Raimondo and the Magdalen: a twelfth-century Italian pilgrim in Provence

Abstract

The life of Raimondo ‘Palmario’ of Piacenza (d. 1200) has been preserved in a seventeenth-century Latin retranslation of an Italian translation of the original written by Master Rufino in 1212. There seems little reason, however, to doubt its authenticity. It contains brief descriptions of two long-distance pilgrimages undertaken by the saint, to the Holy Land as a very young man, and in the 1170s to Compostela and Provence. In Provence he is said to have venerated Mary Magdalen, whose house at Bethany he had visited with great devotion on his earlier Holy Land pilgrimage, and also Lazarus, Martha and the Maries. If authentic, Master Rufino's narrative preserves an exceptionally early record of a pilgrimage to the Provençal shrines of these saints, including the place of the Magdalen's penitence in Provence, which according to other evidence were only just beginning to be identified. As a citizen of Piacenza Raimondo would have been well-placed to obtain up-to-date word-of-mouth information about shrines and relics. He was also an early visitor to St Antony of Vienne, a popular destination with later Italian pilgrims to Compostela, and to a ‘St Bernard’, who was probably not the saint of Clairvaux, but the Carolingian bishop venerated at Romans-sur-Isère.