This chapter explores the practices and economies of pilgrimage within the Byzantine cultural sphere. The development of Christian pilgrimage sites in the early Byzantine period contributed to the consolidation of Christianity by offering performative spaces for forming and asserting Christian identity. Attention in the first half is given to the origins of Christian pilgrimage, travel economies and the intersections between religious groups within the ritual spaces of pilgrimage sites, along with a brief survey of scholarly approaches to the phenomenon. The second half of the chapter offers two ‘multi-religious’ sites, the Oak of Mamre and the Baths of Ḥammat Gader, as case studies to further explore pilgrimage centres as locations that facilitated experimentation and readjustment in religious identification. Material and literary evidence suggest that pilgrimage activities at these two sites were not simply expressions of Byzantine piety but were instrumental in transforming and maintaining cultural identifications.

The essay explores pilgrimage to the sanctuary of Dodona, in Epirus, through a phenomenological lens, aiming to reconstruct the experience of ancient pilgrims. The study highlights the significance of landscape, movement, and motivation, on the basis that Dodona’s natural features and architectural layout deeply influenced pilgrims’ perceptions. The phenomenological approach draws on landscape archaeology, analyzing human interaction with sacred spaces. The analysis examines not only motivations behind oracular activity, but also other purposes, such as attending the Naia festival, and emphasizes the interplay of visibility and movement as pilgrims approached the sanctuary. Although reconstructing individual experiences is challenging, common patterns in collective behavior, such as rituals, processions, and religious practices, offer insights into the ancient pilgrimage experience. In short, the study uses literary, epigraphic, and material evidence to discuss how Dodona’s sacred landscape shaped its visitors’ religious and emotional experiences, contributing to a broader understanding of Greek pilgrimage traditions.

Religion is central to Seamus Heaney’s work. Alongside his preoccupations with Catholic and Celtic belief, ancient Greek and Roman religions are significant in Heaney’s methodological palette, in which ‘low intensity’ allusions to aspects of religious culture can inform operations of poetry and ritual. Greek and Roman culture provides Heaney with a repository of spirit-guide figures, symbolic characters such as Heracles and Tiresias, forms and tropes, including funerary rituals, burial, pilgrimage, and katabasis, and entire works which the poet reimagined, such as Sophocles’s Philoctetes and Euripides’s Antigone, in which civic and religious duties intersect in ways germane to the poet’s reflections on his own time.

Chapter 5 brings together two entirely remote and distinct religious systems: the Vineyard Evangelical Church in the United States and the pilgrim worshipers of Krishna in Vrindavan, India. In both cases, religious actors report sensory experiences of God: auditory in the United States and visual in India. The chapter provides a systemic explanation for these reports, considering them as responses to a profound dissonance in systems of faith among committed adherents to a personal God. The chapter also examines psychological theories such as porosity, absorption, decentering, and other mechanisms for altering states of consciousness toward sensory experiences of the divine.

Catholics continued to make pilgrimages, near and far, during the early modern period, despite the challenges of the Reformation. Drawing on examples from Western Europe and beyond, this chapter follows pilgrims on their quests for healing, penitence, and spiritual growth and demonstrates that shrines and saints continued to act as focal points for devotion.

The clergy were important to the crown because they were (compared with today) very numerous – historians have described the country as ‘swarming with clerics’ and their ‘vast numbers’ as ‘one of the surprises of medieval history’; collectively they were very rich, owning perhaps 20–30 per cent of England’s landed wealth; many had skills which few laymen possessed; and, most importantly, they could, through their performance of religious ritual, send souls to paradise or perdition – hell – in the everlasting world to come. Religion was the way that medieval people made sense of the world; it was not an optional extra in life but affected all aspects of society. Everyone was a church member.

Many late medieval travellers left us extensive accounts about their experiences, but they often do not differ from each other in significant ways, commonly because they copied from previous sources and followed the same routes, such as coming from Germany, crossing the Alps down to Venice, from there taking the ship traveling along the coast of the Adriatic Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean, to reach the Holy Land. German merchants who travelled south to reach the Italian markets were all required to stay in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice. Those who travelled north, often members of the Hanseatic League, found necessary trading centres in the various harbour cities along the coastlines of the Scandinavian cities, the British Isles, and Russia. In a way, we have thus to perceive German medieval travellers as being part of a mass European movement. The motifs for travels were commonly shared: religious desires, economic interests, diplomatic purposes, intellectual curiosity (learning), and professional needs.

The joint centre of this book is Europe and the Middle East, because the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries CE marked what I would call an era of global contact. It was during this time that a series of interlocking conflicts enmeshing the Christian and Islamic civilisations that started with the conquest of Iberia in the eighth century and continued through the Crusades to the Ottoman wars of the early modern period shaped and expanded both Europe and the Middle East. At the same time, Europe and the Middle East explored and expanded into Asia, Africa, and eventually North America. I combine Europe and the Middle East into one cultural entity because for all their differences, the longue durée stresses the shared logocentric tradition of the Abrahamic faiths, the common heritage in science and philosophy, and the centuries of interwoven experiences, often painful and violent, but just as often culturally enriching and mutually beneficial. And while the political entities of medieval Europe play a more significant role in structuring this book than other areas, there are attempts to balance this by foregrounding the role of literatures and writers from other parts of the world.

Women of the middle millennium were more mobile than we imagine, moving from one location to another for marriage, work, trade, worship, to visit family members, to take part in warfare, to settle in new lands, and—against their will—to be trafficked as slaves and sex workers. This picture of women on the move might contradict pervasive stereotypes of premodern women confined to the domestic sphere, or living out their whole lives within the context of one village or neighbourhood. Certainly, diverse religious and secular edicts ordered women to remain confined to domestic spaces and denigrated ‘wandering’ women as harlots of loose character. Many women of elite status were constrained to obey such orders and found themselves subject to strict control over movement. The majority of women who did travel probably did so less often and over shorter distances than their male peers. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to imagine half of humanity was absent from the roads, paths and ship-routes of the premodern world. It is not that women did not make journeys, but rather that travel was highly gendered in ideology and practice.

Travel is a prominent feature of every cycle of medieval Irish literary tales with roots in the pre-Christian narrative tradition, as well as in the majority of stories that originated in the Christian era, including lives of saints and legends about historical figures that took shape in this period. Underlying early Irish society and culture was a tension between competing movements, one attracted by the conceit of centripetal stability and the other fueled by a centrifugal dynamic. A reassuring ideology of cultural and linguistic unity, cultivated by tradition-bearers such as poets and clerics, sought to balance out the instabilities of a volatile social order that frequently experienced realignment, fission, and reconfiguration. Related to this underlying tension was the paradox that, even though the typical person’s status, sphere of activity, and safety were circumscribed within the same social space from birth to death, medieval Irish storytelling and even Christian Ireland’s religious culture glorified travel—that is, the heroic going-forth well beyond the realm of the familiar, and the leaving-behind of one’s safety zone.

The main portion of this essay will present representative Latin and vernacular travel narratives and related texts that postdate the Viking Age. It will be divided into sections according to the general direction of the journeys undertaken. In the material surveyed, accounts of travels to the north are typically associated with adventure and the supernatural. Travels to the west are associated with the more mundane, but equally tantalizing, mercantile and administrative activities. Travels to the south finally are associated with pilgrimages and warfare. Accounts of journeys towards the east do not, apart from a fifteenth-century translation from Latin into Danish of the account Sir John Mandeville’s travels, feature prominently in the material from mainland Scandinavia. Scholarship on medieval Scandinavian literature generally differentiates sharply and consistently between Latin and vernacular texts, and among the vernacular texts between those written in East Norse (Danish, Swedish, and Gutnish) and West Norse (Norwegian and Icelandic). In the present contribution, an effort has been made to include texts in Latin as well as East and West Norse.

Any modern survey of medieval travel literature whose destination was Compostela, or which mentioned it as a significant waystation, had little to discuss about this small town except as a goal of sacred travel. With the twelfth-century Liber Sancti Jacobi the one stunning exception, pre-Reformation primary sources are essentially preserved in archives outside the Iberian Peninsula. Of the forty-some narratives that report visits to Santiago, nearly all were written by foreigners in foreign vernaculars in manuscripts shelved and nearly forgotten near travelers’ homes. It seems that the consolidation of the Spanish state under Ferdinand and Isabel in the late fifteen century, the stiffening of that nation’s intellectual frontiers, and Spain’s adversarial incursions into European affairs in the sixteenth century coincide with a slow rise in pilgrimage narratives written by native Spaniards. Jacobean pilgrimage contracted. Many foreigners came to despise pilgrimage and largely stopped coming.

Given the privileged position of anglophone literature, medieval travel writing from England has been covered more extensively than that originating in other literatures and traditions. This chapter will try to balance English and Scottish travel writing, while omitting three writers in particular that feature elsewhere in this volume: Sir John Mandeville, Margery Kempe, and William Wey. There is no shortage of travel writing situated in England and Scotland: Ohthere, The Stacions of Rome, or the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales are only some instances. English and Scottish pilgrims to the Continent and Palestine have left numerous accounts, the most striking early example of which is Saewulf’s voyage to Jerusalem in 1102. This chapter will offer an overview of several central and remarkable English and Scottish travel texts. Furthermore, I will look at texts for which travel is central yet that have not been typically considered as travel writing. In this sense, I continue the theme of this volume in embracing a capacious definition of ‘travel writing’ as not only texts that make travel their express subject, but that contain and offer accounts of multiple journeys.

Iceland was an island discovered and populated by travellers in the early Middle Ages. Travel was thus an essential part of the Icelandic experience. The Old Icelandic sagas include numerous examples of travel writing, describing various kinds of sea voyages, such as Viking raids, military conquests, diplomatic missions, trading expeditions, as well as voyages of discovery and colonisation. Journeys on land are also described, in particular the pilgrimages which are called ‘walks to the South’ (ON. suðrgöngur). Norsemen drew geographical material from erudite works in Latin by Solinus, Orosius, Isidore of Seville, Bede, and Honorius Augustodunensis. To these they added information acquired personally, both at home and on journeys abroad as Vikings, traders, and pilgrims. What information concerning actual travel can be gathered from these sources? What was the motivation for the journeys described in the sagas? How do the sagas combine learned material from medieval Europe with native traditions from the Norse world? And above all, in what sense did the Icelanders view travel as a liminal experience?

Rome continued to attract deep interest for its classical vestiges. The most cultivated among pilgrims and travellers also came to Rome to see what remained of the old monuments scattered within and without the 20 km of its city walls that enclosed a territory of 1,400 hectares and a population between 30,000 and 50,000 inhabitants. The variety of geographical origins, perspectives and approaches to Rome as a destination of travel, whether real pilgrimages and journeys or imaginary and intellectual journeys, produced a rich array of texts of different genres: itineraries amidst churches and ancient monuments of Rome, catalogues that described the city, its features, marvels (mirabilia), sites, buildings and history, pilgrims’ and travellers’ accounts in the form of journals of their trips to Rome, including routes and impressions of the city; simple itineraries; letters addressed to friends; various kinds of literary (poetic or narrative) representations of the pilgrimage or journey to Rome.

Mecca is the religious heart of Islam. Islam began here when the Prophet Muhammad received the first words of the Qur’an just outside Mecca and it is toward the Ka‘ba that every Muslim in the world is required to pray five times a day and complete at least one Hajj pilgrimage in a lifetime. In the vein of medieval travel this article will focus on three aspects in the context of Mecca: Finding the Qibla (direction of prayer towards the Ka‘ba in Mecca), pilgrimage (hajj) journeys to Mecca as recounted in a specialized travelogue genre known as ‘rihla’, and images of Mecca in hajj certificates and prayer manuals.Like Jerusalem, Mecca has been a religious nexus since time immemorial or so the story goes that the Ka‘ba, built by Adam and rebuilt by Abraham and Isma‘il [Qur’an 2:125−7], was a site of pilgrimage from ancient days. Stressing the omphalotic nature of the Ka‘ba, pre-Islamic Jahiliyya stories tell us that pagan pilgrims would rub their navels on a nail sticking out of the center of the floor of the Ka‘ba as a way of uniting with god and the cosmos.