Artículos de revistas sobre el tema "Christian pilgrims and pilgrimages – Poetry"

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 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.

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.

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.

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

Abstract The poems published and studied here - most of them for the first time - represent literary tastes of East Syriac educated circles of the Ottoman period. These text collections appeared as later additions in the manuscripts written by ʿAbdīšōʿ of Gāzartā, the Uniate East Syriac Church poet and the second patriarch (1555-1570). These small texts, usually having very little or even nothing to do with the main manuscript text, represent a kind of verse notes made by different pilgrims, and reflect popular poetic tastes of the period. Short poems, especially quatrains, are an ideal form for such poetic activities. Judging from their great number, the spread of short poems was constantly increasing since the time the Syriac Renaissance, when they were first borrowed from Arabic and Persian poetry. Apparently, the multi-lingual poems of the Mongol period (second half of the 13th-early 14thcentury) - the heyday of the Syriac tradition in the Islamic period - were treated as appropriate models to portray contemporary cultural life of the multi-lingual Christian communities in the Ottoman Empire.

Music comes from the Greek language mousike which is translated into Latin misuca. The noun mousik or the adjective mousikos is formed from the root mousa, the name of a goddess of the arts and sciences in Greek myth. The influence of music on Islam and Christianity, music can motivate people to be more enthusiastic in carrying out activities such as work. Trigger enthusiasm to work harder. Because the message contained in the poetry of religious music makes you think about the life of the world and the hereafter, because in life you have to balance between the two, but if you listen to music too often to forget the time you can neglect the five daily prayers for Muslims. The method used in this thesis is a library method through a phenomenological approach. This thesis explores data from two sources, namely primary and secondary. Primary data are the Bible and Al-Qur'an, while secondary data are articles, books, documents and websites. The aim is to find out about music in Islam and Christianity, the influence of music on religious values and to broaden thinking and to increase understanding of music. The results of this study want to know the implementation of music on Islamic and Christian values. Music is part of the daily life of the desert people which functions as a complement to public meetings. The application of music in Islam as a welcome for pilgrims to the holy house of the Kaaba, as a motivator and spirit for warriors and travelers. The musical instruments used are made of wood with themes such as war, victory, romance and religion and turn the lyrics into songs. Meanwhile, in Christianity, music is one of the tools during worship. The music server must understand well the meaning of the liturgical elements and implement them in the singing of musical accompaniment. Therefore music in Islam is makruh, but it can be haram if it has a bad impact on the listener.

<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>

The period from the beginning of the seventh century to the middle of the ninth was decisive for the history of the Byzantine empire. At the beginning of the seventh century, the idea of the Roman, or Byzantine, empire as the political configuration of the Mediterranean world - something that the Emperor Justinian had done his best to restore - still seemed valid, though there were already significant cracks in the edifice. By the end of the seventh century - let alone the middle of the ninth - that was a dream, though a dream to which the Byzantines obstinately clung. For the early years of the seventh century had seen the temporary Persian conquest of the eastern provinces of the Byzantine empire, soon followed by the Arab conquest which the Byzantines were to prove unable to overturn. The impact on the Byzantine empire of these events and the infiltration into the Balkan peninsula by the Slavs, was profound - politically, economically, culturally, and theologically. But the story of this impact is generally presented, both in the sources and in scholarly accounts, from the point of view of the centre, the Queen City, Constantinople. Central to the Byzantine world view, as it emerged with renewed confidence in the middle of the ninth century, was the idea of the empire, and the Emperor, as the guardian of Christian Orthodoxy, which was symbolized in the proclamation of the ‘Triumph of Orthodoxy’ with the final overthrow of iconoclasm in 843, a proclamation that became part of the normal ecclesiastical calendar, celebrated thereafter each year on the first Sunday of Lent. But that Orthodoxy, in its final form, had not been nurtured in Constantinople, nor had the wealth of liturgical poetry that came to celebrate it. Constantinople had reacted to the catastrophe of the early seventh century by plunging into heresy: first, the Christological heresy of monenergism, with its refinement, monothelitism, and then the heresy of iconoclasm, also believed - by both iconoclasts and their opponents - to be ultimately a matter of Christology. The Orthodoxy whose triumph was celebrated from 843 onwards had been defined, and celebrated, in Palestine, the province that had been lost for good to the Byzantines in the 630s. Orthodoxy, in fact, achieved its final definition at the periphery - and defeated periphery at that - and from there took over the centre. In this paper, we are not concerned with Christians who visited the Holy Land as pilgrims, but rather with those who belonged there: mainly monks, both natives and those who came to the Holy Land to live in the complex of monasteries in and around Jerusalem. How and why did these Palestinian monks come to play this role in the wider history of the Christian œcumene?

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.

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. 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