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IMC 2018: Sessions

Session 244: Pilgrim Libraries, II: Remembering Pilgrimage and Pilgrims

Monday 2 July 2018, 14.15-15.45

Sponsor:Leverhulme International Research Network 'Pilgrim Libraries - Books & Reading on the Medieval Routes to Rome & Jerusalem'
Organiser:Philip Booth, Department of History, Politics & Philosophy, Manchester Metropolitan University
Moderator/Chair:Laura Grazia Di Stefano, Department of History, University of Nottingham
Paper 244-aRicoldus de Monte Crucis and His Ideal Reader
(Language: English)
Martin M. Bauer, Institut für Sprachen und Literaturen, Universität Innsbruck
Index terms: Crusades, Language and Literature - Latin
Paper 244-bWho Is This Guy?: Remembering Pilgrims in the Later Medieval Period
(Language: English)
Philip Booth, Department of History, Politics & Philosophy, Manchester Metropolitan University
Index terms: Historiography - Medieval, Language and Literature - Comparative, Manuscripts and Palaeography
Paper 244-cMemory and Travel in Late Medieval Pilgrims' Descriptions from the Low Countries
(Language: English)
Peter Stabel, Centrum voor Stadsgeschiedenis, Universiteit Antwerpen
Index terms: Language and Literature - Dutch, Literacy and Orality, Social History
Abstract

Pilgrimage Literature played a vital role in the preservation of information about space and place, but it also played an important role in preserving the memories of individual pilgrims' experiences and their identities. This panel seeks to explore the ways in which pilgrims and pilgrimage were remembered in pilgrimage literature. The first paper aims at explore the part of the reader in Ricoldus de Monte Crucis' Epistole ad Ecclesiam triumphantem and the Liber Peregrinationis. Based on a close reading of the text, it will be argued that Ricoldus most likely intended his ideal reader to be already acquainted with the situation in the Middle East and with the teachings of Islam through earlier polemic literature and travel accounts, and to read his works against this background. The second paper will investigate the way in which 14th and 15th-century readers remembered the 13th-century pilgrim Thietmar and the way in which these readers invented identities for Thietmar to add authority to his account. The final paper will investigate through a sample of about 30 descriptions of pilgrimages to Jerusalem written by authors from the Low Countries in the period 1430-1530 what role memory has in the voyage itself and in the construction of the narrative..