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Pilgrims to Jerusalem in the Middle Ages. By Nicole Chareyron. Translated by W. Donald Wilson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. xi + 293 pp. $45.00 cloth.
This book is an attempt to help modern readers experience what it was like to make a pilgrimage from Western Europe to the Holy Land in the late Middle Ages. In large part, it succeeds. Chareyron, a professor of medieval languages and literature, has assembled over a hundred pilgrim texts, ranging from Meister Thietmar's Latin account from the early thirteenth century to Greffin Affagart's French text from 1553, with the majority coming from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. She uses these texts to reconstruct the stages of a typical pilgrimage, beginning with the reasons for undertaking a pilgrimage (and for writing about it afterwards). She then follows her sub- jects as they typically took ship in Venice, spent miserable weeks or months at sea, wandered through the Holy Land, encountered a bewildering variety of ethnicities, religions, and Christian sects, visited St. Catherine's monastery on Mt. Sinai, explored the urban mazes of Cairo and Alexandria, and finally made their weary but (usually) satisfied way home again.
What readers experience, therefore, is not the account of a single pilgrim, but a pastiche of multiple pilgrimages and viewpoints across a span of some centuries. Attempting such a pastiche could have been risky, as times and situations change, and at any rate the forest could have been (and occasionally is) obscured by the trees, but the consistency that emerges here is remarkable. The overwhelming centrality of Jerusalem in the medieval Christian mind becomes crystal clear, as do the mutual influences of pilgrimage and crusading. As Chareyron notes, "Jerusalem, even when it was out of reach, was still a magnet powerful enough to set armies on the move" (4).
The difficulties and challenges are made equally clear. Most of the attention...