Visiting England’s Cathedrals from the Reformation to the Early Nineteenth Century

Abstract

In 1538 pilgrimage to all shrines was outlawed in England, and pilgrimages to English cathedrals were not revived until the second half of the nineteenth century. This chapter examines that three-century gap, suggesting that attempts to hunt down faint traces in the hope of finding surviving traditions of pilgrimage or the continued veneration of former cultic objects such as shrine bases are chasing a mirage. Instead, the chapter offers a history of visiting English cathedrals from the sixteenth-century Reformation to the early nineteenth century, suggesting that there were four types of visitors: the tomb hunter, the history seeker, the musical aficionado, and the architectural critic. Nevertheless, it is important to put such visiting in the context of other reasons to attend a cathedral, including for worship, as a litigant in a consistory court, and for recreation, and to consider visiting in terms of the diverse and changing functions of a cathedral, rather than in essentialist categories of religious pilgrim or secular tourist. Moreover, the chapter argues that a study of English cathedral visiting challenges the traditional model whereby modern tourism evolved from medieval pilgrimage, and suggests instead overlapping modes of visiting that intersected and clashed, both with one another and with the nature or roles of a cathedral.