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Dee Dyas, Pilgrimage in Medieval English Literature, 700-1500 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001). VIII + 288 pp. ISBN 0-85991-623-5. L50.00/$85.00.
In this considered history of medieval English pilgrimage based largely on theological and literary sources, Dee Dyas is concerned to show that throughout the medieval period the word pilgrimage had a primary meaning connoting an 'Interior Pilgrimage', the journey of Christians through an alien world to a heavenly home, and that that meaning was further attached to a 'Moral Pilgrimage' which engaged the 'Active Life' of the individual Christian. The literature of the period, she reasonably insists, privileges this complex meaning over the usual one of 'Place Pilgrimage', so that even apparently historical allusions to pilgrimage usually echo this one first of all. The roots for this...