Virtual Pilgrimage Research Articles

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

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. …

God’s Cell: Christ as Prisoner and Pilgrimage to the Prison of Christ

At the rear of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem is a small chapel known as the Prison of Christ. The Prison of Christ became a popular pilgrimage site for Latin Christians during the Middle Ages, effectively providing a setting for Christ's captivity during the Passion. This article gives an account of the Prison's origins and its early development. It places the 'invention' of the Prison in the context of the Crusaders' adaptation of pre-existing local traditions at the Palestinian holy spaces. At the same time, the Prison reflected western ideas about punishment, incarceration and the rise of Purgatory and pilgrimage. The Crusaders' understanding of the Prison of Christ should thus be considered within the burgeoning culture of imprisonment and tariffed penance in western Europe. The article then turns to pilgrimage writings and travel literature concerning the Prison of Christ, to demonstrate the knowledge of the Prison amongst western Christians and the uses they made of the site. It shows how the Prison was a canonical locus of the pilgrims' route and was then itself incorporated into 'virtual pilgrimages' and itineraries. This essay discloses how medieval sources consistently describe how Christ was held in a prison. The history and use of the Prison of Christ reveals the interplay of western ideas and eastern space. Pilgrimage writing shows how Latin Christians understood and remade a holy site in Jerusalem, both culturally and materially.

The Beatus Maps: The Revelation of the World in the Middle Ages by Sandra Sáenz-López Pérez

Reviewed by: The Beatus Maps: The Revelation of the World in the Middle Ages by Sandra Sáenz-López Pérez Catherine Brown Sáenz-López Pérez, Sandra. The Beatus Maps: The Revelation of the World in the Middle Ages. Tr. Peter Krakenberger and Gerry Coldham. Burgos: Siloé, 2014. 347 pp. ISBN 978-84-941991-1-0 A revision of the author’s prize-winning 2007 Art History dissertation at the Complutense, this volume, published simultaneously in Spanish and English, is the first book-length study of this important medieval cartographical corpus. The maps studied here illustrate the Commentary on the Apocalypse compiled by Beatus of Liébana between 776 and 784 CE. They appear in fourteen manuscripts dating from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, almost half of the twenty-six surviving illuminated codices and fragments of Beatus’s commentary. The maps fall into two groups: small, schematic maps illustrating the tripartite division of the earth among the sons of Noah in the genealogical tables that introduce the commentary in some of the manuscripts, and the spectacular world maps that illustrate the apostolic evangelization of the earth (recounted in Book II, chapter three of the commentary) in impressive illuminations that span a full opening (verso and facing recto). The Beatus mappaemundi form a world unto themselves in medieval cartography. First, unlike the well-known schematic maps (of which the T-in-O [End Page 214] is perhaps the most familiar), the Beatus world maps add to the well-known tripartite structure (Europe, Africa, Asia) a quarta pars mundi inaccessible from the known world because of the sun’s heat. In addition, they are set apart by their unusual apocalyptic context, brilliant color palette and iconographical vocabulary, and, of course, their monumentality. Their size and vivid visual detail makes their contemplation a sort of virtual pilgrimage, and the growth of real-life pilgrimages is recorded in their evolution: the map in the Burgo de Osma Beatus of 1086, for example, introduces the Camino de Santiago in a red line across the Iberian peninsula to the Galician coast (193). In seven chapters and two appendices, Sandra Sáenz-López Pérez offers an extraordinarily detailed and learned descriptive analysis of the entire corpus of Beatus maps and affiliated imagery. Deeply learned in both ancient natural history and modern scholarship on her subject, and possessed of an almost praeternatural familiarity with the maps themselves, the author guides us through the often very subtle variations from codex to codex as the maps are copied in new historical and cultural contexts. After an initial pair of chapters introducing the Beatus commentary and its maps, she turns to a painstaking descriptive analysis of the characteristic elements of the Beatus mappamundi: physical geography (the shape of the world, land masses, ocean, seas, rivers, mountains, islands, deserts) in chapter three; the apostolic lands and the quarta pars mundi in chapter four; legendary elements in chapter five; and finally, the representation of regions, provinces, and cities in chapter six. Each chapter breaks its categories down into their constitutive elements, describing each one (e.g., representations of the Nile or the city of Rome) in detail, and comparing its treatment across the corpus of manuscripts. This kind of minute analysis requires extraordinary patience to generate; it requires some patience to read, too, as the level of detail can be overwhelming. This is, thus, a book to be gratefully consulted more than read sequentially as a single sustained argument. The concluding chapter seven offers a reconstruction of the (lost) original world map designed, the author believes, by Beatus himself, concluding that that map must have “owed a major debt to cartography of Roman origin”; “the maps of Saint-Sever, El Burgo de Osma and Milan”, she continues, “are the ones which have best preserved that debt” (275). Isidorean influences are prominent [End Page 215] too, of course: she discusses the presence of schematic world maps in Iberian manuscripts of the Etymologies (55–57). The remainder of the chapter reviews significant points of transformation in the Beatus world maps’ evolution, linking them to changes in artistic style and prevailing ideology (the presence or absence of cities associated...

The Model that Never Moved: The Case of a Virtual Memory Theater and Its Christian Philosophical Argument, 1700–1732

ArgumentBy the year 1720, one could visit at least three large-scale wooden models of Solomon's Temple in the cities of Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Halle. For short periods of time, the Amsterdam and Hamburg Temple models were exhibited in London, where they attracted a great deal of attention. The Halle model, on the other hand, never moved from its original location: a complex of schools known today as the Francke Foundations (die Franckesche Stiftungen). This article explores the reasons for the Halle model's striking immobility by considering its position at the center of a long-distance network, also referred to as the Danish-Halle mission. In this article I argue that the Halle Temple model functioned as an effigy and memory theater that helped proponents of this mission make a case for the Temple's status as the world's first information technology. Young people moved around the wooden model; they took virtual pilgrimages with it and internalized its infrastructure by memorizing its various components. The model's position at the center of the complex's striking ethnographical collection and curricula exposes relations between the Danish-Halle mission, Christian philosophy, and an irenical turn as public policy in early eighteenth-century Brandenburg-Prussia.

Moving images: photography and the Japanese American incarceration

List of Illustrations ix Foreword Roger Daniels xiii Acknowledgments xv Introduction 1 1. When the Innocents Suffer: Dorothea Lange and the War Relocation Authority 23 2. The Landscape of Loyalty: Ansel Adams's Born Free and Equal 44 3. The Right to Represent: Toyo Miyatake's Photographs of Manzanar 75 4. Art/History: Photographs of Japanese American Incarceration in the Museum 103 5. Virtual Pilgrimage: The Contemporary Incarceration Photography of Patrick Nagatani and Masumi Hayashi 126 Epilogue 155 Notes 163 Bibliography 189 Index 201

Virtual Pilgrimages? Enclosure and the Practice of Piety at St Katherine's Convent, Augsburg

For forty years, the sisters of St Katherine's, Augsburg, resisted the introduction of strict enclosure as a consequence of Dominican reform. This article examines the initial reactions of the sisters, explores the Dominican practice of enclosure and its connections with obedience, and the influence it had on the sisters' spirituality. After the community had finally accepted enclosure, they managed to gain a papal privilege granting them all the indulgences usually acquired through pilgrimage to Rome and commissioned a cycle of monumental paintings of the seven Roman pilgrim churches. Thus the sisters could ‘jump’ their convent's walls by embarking on substitute pilgrimages.

Virtual Pilgrimages on the Internet

Virtual pilgrimage on the Internet is an important religious phenomenon for understanding the new ways of being spiritual in the postmodern world. While often conservative in character, linked as they are to actual sacred sites that are permeated by the mythical imaginare of tradition, virtual pilgrimages exploit the new technological possibilities of the Internet to re-imagine the sacred. In what follows, I argue that virtual pilgrimage has four key characteristics as a form of religious travel. First, it creates a mythscape, an immaterial mental geography that originally comes from sacred oral or scriptural traditions. Second, it exists as an interactive visual-auditory medium for experiencing a sense of sacred presence. Third, it generates symbolic forms of entertainment that are liminoid in character. Fourth, as a leisure activity of individuals ‘Net surfing’ from their home or office computers, it can create ‘virtual travelling communities’ of pilgrims who use the discourse of communitas to describe their experience.

Some Medieval Advertisements of Rome

Previous articleNext article FreeSome Medieval Advertisements of RomeJ. R. HulbertJ. R. Hulbert Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 20, Number 4May, 1923 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/387471 Views: 70Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Logan Quigley Travels in Deleuzean Time: Virtual Pilgrimage, Temporal Paradox, and the Newberry and Bicester Stacions of Rome, Exemplaria 34, no.22 (Jul 2022): 148–167.https://doi.org/10.1080/10412573.2022.2070366