Pilgrim Voices: Narrative and Authorship in Christian Pilgrimage

Front Cover
Simon Coleman, John Elsner
Berghahn Books, 2003 - 168 pages

Research on pilgrimage has traditionally fallen across a series of academic disciplines - anthropology, archaeology, art history, geography, history and theology. To date, relatively little work has been devoted to the issue of pilgrimage as writing and specifically as a form of travel-writing. The aim of the interdisciplinary essays gathered here is to examine the relations of Christian pilgrimage to the numerous narratives, which it generates and upon which it depends. Authors reveal not only the tensions between oral and written accounts but also the frequent ambiguities of journeys - the possibilities of shifts between secular and sacred forms and accounts of travel. Above all, the papers reveal the self-generating and multiple-authored characteristics of pilgrimage narrative: stories of past pilgrimage experience generate future stories and even future journeys.

Simon Coleman moved to Sussex University in 2004, having spent 11 years at Durham University as Lecturer and then Reader in Anthropology, and Deputy Dean for the Faculty of Social Sciences and Health.

John Elsner is Senior Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

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Contents

Authoring Christian Pilgrimage
1
Forms
17
the Miracles of Santa Maria
40
The Pilgrimage of Passion in Sidneys Arcadia
61
Pilgrimage Patterns
84
One Way to be a Pilgrim
110
Narrative and the Sacralisation
133
Index
159
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About the author (2003)

Simon Coleman moved to Sussex University in 2004, having spent 11 years at Durham University as Lecturer and then Reader in Anthropology, and Deputy Dean for the Faculty of Social Sciences and Health. John Elsner is Senior Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

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