Navigation Link 6

Medieval Mental Pilgrimages

This link refers to adventures of the mind rather than literal voyages. We've seen several "mental trips" in our reading this term--this of "The Wanderer," whose mind really does wander as he contemplates his past; this of the visions, too-- the Dream of the Rood and the visions recounted by Bede.

You can make some notes to yourself in the space below, based on what we said about these texts in class. Print them to save--otherwise they'll disappear. (When you print, it's a good idea to "sign" and date the material, too.)

Obviously people made more voyages in their minds than they did on the sea, and they got inspiration from the "travel literature" of the time. This literature includes visions but also reports of other journeys. Refer to Bede at this point, (Book 5, Chapter 15) for a discussion of Adamnan's Concerning the Holy Places, for an important example. This is an account of a journey to the Middle East; Bede excerpted the text and obviously held it in high regard.

You can pursue this link in two directions.

1. You can try to learn more about Adamnan--can you find an edition and/or translation of his work in our library? If you can, you'll find some interesting maps and drawings of churches in the Holy Land and you can begin to think about what the Anglo-Saxons knew about this remote and exotic territory that almost none of them ever saw for themselves.
2. Or you can think ahead to Chaucer. We tend to forget, amid the popularity of the Canterbury Tales, that there are many pilgrimage narratives from the Middle Ages. One of the best books on this topic is Donald R. Howard, Writers and Pilgrims: Medieval Pilgrimage Narratives and their Posterity (California: University of California Press, 1980). Howard begins his book with a discussion of a famous poem about a journey of a very different sort, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan." Coleridge claimed that he had written this poem first in his sleep after he read PurchaseHis Pilgrimage, or Relations of the World and the Religious Observed in All Ages and Places discovered, from the Creation until this Present, which was published in 1613. (Coleridge wrote his poem in 1797; it was not published until 1816.)

Howard's point in this example is that some pilgrimages took place in the mind, as the result of reading. He calls the poem "a classic case of the maxim that literary works are made out of other literary works" (2).

• What literary works about journeying are made out of other literary works? There are examples in Chaucer--look at the beginning of "The Parliament of Fowls," for example.

Howard's book will be a good guide to developing this link, but there are many discussions of travel literature generally available that will help you get started on this assignment.

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