggests how pilgrimage combines various aspects of life, from the emotional to the physical, the quotidian (walking and especially resting—in hotels with quilts) with the extraordinary (newly sprung tooth or the appearance of turkeys). “[W]ayfaring abilities depend on an emotional connection to the environment” (Easterlin 261), whether that environment is modified by humans or even manmade, inhabited by human or nonhuman actors. How can one model an “ecological relationship between humans and nonhumans” in narrative (Rodriguez 368)? Rodriguez proposes a “model of reading as encounter [...] encountering fictional story worlds as potential models” (Rodriguez 368), just as my mother did with the Magic Taxi Cab story.Taxis proliferate in my childhood pilgrimage. My mother writes in 1966 in her diary of journeying along the Pilgrims’ Way to St. Martha’s on the Hill. “Susie was moaning and groaning under her pack and at one desperate uphill moment gasped out, ‘Let’s take a taxi!’ – our highborn lady as we call her. But we finally made it.” “Martha’s”, as I later learned, is a corruption of “Martyrs”, a natural linguistic decay that developed over the medieval period. Just as the vernacular textures pilgrimage poems in the fourteeth century, the common tongue in all its glorious variety seeps into even the quotidian modern pilgrim’s journey.Part of the delight of pilgrimage lies in the characters one meets and the languages they speak. In 1994, the only time my husband and I cheated on a strictly ambulatory sacred journey occurred when we opted to ride a bus for ten miles where walking would have been dangerous. When I ask the bus driver if a stop were ours, he replied, “I'll give you a shout, love.” As though in a P. G. Wodehouse novel, when our stop finally came, he cried out, “Cheerio, love” to me and “Cheerio, mate” to Jim.Language changes. Which is a good thing. If it didn’t, it would be dead, like those martyrs of old. Like Latin itself. Disentangling pilgrimage from language proves impossible. The healthy ecopoetics of languages meshes with the sustainable vibrancy of the land we traverse.“Nettles of remorse…”: Derek Walcott, The Bounty Once my father had to carry me past a particularly tough patch of nettles. As my mother tells it, we “went through orchards and along narrow woodland path with face-high nettles. Susie put a scarf over her face and I wore a poncho though it was sunny and we survived almost unscathed.” Certain moments get preserved by the camera. At age seven in a field outside of Wye, I am captured in my father’s slides surrounded by grain. At age thirty-five, I am captured in film by my husband in the same spot, in the identical pose, though now quite a bit taller than the grain. Three years later, as a mother, I in turn snap him with a backpack containing baby Sarah, grumpily gazing off over the fields.When I was seven, we took off from Detling. My mother writes, “set off along old Pilgrims’ Way. Road is paved now, but much the same as fifteen years ago. Saw sheep, lambs, and enjoyed lovely scenery. Sudden shower sent us all to a lunch spot under trees near Thurnham Court, where we huddled under ponchos and ate happily, watching the weather move across the valley. When the sun came to us, we continued on our way which was lovely, past sheep, etc., but all on hard paved road, alas. Susie was a good little walker, but moaned from time to time.”I seem to whimper and groan a lot on pilgrimage. One thing is clear: the physical aspects of walking for days affected my phenomenological response to our pilgrimage which we’d undertaken both as historical ritual, touristic nature hike, and what Wendell Berry calls a “secular pilgrimage” (402), where the walker seeks “the world of the Creation” (403) in a “return to the wilderness in order to be restored” (416). The materiality of my experience was key to how I perceived this journey as a spiritual, somatic, and emotional event. The link between pilgrimage and memory, between pilgrimage poetics and memorial methods, occupies my thoughts on pilgrimage. As Nancy Easterlin’s work on “cognitive ecocriticism” (“Cognitive” 257) contends, environmental knowledge is intimately tied in with memory (“Cognitive” 260). She writes: “The advantage of extensive environmental knowledge most surely precipitates the evolution of memory, necessary to sustain vast knowledge” (“Cognitive” 260). Even today I can recall snatches of moments from that trip when I was a child, including the telling of tales.Landscape not only changes the writer, but writing transforms the landscape and our interaction with it. As Valerie Allen suggests, “If the subject acts upon the environment, so does the environment upon the subject” (“When Things Break” 82). Indeed, we can understand the “road as a strategic point of interaction between human and environment” (Allen and Evans 26; see also Oram)—even, or especially, when that interaction causes pain and inflames blisters. My relationship with moleskin on my blasted and blistered toes made me intimately conscious of my body with every step taken on the pilgrimage route.As an adult, my boots on the way from Winchester to Canterbury pinched and squeezed, packed dirt acting upon them and, in turn, my feet. After taking the train home and upon arrival in London, we walked through Bloomsbury to our flat on Russell Square, passing by what I saw as a new, less religious, but no less beckoning shrine: The London Foot Hospital at Fitzroy Square.Now, sadly, it is closed. Where do pilgrims go for sole—and soul—care?Slow Walking as WayfindingAll pilgrimages come to an end, just as, in 1966, my mother writes of our our arrival at last in Canterbury:On into Canterbury past nice grassy cricket field, where we sat and ate chocolate bars while we watched white-flannelled cricketers at play. Past town gates to our Queen’s Head Inn, where we have the smallest, slantingest room in the world. Everything is askew and we’re planning to use our extra pillows to brace our feet so we won’t slide out of bed. Children have nice big room with 3 beds and are busy playing store with pounds and shillings [that’s very hard mathematics!]. After dinner, walked over to cathedral, where evensong was just ending. Walked back to hotel and into bed where we are now.Up to early breakfast, dashed to cathedral and looked up, up, up. After our sins were forgiven, we picked up our rucksacks and headed into London by train.This experience in 1966 varies slightly from the one in 1994. Jim and I walk through a long walkway of tall, slim trees arching over us, a green, lush and silent cloister, finally gaining our first view of Canterbury with me in a similar photo to one taken almost thirty years before. We make our way into the city through the West Gate, first passing by St. Dunstan’s Church where Henry II had put on penitential garb and later Sir Thomas More’s head was buried. Canterbury is like Coney Island in the Middle Ages and still is: men with dreadlocks and slinky didjeridoos, fire tossers, mobs of people, tourists. We go to Mercery Lane as all good pilgrims should and under the gate festooned with the green statue of Christ, arriving just in time for evensong.Imagining a medieval woman arriving here and listening to the service, I pray to God my gratefulness for us having arrived safely. I can understand the fifteenth-century pilgrim, Margery Kempe, screaming emotionally—maybe her feet hurt like mine. I’m on the verge of tears during the ceremony: so glad to be here safe, finally got here, my favorite service, my beloved husband. After the service, we pass on through the Quire to the spot where St. Thomas’s relic sanctuary was. People stare at a lit candle commemorating it. Tears well up in my eyes.I suppose some things have changed since the Middle Ages. One Friday in Canterbury with my children in 2003 has some parallels with earlier iterations. Seven-year-old Sarah and I go to evensong at the Cathedral. I tell her she has to be absolutely quiet or the Archbishop will chop off her head.She still has her head.Though the road has been paved, the view has remained virtually unaltered. Some aspects seem eternal—sheep, lambs, and stiles dotting the landscape. The grinding down of the pilgrimage path, reflecting the “slowness of flat ontology” (Yates 207), occurs over vast expanses of time. Similarly, Easterlin reflects on human and more than human vitalism: “Although an understanding of humans as wayfinders suggests a complex and dynamic interest on the part of humans in the environment, the surround itself is complex and dynamic and is frequently in a state of change as the individual or group moves through it” (Easterlin “Cognitive” 261). An image of my mother in the 1970s by a shady tree along the Pilgrims’ Way in England shows that the path is lower by 6 inches than the neighboring verge (Bright 4). We don’t see dirt evolving, because its changes occur so slowly. Only big time allows us to see transformative change.Memorial PilgrimageOddly, the erasure of self through duplication with a precursor occurred for me while reading W.G. Sebald’s pilgrimage novel, The Rings of Saturn. I had experienced my own pilgrimage to many of these same locations he immortalizes. I, too, had gone to Somerleyton Hall with my elderly mother, husband, and two children. My memories, sacred shrines pooling in familial history, are infused with synchronic reflection, medieval to contemporary—my parents’ periodic sojourns in Suffolk for years, leading me to love the very landscape Sebald treks across; sadness at my parents’ decline; hope in my children’s coming to add on to their memory palimpsest a layer devoted to this land, to this history, to this family.Then, the oddest coincidence from my reading pilgrimage. After visiting Dunwich Heath, Sebald comes to his friend, Michael, whose wife Anne relays a story about a local man hired as a pallbearer by the local undertaker in Westleton. This man, whose memory was famously bad, nevertheless reveled in the few lines allotted him in an outdoor performance of King Lear. After her relating this story, Sebald asks for a taxi (Sebald 188-9).This might all seem unremarkable to the average reader. Yet, “human wayfinders are richly aware of and responsive to environment, meaning both physical places and living beings, often at a level below consciousness” (Easterlin “Cognitive” 265). For me, with a connection to this area, I startled with recollection emerging from my subconscience. The pallbearer’s name in Sebald’s story was Mr Squirrel, the very same name of the taxi driver my parents—and we—had driven with many times. The same Mr Squirrel? How many Mr Squirrels can there be in this small part of Suffolk? Surely it must be the same family, related in a genetic encoding of memory. I run to my archives. And there, in my mother’s address book—itself a palimpsest of time with names and addressed scored through; pasted-in cards, names, and numbers; and looseleaf memoranda—there, on the first page under “S”, “Mr. Squirrel” in my mother’s unmistakable scribble. She also had inscribed his phone number and the village Saxmundum, seven miles from Westleton. His name had been crossed out. Had he died? Retired? I don’t know. Yet quick look online tells me Squirrell’s Taxis still exists, as it does in my memory.Making KinAfter accompanying a class on a bucolic section of England’s Pilgrims’ Way, seven miles from Wye to Charing, we ended up at a pub drinking a pint, with which all good pilgrimages should conclude. There, students asked me why I became a medievalist who studies pilgrimage. Only after the publication of my first book on women pilgrims did I realize that the origin of my scholarly, long fascination with pilgrimage, blossoming into my professional career, began when I was seven years old along the way to Canterbury. The seeds of that pilgrimage when I was so young bore fruit and flowers decades later.One story illustrates Michel Serres’s point that we should not aim to appropriate the world, but merely act as temporary tenants (Serres 72-3). On pilgrimage in 1966 as a child, I had a penchant for ant spiders. That was not the only insect who took my heart. My mother shares how “Susie found a beetle up on the hill today and put him in the cheese box. Jimmy put holes in the top for him. She named him Alexander Beetle and really became very fond of him. After supper, we set him free in the garden here, with appropriate ceremony and a few over-dramatic tears of farewell.” He clearly made a great impression on me. I yearn for him today, that beetle in the cheese box. Though I tried to smuggle nature as contraband, I ultimately had to set him free.Passing through cities, landscape, forests, over seas and on roads, wandering by fields and vegetable patches, under a sky lit both by sun and moon, the pilgrim—even when in a group of fellow pilgrims—in her lonesome exercise endeavors to realize Serres’ ideal of the tenant inhabitant of earth. Nevertheless, we, as physical pilgrims, inevitably leave our traces through photos immortalizing the journey, trash left by the wayside, even excretions discretely deposited behind a convenient bush. Or a beetle who can tell the story of his adventure—or terror—at being ensconced for a time in a cheese box.On one notorious day of painful feet, my husband and I arrived in Otford, only to find the pub was still closed. Finally, it became time for dinner. We sat outside, me with feet ensconced in shoes blessedly inert and unmoving, as the server brought out our salads. The salad cream, white and viscous, was presented in an elegantly curved silver dish. Then Jim began to pick at the salad cream with his fork. Patiently, tenderly, he endeavored to assist a little bug who had gotten trapped in the gooey sauce. Every attempt seemed doomed to failure. The tiny creature kept falling back into the gloppy substance. Undaunted, Jim compassionately ministered to our companion. Finally, the little insect flew off, free to continue its own pilgrimage, which had intersected with ours in a tiny moment of affinity. Such moments of “making kin” work, according to Donna Haraway, as “life-saving strateg[ies] for the Anthropocene” (Oppermann 3, qtd. in Haraway 160).How can narrative avoid the anthropocentric centre of writing, which is inevitable given the human generator of such a piece? While words are a human invention, nonhuman entities vitally enact memory. The very Downs we walked along were created in the Cretaceous period at least seventy million years ago. The petrol propelling the magic taxi cab was distilled from organic bodies dating back millions of years. Jurassic limestone from the Bathonian Age almost two hundred million years ago constitutes the Caen stone quarried for building Canterbury Cathedral, while its Purbeck marble from Dorset dates from the Cretaceous period. Walking on pilgrimage propels me through a past millions—billions—of eons into the past, dwarfing my speck of existence. Yet, “if we wish to cross the darkness which separates us from [the past] we must lay down a little plank of words and step delicately over it” (Barfield 23). Elias Amidon asks us to consider how “the ground we dig into and walk upon is sacred. It is sacred because it makes us neighbors to each other, whether we like it or not. Tell this story” (Amidon 42). And, so, I have.We are winding down. Time has passed since that first pilgrimage of mine at seven years old. Yet now, here, I still put on my red plaid wollen jumper and jacket, crisp white button-up shirt, grey knee socks, and stout red walking shoes. Slinging on my rucksack, I take my mother’s hand.I’m ready to take my first step.We continue our pilgrimage, together.ReferencesAllen, Valerie. “When Things Break: Mending Rroads, Being Social.” Roadworks: Medieval Britain, Medieval Roads. Eds. Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2016.———, and Ruth Evans. Introduction. Roadworks: Medieval Britain, Medieval Roads. Eds. Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2016.Alworth, David J. Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2016.Amidon, Elias. “Digging In.” Dirt: A Love Story. Ed. Barbara Richardson. Lebanon, NH: ForeEdge, 2015.Barfield, Owen. History in English Words. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1967.Berry, Wendell. “A Secular Pilgrimage.” The Hudson Review 23.3 (1970): 401-424.Bright, Derek. “The Pilgrims’ Way Revisited: The Use of the North Downs Main Trackway and the Medway Crossings by Medieval Travelers.” Kent Archaeological Society eArticle (2010): 4-32.Craps, Stef, Rick Crownshaw, Jennifer Wenzel, Rosanne Kennedy, Claire Colebrook, and Vin Nardizzi. “Memory Studies and the Anthropocene: A Roundtable.” Memory Studies 11.4 (2017) 1-18.Easterlin, Nancy. A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012.———. “Cognitive Ecocriticism: Human Wayfinding, Sociality, and Literary Interpretation.” Introduction to Cognitive Studies. Ed. Lisa Zunshine. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2010. 257-274.Haraway, Donna. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 159-65.James, Erin, and Eric Morel. “Ecocriticism and Narrative Theory: An Introduction.” English Studies 99.4 (2018): 355-365.Marcussen, Marlene. Reading for Space: An Encounter between Narratology and New Materialism in the Works of Virgina Woolf and Georges Perec. PhD diss. University of Southern Denmark, 2016.Oppermann, Serpil. “Introducing Migrant Ecologies in an (Un)Bordered World.” ISLE 24.2 (2017): 243–256.Oram, Richard. “Trackless, Impenetrable, and Underdeveloped? Roads, Colonization and Environmental Transformation in the Anglo-Scottish Border Zone, c. 1100 to c. 1300.” Roadworks: Medieval Britain, Medieval Roads. Eds. Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2016.Rodriquez, David. “Narratorhood in the Anthropocene: Strange Stranger as Narrator-Figure in The Road and Here.” English Studies 99.4 (2018): 366-382.Savory, Elaine. “Toward a Caribbean Ecopoetics: Derek Walcott’s Language of Plants.” Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment. Eds. Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. 80-96.Sebald, W.G. The Rings of Saturn. Trans. Michael Hulse. New York: New Directions, 1998.Serres, Michel. Malfeasance: Appropriating through Pollution? Trans. Anne-Marie Feenberg-Dibon. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2011.Walcott, Derek. Selected Poems. Ed. Edward Baugh. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. 3-16.Yates, Julian. “Sheep Tracks—A Multi-Species Impression.” Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects. Ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Washington, D.C.: Oliphaunt Books, 2012.

Religious tourism and pilgrimage are theocentric terms that refer to people visiting holy and sacred shrines seeking; God’s indulgence and absolution of sins in the afterlife, spiritual and physical healing, regeneration of the soul and spirit, acquiring new religious and cultural experiences, a shorter stay in the purgatory and a transcendence of one’s former frame of reference. Religious tourism and pilgrimage have a strong potential to: create quality employment opportunities, increase local community resilience against poverty, curtail rural flight migration, foster mutual understanding, respect, peace and harmony among tourist, pilgrims, local communities, and even countries, and importantly may contribute to rapid national growth and development. The study used a multiple paradigm approach to investigate motives for visiting ZCC Mbungo Shrine in Zimbabwe by religious tourists and pilgrims. Data was collected using representative focus group made up of 10 participants and revelatory focus group consisting of 5 participants. Our findings show that religious tourists and pilgrims to ZCC Mbungo Shrine are motivated by the quest for spiritual and physical healing, new cultural experiences, piety, religious affiliation and veneration of the founding member. The study recommends improving tourist facilitating conditions, promotion of eco-tourism and cultural tourism alongside religious tourism and pilgrimages to the shrine.

Becher, Matthias / Stephan Conermann / Linda Dohmen (Hrsg.), Macht und Herrschaft transkulturell. Vormoderne Konfigurationen und Perspektiven der Forschung (Macht und Herrschaft, 1), Göttingen 2018, V&amp;R unipress / Bonn University Press, 349 S., € 50,00. (Matthias Maser, Erlangen) Riello, Giorgio / Ulinka Rublack (Hrsg.), The Right to Dress. Sumptuary Laws in a Global Perspective, c. 1200 – 1800, Cambridge [u. a.] 2019, Cambridge University Press, XVII u. 505 S. / Abb., £ 95,00. (Kim Siebenhüner, Jena) Briggs, Chris / Jaco Zuijderduijn (Hrsg.), Land and Credit. Mortgages in the Medieval and Early Modern European Countryside (Palgrave Studies in the History of Finance), Cham 2018, Palgrave Macmillan, 339 S. / graph. Darst., € 149,79. (Anke Sczesny, Augsburg) Rogger, Philippe / Regula Schmid (Hrsg.), Miliz oder Söldner? Wehrpflicht und Solddienst in Stadt, Republik und Fürstenstaat 13.–18. Jahrhundert (Krieg in der Geschichte, 111), Paderborn 2019, Schöningh, XI u. 282 S. / Abb., € 64,00. (Tim Nyenhuis, Düsseldorf) Seggern, Harm von (Hrsg.), Residenzstädte im Alten Reich (1300 – 1800). Ein Handbuch, Abteilung I: Analytisches Verzeichnis der Residenzstädte, Teil 1: Nordosten (Residenzenforschung. Neue Folge: Stadt und Hof, I.1), Ostfildern 2018, Thorbecke, XVII u. 687 S., € 85,00. (Martin Fimpel, Wolfenbüttel) Walsh, Michael J. K. (Hrsg.), Famagusta Maritima. Mariners, Merchants, Pilgrims and Mercenaries (Brill’s Studies in Maritime History, 7), Leiden / Boston 2019, Brill, XX u. 300 S. / Abb., € 116,00. (Jann M. Witt, Laboe) Hodgson, Natasha R. / Katherine J. Lewis / Matthew M. Mesley (Hrsg.), Crusading and Masculinities (Crusades – Subsidia, 13), London / New York 2019, Routledge, XII u. 365 S., £ 110,00. (Melanie Panse-Buchwalter, Kassel) Pálosfalvi, Tamás, From Nicopolis to Mohács. A History of Ottoman-Hungarian Warfare, 1389 – 1526 (The Ottoman Empire and Its Heritage, 63), Leiden / Boston 2018, Brill, XIV u. 504 S. / Abb., € 135,00. (Sándor Papp, Szeged) Rubin, Miri, Cities of Strangers. Making Lives in Medieval Europe (The Wiles Lectures), Cambridge [u. a.] 2020, Cambridge University Press, XV u. 189 S. / Abb., £ 18,99. (Uwe Israel, Dresden) Hummer, Hans, Visions of Kinship in Medieval Europe (Oxford Studies in Medieval European History), Oxford / New York 2018, Oxford University Press, 380 S., £ 65,00. (Wolfgang P. Müller, New York) Kuehn, Thomas, Family and Gender in Renaissance Italy 1300 – 1600, Cambridge / New York 2017, Cambridge University Press, XV u. 387 S., £ 24,99. (Inken Schmidt-Voges, Marburg) Houlbrooke, Ralph, Love and Dishonour in Elizabethan England. Two Families and a Failed Marriage, Woodbridge 2018, The Boydell Press, XX u. 272 S., £ 50,00. (Inken Schmidt-Voges, Marburg) Müller, Miriam, Childhood, Orphans and Underage Heirs in Medieval Rural England. Growing up in the Village (Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood), Cham 2019, Palgrave Macmillan, XII u. 213 S. / Abb., € 74,89. (Carola Föller, Erlangen) Parsons, Ben, Punishment and Medieval Education, Cambridge 2018, D. S. Brewer, VII u. 252 S. / Abb., £ 60,00. (Benjamin Müsegades, Heidelberg) Boer, Jan-Hendryk de / Marian Füssel / Maximilian Schuh (Hrsg.), Universitäre Gelehrtenkultur vom 13.–16. Jahrhundert. Ein interdisziplinäres Quellen- und Methodenhandbuch, Stuttgart 2018, Steiner, 589 S. / Abb., € 78,00. (Caspar Hirschi, St. Gallen) Jones, Robert W. / Peter Coss (Hrsg.), A Companion to Chivalry, Woodbridge / Rochester 2019, The Boydell Press, IX u. 338 S. / Abb., £ 60,00. (Stefan G. Holz, Heidelberg / Stuttgart) Schreier, Gero, Ritterhelden. Rittertum, Autonomie und Fürstendienst in niederadligen Lebenszeugnissen des 14. bis 16. Jahrhunderts (Mittelalter-Forschungen, 58), Ostfildern 2019, Thorbecke, 393 S., € 52,00. (Gerhard Fouquet, Kiel) Sabaté, Flocel (Hrsg.), The Crown of Aragon. A Singular Mediterranean Empire (Brill’s Companions to European History, 12), Leiden / Boston 2017, Brill, XIII u. 364 S., € 223,00. (Nikolas Jaspert, Heidelberg) Jostkleigrewe, Georg, Monarchischer Staat und „Société politique“. Politische Interaktion und staatliche Verdichtung im spätmittelalterlichen Frankreich (Mittelalter-Forschungen, 56), Ostfildern 2018, Thorbecke, 493 S. / Abb., € 58,00. (Gisela Naegle, Gießen / Paris) Flemmig, Stephan, Die Bettelorden im hochmittelalterlichen Böhmen und Mähren (1226 – 1346) (Jenaer mediävistische Vorträge, 7), Stuttgart 2018, Steiner, 126 S., € 29,00. (Jörg Seiler, Erfurt) Bendheim, Amelie / Heinz Sieburg (Hrsg.), Prag in der Zeit der Luxemburger Dynastie. Literatur, Religion und Herrschaftskulturen zwischen Bereicherung und Behauptung (Interkulturalität, 17), Bielefeld 2019, transcript, 197 S. / Abb., € 34,99. (Julia Burkhardt, München) The Countryside of Hospitaller Rhodes 1306 – 1423. Original Texts and English Summaries, hrsg. v. Anthony Luttrell / Gregory O’Malley (The Military Religious Orders: History, Sources, and Memory), London / New York 2019, Routledge, IX u. 323 S., £ 105,00. (Alexander Beihammer, Notre Dame) Neugebauer-Wölk, Monika, Kosmologische Religiosität am Ursprung der Neuzeit. 1400 – 1450, Paderborn 2019, Schöningh, 838 S., € 168,00. (Heribert Müller, Köln) Välimäki, Reima, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany. The Inquisitor Petrus Zwicker and the Waldensians (Heresy and Inquisition in the Middle Ages, 6), Woodbridge / Rochester 2019, York Medieval Press, XV u. 335 S. / Abb., £ 75,00. (Thomas Scharff, Braunschweig) Machilek, Franz, Jan Hus (um 1372 – 1415). Prediger, Theologe, Reformator (Katholisches Leben und Kirchenreform im Zeitalter der Glaubensspaltung, 78/79), Münster 2019, Aschendorff, 271 S., € 29,90. (Klara Hübner, Brno) Kopietz, Matthias, Ordnung, Land und Leute. Politische Versammlungen im wettinischen Herrschaftsbereich 1438 – 1547 (Studien und Schriften zur Geschichte der Sächsischen Landtage, 6), Ostfildern 2019, Thorbecke, 472 S. / graph. Darst., € 60,00. (Stephan Flemmig, Jena / Leipzig) Erdélyi, Gabriella, Negotiating Violence. Papal Pardons and Everyday Life in East Central Europe (1450 – 1550) (Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions, 213), Leiden / Boston 2018, Brill, X u. 247 S. / Abb., € 129,00. (Gerd Schwerhoff, Dresden) Proske, Veronika, Der Romzug Kaiser Sigismunds (1431 – 1433). Politische Kommunikation, Herrschaftsrepräsentation und -rezeption (Forschungen zur Kaiser- und Papstgeschichte des Mittelalters, 44), Wien / Köln / Weimar 2018, Böhlau, VIII u. 447 S. / Abb., € 50,00. (Karel Hruza, Wien) Leukel, Patrick, „all welt wil auf sein wider Burgundi“. Das Reichsheer im Neusser Krieg 1474/75 (Krieg in der Geschichte, 110), Paderborn 2019, Schöningh, XI u. 594 S. / graph. Darst., € 148,00. (Steffen Krieb, Mainz) Zwart, Pim de / Jan Luiten van Zanden, The Origins of Globalization. World Trade in the Making of the Global Economy, 1500 – 1800 (New Approaches to Economic and Social History), Cambridge [u. a.] 2018, Cambridge University Press, XVI u. 338 S. / Abb., £ 20,99. (Angelika Epple, Bielefeld) Veluwenkamp, Jan. W. / Werner Scheltjens (Hrsg.), Early Modern Shipping and Trade. Novel Approaches Using Sound Toll Registers Online (Brill’s Studies in Maritime History, 5), Leiden / Boston 2018, Brill, XII u. 243 S. / Abb., € 110,00. (Patrick Schmidt, Rostock) Pettigrew, William A. / David Veevers (Hrsg.), The Corporation as a Protagonist in Global History, c. 1550 – 1750 (Global Economic History Series, 16), Leiden / Boston 2019, Brill, X u. 332 S., € 130,00. (Yair Mintzker, Princeton) Biedermann, Zoltán / Anne Gerritsen / Giorgio Riello (Hrsg.), Global Gifts. The Material Culture of Diplomacy in Early Modern Eurasia (Studies in Comparative World History), Cambridge [u. a.] 2018, Cambridge University Press, XVI u. 301 S. / Abb., £ 75,00. (Jan Hennings, Uppsala / Wien) Ginzberg, Eitan, The Destruction of the Indigenous Peoples of Hispano America. A Genocidal Encounter, Brighton / Chicago / Toronto 2019 [zuerst 2018], Sussex Academic Press, XV u. 372 S. / Abb., £ 40,00. (Silke Hensel, Münster) Saladin, Irina, Karten und Mission. Die jesuitische Konstruktion des Amazonasraums im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Historische Wissensforschung, 12), Tübingen 2020, Mohr Siebeck, XX u. 390 S. / Abb., € 69,00. (Christoph Nebgen, Saarbrücken) Verschleppt, verkauft, versklavt. Deutschsprachige Sklavenberichte aus Nordafrika (1550 – 1800). Edition und Kommentar, hrsg. v. Mario Klarer, Wien / Köln / Weimar 2019, Böhlau, 249 S. / Abb., € 40,00. (Stefan Hanß, Manchester) Alfani, Guido / Matteo Di Tullio, The Lion’s Share. Inequality and the Rise of the Fiscal State in Preindustrial Europe (Cambridge Studies in Economic History), Cambridge [u. a.] 2019, Cambridge University Press, XII u. 232 S., £ 31,99. (Peer Vries, Amsterdam) Corens, Liesbeth / Kate Peters / Alexandra Walsham (Hrsg.), Archives and Information in the Early Modern World (Proceedings of the British Academy, 212), Oxford 2018, Oxford University Press, XVIII u. 326 S. / Abb., £ 70,00. (Maria Weber, München) Eickmeyer, Jost / Markus Friedrich / Volker Bauer (Hrsg.), Genealogical Knowledge in the Making. Tools, Practices, and Evidence in Early Modern Europe (Cultures and Practices of Knowledge in History / Wissenskulturen und ihre Praktiken, 1), Berlin / Boston 2019, de Gruyter Oldenbourg, X u. 349 S. / Abb., € 79,95. (Lennart Pieper, Münster) Sittig, Claudius / Christian Wieland (Hrsg.), Die „Kunst des Adels“ in der Frühen Neuzeit (Wolfenbütteler Forschungen, 144), Wiesbaden 2018, Harrassowitz in Kommission, 364 S. / Abb., € 82,00. (Jens Niebaum, Münster) Wall, Heinrich de (Hrsg.), Recht, Obrigkeit und Religion in der Frühen Neuzeit (Historische Forschungen, 118), Berlin 2019, Duncker &amp; Humblot, 205 S., € 89,90. (Cornel Zwierlein, Berlin) Rahn, Thomas / Hole Rößler (Hrsg.), Medienphantasie und Medienreflexion in der Frühen Neuzeit. Festschrift für Jörg Jochen Berns (Wolfenbütteler Forschungen, 157), Wiesbaden 2018, Harrassowitz in Kommission, 419 S. / Abb., € 82,00. (Andreas Würgler, Genf) Berns, Jörg J. / Thomas Rahn (Hrsg.), Projektierte Himmel (Wolfenbütteler Forschungen, 154), Wiesbaden 2019, Harrassowitz in Kommission, 421 S. / Abb., € 86,00. (Claire Gantet, Fribourg / Freiburg) Brock, Michelle D. / Richard Raiswell / David R. Winter (Hrsg.), Knowing Demons, Knowing Spirits in the Early Modern Period (Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic), Cham 2018, Palgrave Macmillan, XV u. 317 S. / Abb., € 96,29. (Rainer Walz, Bochum) Kaplan, Yosef (Hrsg.), Religious Changes and Cultural Transformations in the Early Modern Western Sephardic Communities (Studies in Jewish History and Culture, 54), Leiden / Boston 2019, Brill, XXXVIII u. 616 S. / Abb., € 160,00. (Jorun Poettering, Hamburg) Gebke, Julia, (Fremd)‌Körper. Die Stigmatisierung der Neuchristen im Spanien der Frühen Neuzeit, Wien / Köln / Weimar 2020, Böhlau, 343 S., € 45,00. (Joël Graf, Bern) May, Anne Ch., Schwörtage in der Frühen Neuzeit. Ursprünge, Erscheinungsformen und Interpretationen eines Rituals, Ostfildern 2019, Thorbecke, 286 S. / Abb., € 39,00. (Gabriele Haug-Moritz, Graz) Godsey, William D. / Veronika Hyden-Hanscho (Hrsg.), Das Haus Arenberg und die Habsburgermonarchie. Eine transterritoriale Adelsfamilie zwischen Fürstendienst und Eigenständigkeit (16.–20. Jahrhundert), Regensburg 2019, Schnell &amp; Steiner, 496 S. / Abb., € 69,00. (Arndt Schreiber, Freiburg i. Br.) Hübner, Jonas, Gemein und ungleich. Ländliches Gemeingut und ständische Gesellschaft in einem frühneuzeitlichen Markenverband – Die Essener Mark bei Osnabrück (Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission für Niedersachsen und Bremen, 307), Göttingen 2020, Wallstein, 402 S. / Abb., € 34,00. (Gerd van den Heuvel, Hannover) Lück, Heiner, Alma Leucorea. Eine Geschichte der Universität Wittenberg 1502 bis 1817, Halle a. d. S. 2020, Universitätsverlag Halle-Wittenberg, 368 S. / Abb., € 175,00. (Manfred Rudersdorf, Leipzig) Saak, Eric Leland, Luther and the Reformation of the Later Middle Ages, Cambridge [u. a.] 2017, Cambridge University Press, XII u. 399 S., £ 90,00. (Benedikt Brunner, Mainz) Selderhuis, Herman J. / J. Marius J. Lange van Ravenswaay (Hrsg.), Luther and Calvinism. Image and Reception of Martin Luther in the History and Theology of Calvinism (Refo500 Academic Studies, 42), Göttingen / Bristol 2017, Vandenhoeck &amp; Ruprecht, 547 S. / Abb., € 130,00. (Benedikt Brunner, Mainz) Schilling, Heinz, Karl V. Der Kaiser, dem die Welt zerbrach, München 2020, Beck, 457 S. / Abb., € 29,95. (Martina Fuchs, Wien) Jostmann, Christian, Magellan oder Die erste Umsegelung der Erde, München 2019, Beck, 336 S. / Abb., € 24,95. (Jann M. Witt, Laboe) Lang, Heinrich, Wirtschaften als kulturelle Praxis. Die Florentiner Salviati und die Augsburger Welser auf den Märkten in Lyon (1507 – 1559) (Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Beihefte, 248), Stuttgart 2020, Steiner, 724 S. / graph. Darst., € 99,00. (Oswald Bauer, Kastelruth) Schmidt, Maike, Jagd und Herrschaft. Praxis, Akteure und Repräsentationen der höfischen „vénerie“ unter Franz I. von Frankreich (1515 – 1547), Trier 2019, Verlag für Geschichte und Kultur, 415 S. / Abb., € 29,90. (Nadir Weber, Berlin) Richter, Angie-Sophia, Das Testament der Apollonia von Wiedebach. Stiftungswesen und Armenfürsorge in Leipzig am Vorabend der Reformation (1526 – 1539) (Quellen und Forschungen zur Geschichte der Stadt Leipzig, 18), Leipzig 2019, Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 313 S. / Abb., € 34,00. (Martin Dinges, Stuttgart) Faber, Martin, Sarmatismus. Die politische Ideologie des polnischen Adels im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Deutsches Historisches Institut Warschau. Quellen und Studien, 35), Wiesbaden 2018, Harrassowitz, 525 S., € 88,00. (Damien Tricoire, Trier) Woodcock, Matthew / Cian O’Mahony (Hrsg.), Early Modern Military Identities, 1560 – 1639. Reality and Representation, Woodbridge / Rochester 2019, D. S. Brewer, VI u. 316 S., £ 60,00. (Florian Schönfuß, Oxford) Henry Pier’s Continental Travels, 1595 – 1598, hrsg. v. Brian Mac Cuarta SJ (Camden Fifth Series, 54), Cambridge [u. a.] 2018, Cambridge University Press, XIII u. 238 S. / Karten, £ 44,99. (Michael Maurer, Jena) Scheck, Friedemann, Interessen und Konflikte. Eine Untersuchung zur politischen Praxis im frühneuzeitlichen Württemberg am Beispiel von Herzog Friedrichs Weberwerk (1598 – 1608). (Schriften zur südwestdeutschen Landeskunde, 81) Ostfildern 2020, Thorbecke, XI u. 292 S. / Abb., € 39,00. (Hermann Ehmer, Stuttgart) Scheffknecht, Wolfgang, Kleinterritorium und Heiliges Römisches Reich. Der „Embsische Estat“ und der Schwäbische Reichskreis im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Forschungen zur Geschichte Vorarlbergs. Neue Folge, 13), Konstanz 2018, UVK, 542 S. / Abb., € 59,00. (Jonas Stephan, Bad Sassendorf) Stoldt, Peter H., Diplomatie vor Krieg. Braunschweig-Lüneburg und Schweden im 17. Jahrhundert (Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission für Niedersachsen und Bremen, 303), Göttingen 2020, Wallstein, 488 S. / Abb., € 39,90. (Malte de Vries, Göttingen) Bräuer, Helmut, „… angst vnd noth ist vnser täglich brott …“. Sozial- und mentalitätsgeschichtliche Beobachtungen in Chemnitz während der ersten Hälfte des 17. Jahrhunderts, Leipzig 2019, Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 236 S. / Abb., € 29,00. (Ansgar Schanbacher, Göttingen) Brüser, Joachim, Reichsständische Libertät zwischen kaiserlichem Absolutismus und französischer Hegemonie. Der Rheinbund von 1658, Münster 2020, Aschendorff, XI u. 448 S. / Abb., € 62,00. (Wolfgang Burgdorf, München) Albrecht-Birkner, Veronika / Alexander Schunka (Hrsg.), Pietismus in Thüringen – Pietismus aus Thüringen. Religiöse Reform im Mitteldeutschland des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts (Gothaer Forschungen zur Frühen Neuzeit, 13), Stuttgart 2018, Steiner, 327 S., € 55,00. (Thomas Grunewald, Halle a. d. S.) James, Leonie, The Household Accounts of William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1635 – 1642 (Church of England Record Society, 24), Woodbridge / Rochester 2019, The Boydell Press, XLIII u. 277 S., £ 70,00. (Georg Eckert, Wuppertal / Potsdam) Southcombe, George, The Culture of Dissent in Restoration England. „The Wonders of the Lord“ (Royal Historical Society Studies in History. New Series), Woodbridge / Rochester 2019, The Royal History Society / The Boydell Press, XII u. 197 S., £ 50,00. (Georg Eckert, Wuppertal / Potsdam) McTague, John, Things That Didn’t Happen. Writing, Politics and the Counterhistorical, 1678 – 1743 (Studies in the Eighteenth Century), Woodbridge 2019, The Boydell Press, XI u. 282 S. / Abb., £ 60,00. (Georg Eckert, Wuppertal / Potsdam) McCormack, Matthew, Citizenship and Gender in Britain, 1688 – 1928, London / New York 2019, Routledge, 194 S. / Abb., € 120,00. (Saskia Lettmaier, Kiel) Paul, Tawny, The Poverty of Disaster. Debt and Insecurity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History), Cambridge [u. a.] 2019, Cambridge University Press, XIII u. 285 S. / Abb., £ 75,00. (Martin Dinges, Stuttgart) Fürstabt Celestino Sfondrati von St. Gallen 1696 als Kardinal in Rom, hrsg. v. Peter Erhart, bearb. v. Helena Müller / Christoph Uiting / Federica G. Giordani / Giuanna Beeli / Birgit Heinzle (Itinera Monastica, 2), Wien / Köln / Weimar 2019, Böhlau, 724 S. / Abb., € 75,00. (Volker Reinhardt, Fribourg) Zumhof, Tim, Die Erziehung und Bildung der Schauspieler. Disziplinierung und Moralisierung zwischen 1690 und 1830, Wien / Köln / Weimar 2018, Böhlau, 586 S. / Abb., € 80,00. (Wolf-Dieter Ernst, Bayreuth) Gelléri, Gábor, Lessons of Travel in Eighteenth-Century France. From Grand Tour to School Trips (Studies in the Eighteenth Century), Woodbridge, The Boydell Press 2020, VIII u. 235 S., £ 75,00. (Michael Maurer, Jena) Beckus, Thomas / Thomas Grunewald / Michael Rocher (Hrsg.), Niederadel im mitteldeutschen Raum (um 1700 – 1806) (Quellen und Forschungen zur Geschichte Sachsen-Anhalts, 17), Halle a. d. S. 2019, Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 235 S. / Abb., € 40,00. (Axel Flügel, Bielefeld) Seitschek, Stefan, Die Tagebücher Kaiser Karls VI. Zwischen Arbeitseifer und Melancholie, Horn 2018, Berger, 524 S. / Abb., € 29,90. (Tobias Schenk, Wien) Köntgen, Sonja, Gräfin Gessler vor Gericht. Eine mikrohistorische Studie über Gewalt, Geschlecht und Gutsherrschaft im Königreich Preußen 1750 (Veröffentlichungen aus den Archiven Preußischer Kulturbesitz. Forschungen 14), Berlin 2019, Duncker &amp; Humblot, VIII u. 291 S., € 89,90. (Nicolas Rügge, Hannover) Polli-Schönborn, Marco, Kooperation, Konfrontation, Disruption. Frühneuzeitliche Herrschaft in der alten Eidgenossenschaft vor und während des Leventiner Protestes von 1754/55, Basel 2020, Schwabe, 405 S. / Abb., € 58,00. (Beat Kümin, Warwick) Kubiska-Scharl, Irene / Michael Pölzl, Das Ringen um Reformen. Der Wiener Hof und sein Personal im Wandel (1766 – 1792) (Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Staatsarchivs, 60), Wien 2018, StudienVerlag, 756 S. / graph. Darst., € 49,20. (Simon Karstens, Trier) Kittelmann, Jana / Anne Purschwitz (Hrsg.), Aufklärungsforschung digital. Konzepte, Methoden, Perspektiven (IZEA. Kleine Schriften, 10/2019), Halle a. d. S. 2019, Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 116 S. / Abb., € 10,00. (Simon Karstens, Trier) Willkommen, Alexandra, Alternative Lebensformen. Unehelichkeit und Ehescheidung am Beispiel von Goethes Weimar (Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission für Thüringen. Kleine Reihe, 57), Wien / Köln / Weimar 2019, Böhlau, 437 S. / graph. Darst., € 55,00. (Laila Scheuch, Bonn) Reuter, Simon, Revolution und Reaktion im Reich. Die Intervention im Hochstift Lüttich 1789 – 1791 (Verhandeln, Verfahren, Entscheiden, 5), Münster 2019, Aschendorff, VIII u. 444 S., € 62,00. (Horst Carl, Gießen) Eichmann, Flavio, Krieg und Revolution in der Karibik. Die kleinen Antillen, 1789 – 1815 (Pariser Historische Studien, 112), Berlin / Boston 2019, de Gruyter Oldenbourg, 553 S., € 54,95. (Damien Tricoire, Trier)

IntroductionThe wandering narrator is a familiar figure in contemporary literature. This narrator is often searching for something abstract or ill-defined connected to the past and the traces it leaves behind. The works of the German writer W.G. Sebald inspired a number of theories on the various ways a writer might intersect place, memory, and representation through seemingly aimless wandering. This article expands on the scholarship around Sebald’s themes to identify two modes of investigative wandering: (1) wandering “in place”, through a city where a past trauma has occurred, and (2) wandering “out of place”, which occurs when a wanderer encounters a city that is a holding place of traumas experienced elsewhere.Sebald’s narrators mostly conduct wandering “in place” because they are actively immersed in, and wandering through, locations that trigger both memory and thought. In this article, after exploring both Sebald’s work and theories of place in literature, I analyse another example of wandering in place, in the Paris of Patrick Modiano’s novel, The Search Warrant (2014). I conclude by discussing how I encountered this mode of wandering myself when in Moscow and St Petersburg researching my first novel, The Memory Artist (2016). In contrasting these two modes of wandering, my aim is to contribute further nuance to the interpretation of conceptions of place in literature. By articulating the concept of wandering “out of place”, I identify a category of wanderer and writer who, like myself, finds connection with places and their stories without having a direct encounter with that place. Theories of Place and Wandering in W.G. Sebald’s WorkIn this section, I introduce Sebald as a literary wanderer. Born in the south of Germany in 1944, Sebald is perhaps best known for his four “prose fictions”— Austerlitz published in 2001, The Emigrants published in 1996, The Rings of Saturn published in 1998, and Vertigo published in 2000—all of which blend historiography and fiction in mostly plot-less narratives. These works follow a closely autobiographical narrator as he traverses Europe, visiting people and places connected to Europe’s turbulent twentieth century. He muses on the difficulty of preserving the truths of history and speaking of others’ traumas. Sebald describes how “places do seem to me to have some kind of memory, in that they activate memory in those who look at them” (Sebald quoted in Jaggi). Sebald left his native Germany in 1966 and moved to England, where he lived until his untimely death in a car accident in 2001 (Gussow). His four prose fictions feature the same autobiographical narrator: a middle-aged German man who lives in northern England. The narrator traverses Europe with a compulsion to research, ponder, and ultimately, represent historical catastrophes and traumas that haunt him. Anna MacDonald describes how Sebald’s texts “move freely between history and memory, biography, autobiography and fiction, travel writing and art criticism, scientific observation and dreams, photographic and other textual images” (115). The Holocaust and human displacement are simultaneously at the forefront of the narrator’s preoccupations but rarely referenced directly. This singular approach has caused many commentators to remark that Sebald’s works are “haunted” by these traumatic events (Baumgarten 272).Sebald’s narrators are almost constantly on the move, obsessively documenting the locations, buildings, and people they encounter or the history of that place. As such, it is helpful to consider Sebald’s wandering narrator through theories of landscape and its representation in art. Heike Polster describes the development of landscape from a Western European conception and notes how “the landscape idea in art and the techniques of linear perspective appear simultaneously” (88). Landscape is distinguished from raw physical environment by the role of the human mind: “landscape was perceived and constructed by a disembodied outsider” (88). As such, landscape is something created by our perceptions of place. Ulrich Baer makes a similar observation: “to look at a landscape as we do today manifests a specifically modern sense of self-understanding, which may be described as the individual’s ability to view herself within a larger, and possibly historical, context” (43).These conceptions of landscape suggest a desire for narrative. The attempt to fix our understanding of a place according to what we know about it, its past, and our own relationship to it, makes landscape inextricable from representation. To represent a landscape is to offer a representation of subjective perception. This understanding charges the landscapes of literature with meaning: the perceptions of a narrator who wanders and encounters place can be studied for their subjective properties.As I will highlight through the works of Sebald and Modiano, the wandering narrator draws on a number of sources in their representations of both place and memory, including their perceptions as they walk in place, the books they read, the people they encounter, as well as their subjective and affective responses. This multi-dimensional process aligns with Polster’s contention that “landscape is as much the external world as it is a visual and philosophical principle, a principle synthesizing the visual experience of material and geographical surroundings with our knowledge of the structures, characteristics, and histories of these surroundings” (70). The narrators in the works of Sebald and Modiano undertake this synthesised process as they traverse their respective locations. As noted, although their objectives are often vague, part of their process of drawing together experience and knowledge is a deep desire to connect with the pasts of those places. The particular kind of wanderer “in place” who I consider here is preoccupied with the past. In his study of Sebald’s work, Christian Moser describes how “the task of the literary walker is to uncover and decipher the hidden track, which, more often than not, is buried in the landscape like an invisible wound” (47-48). Pierre Nora describes places of memory, lieux de memoire, as locations “where memory crystallizes and secretes itself”. Interest in such sites arises when “consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with a sense that memory has been torn—but torn in such a way as to pose the problem of the embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists” (Nora 7).Encountering and contemplating sites of memory, while wandering in place, can operate simultaneously as encounters with traumatic stories. According to Tim Ingold, “the landscape is constituted as an enduring record of—and testimony to—the lives and works of past generations who have dwelt within it, and in doing so, have left something of themselves […] landscape tells – or rather is – a story” (153). Such occurrences can be traced in the narratives of Sebald and Modiano, as their narrators participate both in the act of reading the story of landscape, through their wandering and their research about a place, but also in contributing to the telling of those stories, by inserting their own layer of subjective experience. In this way, the synthesised process of landscape put forward by Polster takes place.To perceive the landscape in this way is to “carry out an act of remembrance” (Ingold 152). The many ways that a person experiences and represents the stories that make up a landscape are varied and suited to a wandering methodology. MacDonald, for example, characterises Sebald’s methodology of “representation-via-digressive association”, which enables “writer, narrator, and reader alike to draw connections in, and through, space between temporally distant historical events and the monstrous geographies they have left in their wake” (MacDonald 116).Moser observes that Sebald’s narrative practice suggests an opposition between the pilgrimage, “devoted to worship, asceticism, and repentance”, and tourism, aimed at “entertainment and diversion” (Moser 37). If the pilgrim contemplates the objects, monuments, and relics they encounter, and the tourist is “given to fugitive consumption of commercialized sights”, Sebald’s walker is a kind of post-traumatic wanderer who “searches for the traces of a silent catastrophe that constitutes the obverse of modernity and its history of progress” (Moser 37). Thus, wandering tends to “cultivate a certain mode of perception”, one that is highly attuned to the history of a place, that looks for traces rather than common sites of consumption (Moser 37).It is worth exploring the motivations of a wandering narrator. Sebald’s narrator in The Rings of Saturn (2002) provides us with a vague impetus for his wandering: “in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that had taken hold of me after the completion of a long stint of work” (3). In Vertigo (2002), Sebald’s narrator walks with seemingly little purpose, resulting in a sense of confusion or nausea alluded to in the book’s title: “so what else could I do … but wander aimlessly around until well into the night”. On the next page, he refers again to his “aimlessly wandering about the city”, which he continues until he realises that his shoes have fallen apart (35-37). What becomes apparent from such comments is that the process of wandering is driven by mostly subconscious compulsions. The restlessness of Sebald’s wandering narrators represents their unease about our capacity to forget the history of a place, and thereby lose something intangible yet vital that comes from recognising traumatic pasts.In Sebald’s work, if there is any logic to the wanderer’s movement, it is mostly hidden from them while wandering. The narrator of Vertigo, after days of wandering through northern Italian cities, remarks that “if the paths I had followed had been inked in, it would have seemed as though a man had kept trying out new tracks and connections over and over, only to be thwarted each time by the limitations of his reason, imagination or willpower” (Sebald, Vertigo 34). Moser writes how “the hidden order that lies behind the peripatetic movement becomes visible retroactively – only after the walker has consulted a map. It is the map that allows Sebald to decode the ‘writing’ of his steps” (48). Wandering in place enables digressions and preoccupations, which then constitute the landscape ultimately represented. Wandering and reading the map of one’s steps afterwards form part of the same process: the attempt to piece together—to create a landscape—that uncovers lost or hidden histories. Sebald’s Vertigo, divided into four parts, layers the narrator’s personal wandering through Italy, Austria, and Germany, with the stories of those who were there before him, including the writers Stendhal, Kafka, and Casanova. An opposing factor to memory is a landscape’s capacity to forget; or rather, since landscape conceived here is a construction of our own minds, to reflect our own amnesia. Lewis observes that Sebald’s narrator in Vertigo “is disturbed by the suppression of history evident even in the landscape”. Sebald’s narrator describes Henri Beyle (the writer Stendhal) and his experience visiting the location of the Battle of Marengo as such:The difference between the images of the battle which he had in his head and what he now saw before him as evidence that the battle had in fact taken place occasioned in him a vertiginous sense of confusion […] In its shabbiness, it fitted neither with his conception of the turbulence of the Battle of Marengo nor the vast field of the dead on which he was now standing, alone with himself, like one meeting his doom. (17-18)The “vertiginous sense of confusion” signals a preoccupation with attempting to interpret sites of memory and, importantly, what Nora calls a “consciousness of a break with the past” (Nora 7) that characterises an interest in lieux de memoire. The confusion and feeling of unknowing is, I suggest, a characteristic of a wandering narrator. They do not quite know what they are looking for, nor what would constitute a finished wandering experience. This lack of resolution is a hallmark of the wandering narrative. A parallel can be drawn here with trauma fiction theory, which categorises a particular kind of literature that aims to recognise and represent the ethical and psychological impediments to representing trauma (Whitehead). Baumgarten describes the affective response to Sebald’s works:Here there are neither answers nor questions but a haunted presence. Unresolved, fragmented, incomplete, relying on shards for evidence, the narrator insists on the inconclusiveness of his experience: rather than arriving at a conclusion, narrator and reader are left disturbed. (272)Sebald’s narrators are illustrative literary wanderers. They demonstrate a conception of landscape that theorists such as Polster, Baer, and Ingold articulate: landscapes tell stories for those who investigate them, and are constituted by a synthesis of personal experience, the historical record, and the present condition of a place. This way of encountering a place is necessarily fragmented and can be informed by the tenets of trauma fiction, which seeks ways of representing traumatic histories by resisting linear narratives and conclusive resolutions. Modiano: Wandering in Place in ParisModiano’s The Search Warrant is another literary example of wandering in place. This autobiographical novel similarly illustrates the notion of landscape as a construction of a narrator who wanders through cities and forms landscape through an amalgamation of perception, knowledge, and memory.Although Modiano’s wandering narrator appears to be searching the Paris of the 1990s for traces of a Jewish girl, missing since the Second World War, he is also conducting an “aimless” wandering in search of traces of his own past in Paris. The novel opens with the narrator reading an old newspaper article, dated 1942, and reporting a missing fourteen-year-old girl in Paris. The narrator becomes consumed with a need to learn the fate of the girl. The search also becomes a search for his own past, as the streets of Paris from which Dora Bruder disappeared are also the streets his father worked among during the Nazi Occupation of Paris. They are also the same streets along which the narrator walked as an angst-ridden youth in the 1960s.Throughout the novel, the narrator uses a combination of facts uncovered by research, documentary evidence, and imagination, which combine with his own memories of walking in Paris. Although the fragmentation of sources creates a sense of uncertainty, together there is an affective weight, akin to Sebald’s “haunted presence”, in the layers Modiano’s narrator compiles. One chapter opens with an entry from the Clignancourt police station logbook, which records the disappearance of Dora Bruder:27 December 1941. Bruder, Dora, born Paris.12, 25/2/26, living at 41 Boulevard Ornano.Interview with Bruder, Ernest, age 42, father. (Modiano 69)However, the written record is ambiguous. “The following figures”, the narrator continues, “are written in the margin, but I have no idea what they stand for: 7029 21/12” (Modiano 69). Moreover, the physical record of the interview with Dora’s father is missing from the police archives. All he knows is that Dora’s father waited thirteen days before reporting her disappearance, likely wary of drawing attention to her: a Jewish girl in Occupied Paris. Confronted by uncertainty, the narrator recalls his own experience of running away as a youth in Paris: “I remember the intensity of my feelings while I was on the run in January 1960 – an intensity such as I have seldom known. It was the intoxication of cutting all ties at a stroke […] Running away – it seems – is a call for help and occasionally a form of suicide” (Modiano 71). The narrator’s construction of landscape is multi-layered: his past, Dora’s past, his present. Overhanging this is the history of Nazi-occupied Paris and the cultural memory of France’s collaboration with Nazi Germany.With the aid of other police documents, the narrator traces Dora’s return home, and then her arrest and detainment in the Tourelles barracks in Paris. From Tourelles, detainees were deported to Drancy concentration camp. However, the narrator cannot confirm whether Dora was deported to Drancy. In the absence of evidence, the narrator supplies other documents: profiles of those known to be deported, in an attempt to construct a story.Hena: I shall call her by her forename. She was nineteen … What I know about Hena amounts to almost nothing: she was born on 11 December 1922 at Pruszkow in Poland, and she lived at no. 42 Rue Oberkampf, the steeply sloping street I have so often climbed. (111)Unable to make conclusions about Dora’s story, the narrator is drawn back to a physical location: the Tourelles barracks. He describes a walk he took there in 1996: “Rue des Archives, Rue de Bretagne, Rue des-Filles-du-Calvaire. Then the uphill slope of the Rue Oberkampf, where Hena had lived” (Modiano 124). The narrator combines what he experiences in the city with the documentary evidence left behind, to create a landscape. He reaches the Tourelles barracks: “the boulevard was empty, lost in a silence so deep I could hear the rustling of the planes”. When he sees a sign that says “MILITARY ZONE. FILMING OR PHOTOGRAPHY PROHIBITED”, the cumulative effect of his solitary and uncertain wandering results in despair at the difficulty of preserving the past: “I told myself that nobody remembers anything anymore. A no-man’s-land lay beyond that wall, a zone of emptiness and oblivion” (Modiano 124). The wandering process here, including the narrator’s layering of his own experience with Hena’s life, the lack of resolution, and the wandering narrator’s disbelief at the seemingly incongruous appearance of a place today in relation to its past, mirrors the feeling of Sebald’s narrator at the site of the Battle of Marengo, quoted above.Earlier in the novel, after frustrated attempts to find information about Dora’s mother and father, the narrator reflects that “they are the sort of people who leave few traces. Virtually anonymous” (Modiano 23). He remarks that Dora’s parents are “inseparable from those Paris streets, those suburban landscapes where, by chance, I discovered they had lived” (Modiano 23). There is a disjunction between knowledge and something deeper, the undefined impetus that drives the narrator to walk, to search, and therefore to write: “often, what I know about them amounts to no more than a simple address. And such topographical precision contrasts with what we shall never know about their life—this blank, this mute block of the unknown” (Modiano 23). This contrast of topographical precision and the “unknown” echoes the feeling of Sebald’s narrator when contemplating sites of memory. One may wander “in place” yet still feel a sense of confusion and gaps in knowledge: this is, I suggest, an intended aesthetic effect by both authors. Reader and narrator alike feel a sense of yearning and melancholy as a result of the narrator’s wandering. Wandering out of Place in Moscow and St PetersburgWhen I travelled to Russia in 2015, I sought to document, with a Sebaldian wandering methodology, processes of finding memory both in and out of place. Like Sebald and Modiano, I was invested in hidden histories and the relationship between the physical environment and memory. Yet unlike those authors, I focused my wandering mostly on places that reflected or referenced events that occurred elsewhere rather than events that happened in that specific place. As such, I was wandering out of place.The importance of memory, both in and out of place, is a central concept in my novel The Memory Artist. The narrator, Pasha, reflects the concerns of current and past members of Russia’s civic organisation named Memorial, which seeks to document and preserve the memory of victims of Communism. Contemporary activists lament that in modern Russia the traumas of the Gulag labour camps, collectivisation, and the “Terror” of executions under Joseph Stalin, are inadequately commemorated. In a 2012 interview, Irina Flige, co-founder of the civic body Memorial Society in St Petersburg, encapsulated activists’ disappointment at seeing burial sites of Terror victims fall into oblivion:By the beginning of 2000s these newly-found sites of mass burials had been lost. Even those that had been marked by signs were lost for a second time! Just imagine: a place was found [...] people came and held vigils in memory of those who were buried there. But then this generation passed on and a new generation forgot the way to these sites – both literally and metaphorically. (Flige quoted in Karp)A shift in generation, and a culture of secrecy or inaction surrounding efforts to preserve the locations of graves or former labour camps, perpetuate a “structural deficit of knowledge”, whereby knowledge of the physical locations of memory is lost (Anstett 2). This, in turn, affects the way people and societies construct their memories. When sites of past trauma are not documented or acknowledged as such, it is more difficult to construct a narrative about those places, particularly those that confront and document a violent past. Physical absence in the landscape permits a deficit of storytelling.This “structural deficit of knowledge” is exacerbated when sites of memory are located in distant locations. The former Soviet labour camps and locations of some mass graves are scattered across vast locations far from Russia’s main cities. Yet for some, those cities now act as holding environments for the memory of lost camp locations, mass graves, and histories. For example, a monument in Moscow may commemorate victims of an overseas labour camp. Lieux de memoire shift from being “in place” to existing “out of place”, in monuments and memorials. As I walked through Moscow and St Petersburg, I had the sensation I was wandering both in and out of place, as I encountered the histories of memories physically close but also geographically distant.For example, I arrived early one morning at the Lubyanka building in central Moscow, a pre-revolutionary building with yellow walls and terracotta borders, the longstanding headquarters of the Soviet and now Russian secret police (image 1). Many victims of the worst repressive years under Stalin were either shot here or awaited deportation to Gulag camps in Siberia and other remote areas. The place is both a site of memory and one that gestures to traumatic pasts inflicted elsewhere.Image 1: The Lubyanka, in Central MoscowA monument to victims of political repression was erected near the Lubyanka Building in 1990. The monument takes the form of a stone taken from the Solovetsky Islands, an archipelago in the far north, on the White Sea, and the location of the Solovetsky Monastery that Lenin turned into a prison camp in 1921 (image 2). The Solovetsky Stone rests in view of the Lubyanka. In the 1980s, the stone was taken by boat to Arkhangelsk and then by train to Moscow. The wanderer encounters memory in place, in the stone and building, and also out of place, in the signified trauma that occurred elsewhere. Wandering out of place thus has the potential to connect a wanderer, and a reader, to geographically remote histories, not unlike war memorials that commemorate overseas battles. This has important implications for the preservation of stories. The narrator of The Memory Artist reflects that “the act of taking a stone all the way from Solovetsky to Moscow … was surely a sign that we give things and objects and matter a little of our own minds … in a way I understood that [the stone’s] presence would be a kind of return for those who did not, that somehow the stone had already been there, in Moscow” (Brabon 177).Image 2: The Monument to Victims of Political Repression, Near the LubyankaIn some ways, wandering out of place is similar to the examples of wandering in place considered here: in both instances the person wandering constructs a landscape that is a synthesis of their present perception, their individual history, and their knowledge of the history of a place. Yet wandering out of place offers a nuanced understanding of wandering by revealing the ways one can encounter the history, trauma, and memory that occur in distant places, highlighting the importance of symbols, memorials, and preserved knowledge. Image 3: Reflectons of the LubyankaConclusionThe ways a writer encounters and represents the stories that constitute a landscape, including traumatic histories that took place there, are varied and well-suited to a wandering methodology. There are notable traits of a wandering narrator: the digressive, associative form of thinking and writing, the unmapped journeys that are, despite themselves, full of compulsive purpose, and the lack of finality or answers inherent in a wanderer’s narrative. Wandering permits an encounter with memory out of place. The Solovetsky Islands remain a place I have never been, yet my encounter with the symbolic stone at the Lubyanka in Moscow lingers as a historical reminder. This sense of never arriving, of not reaching answers, echoes the narrators of Sebald and Modiano. Continued narrative uncertainty generates a sense of perpetual wandering, symbolic of the writer’s shadowy task of representing the past.ReferencesAnstett, Elisabeth. “Memory of Political Repression in Post-Soviet Russia: The Example of the Gulag.” Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence, 13 Sep. 2011. 2 Aug. 2019 <https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/memory-political-repression-post-soviet-russia-example-gulag>.Baer, Ulrich. “To Give Memory a Place: Holocaust Photography and the Landscape Tradition.” Representations 69 (2000): 38–62.Baumgarten, Murray. “‘Not Knowing What I Should Think:’ The Landscape of Postmemory in W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 5.2 (2007): 267–87.Brabon, Katherine. The Memory Artist. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2016.Gussow, Mel. “W.G. Sebald, Elegiac German Novelist, Is Dead at 57.” The New York Times 15 Dec. 2001. 2 Aug. 2019 <https://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/15/books/w-g-sebald-elegiac-german-novelist-is-dead-at-57.html>.Ingold, Tim. “The Temporality of the Landscape.” World Archaeology 25.2 (1993): 152–174.Jaggi, Maya. “The Last Word: An Interview with WG Sebald.” The Guardian 22 Sep. 2001. 2 Aug. 2019 <www.theguardian.com/books/2001/sep/22/artsandhumanities.highereducation>.Karp, Masha. “An Interview with Irina Flige.” RightsinRussia.com 11 Apr. 2012. 2 Aug. 2019 <http://www.rightsinrussia.info/archive/interviews-1/irina-flige/masha-karp>.Lewis, Tess. “WG Sebald: The Past Is Another Country.” New Criterion 20 (2001).MacDonald, Anna. “‘Pictures in a Rebus’: Puzzling Out W.G. Sebald’s Monstrous Geographies.” In Monstrous Spaces: The Other Frontier. Eds. Niculae Liviu Gheran and Ken Monteith. Oxford: Interdisciplinary Press, 2013. 115–25.Modiano, Patrick. The Search Warrant. Trans. Joanna Kilmartin. London: Harvill Secker, 2014.Moser, Christian. “Peripatetic Liminality: Sebald and the Tradition of the Literary Walk.” In The Undiscover’d Country: W.G. Sebald and the Poetics of Travel. Ed. Markus Zisselsberger. Rochester New York: Camden House, 2010. 37–62. Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire.” Representations 26: (Spring 1989): 7–24.Polster, Heike. The Aesthetics of Passage: The Imag(in)ed Experience of Time in Thomas Lehr, W.G. Sebald, and Peter Handke. Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2009.Sebald, W.G. The Rings of Saturn. Trans. Michael Hulse. London: Vintage, 2002. ———. Vertigo. Trans. Michael Hulse. London: Vintage, 2002.Whitehead, Anne. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.