Virtual Pilgrimages in the Convent: Imagining Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages by Kathryn M. Rudy (review)

Abstract

Virtual Pilgrimages in Convent: Imagining Jerusalem in Late Middle Ages. By Kathryn M. Rudy. [Disciplina monastica. Studies on Medieval Monastic Life, 8.] (Turnhout: Brepols. 2011. Pp. 475. euro110,00 paperback. ISBN 978-2-50354103-7.)This is a magnificent, revisionist study of an important topic. It examines ways in which nuns, religious women, and even a few laywomen from Low Countries interacted with texts, images, and objects to go on virtual pilgrimage to Rome and Jerusalem during half-century or so before Reformation. This much is well known; but much less so is fact that although many were motivated by lack of resources and opportunity, a few simply did want to compromise their commitment to poverty and enclosure. At book's core is Rudy's sensitive and nuanced discussion of seventeen manuscript texts, dating from fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries, which were copied by nuns or devout women (mostly tertiaries). Several of these texts have been transcribed in their original language, Middle Dutch, with parallel English translation, in extensive appendices on pages 263-448. As a corollary to fact that these accounts, more often than not, drew on diaries or guidebooks written by those who had actually visited sites in Rome and Holy Land, their users-and this word is used advisedly, given passive, modern-day connotations of reader-tended to interpret pilgrimage metaphorically but sought to replicate experience as physically and literally as possible: not just with imagination, but with eyes, hands, and feet (p. 21). A striking manifestation of desire for authenticity was importance of so-called metric relics-the measured distances between holy places . . . which could then be remapped onto local environment to construct personal Passion theaters (p. 97). Rudy sets these phenomena firmly in context of influence in Low Countries of devotio moderna, which she considers responsible only for spurring production of vernacular devotional literature in century up to Reformation but also for the ubiquity of women's vernacular literacy (p. 25) as testified by survival of literally hundreds of manuscripts written in Middle Dutch with feminine pronouns and nouns. Although lion's share of Rudy's attention is paid to ways in which Holy Land was evoked in text and image, as she notes, earliest work that consciously sought to provide a substitute for physical pilgrimage was an early-fifteenth-century text, attributed spuriously to Jean Gerson, which explained how its readers could journey to Rome in their imagination. However, it was only owing to fall of Constantinople in 1453, which made actual travel to Holy Land much more difficult, that Jerusalem became focus of attention. Key to this development was direct association of visits to specific locations where Christ walked, talked, suffered, and was crucified with spiritual reward in form of indulgences. The master impresarios here were friars of Franciscan order who had been given role of custodians of Holy Places by pope in 1342. It was they who transplanted spiritual boon of plenary indulgences-nine of which could be gained in Jerusalem alone (and four of those within single site of Church of Holy Sepulchre)-to Western Europe. …