Medieval Pilgrimage:  Past, Present, and Future
	 While pilgrimage is a subset of travel, it deserves to be considered on its own terms, distinct from other forms of travel.  In fact, the study of medieval pilgrimage has become the focus of renewed scholarly interest in recent years.  Like their subject, many works that analyze medieval pilgrimage are narrative in approach, but scholars have also examined pilgrimage through the lenses of feminist theory, disability studies, literary theory, and anthropology—just to name a few.  This essay will trace the trajectory of the study of medieval travel in general with a heavy emphasis on pilgrimage.  Specifically, I am interested in how the field has changed from using a traditional “important men” top-down approach to its current state of using a bottom-up method and focusing on not only regular people but of women and other minorities in particular.  
	I begin with Travels and Travellers of the Middle Ages (1930), a collection of essays that provides a useful survey of the sort of traditional, “important men” top-down (and positivist) approach that would dominate historical scholarship for much of the twentieth century.  In these essays, the authors recount the way it was through primary sources such as Ptolemy and Pliny.  They do not analyze any of their sources other than to demonstrate how these men of the Latin west “modified their conceptions of the physical world in which they lived” over time.   No interdisciplinary methods are used, nor do they approach the subject from the bottom-up.  For these reasons, this collection of essays serves as an example of where scholarship has been and can be compared to where it is and also where it could go.
	Later scholars have deployed interdisciplinary methods such as literary theory and anthropology to inform their studies medieval travel.  Writing in the 1980s, Mary B. Campbell, a Professor of English at Brandeis University, asserts that everything is related to travel, going so far as to claim that humans have been “traveling” in one form or another since the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.   Rooting her study in literary theory, Campbell seeks to answer such questions as “[how] does one distinguish fact from fiction, either as writer or as reader, in the case of unverifiable records…?”   She aims to make the distinction between records of fact and literature, placing travel literature—for the most part—in the latter category.  Her decision to focus on “premodern European accounts of travel outside Europe…to Asia”  helps Campbell come to this conclusion.  For example, her use of Mandeville’s Travels and the Alexander Romances have been determined to be fantasies (to use the modern term), both written by anonymous authors.  Campbell draws on anthropology in a rather unconventional way (as a literary scholar might), using it in conjunction with Bakhtin’s perceptions of the grotesque as carnival.  In other words, anthropology—and its close relative, ethnography—provide a lens for medieval Europeans to view the wondrous beasts and grotesque peoples of the East.  Her attempts at a bottom-up approach are thwarted by her own misunderstanding of historical facts.
	In contrast to Campbell, Jean Verdon, a French literary theorist writing a decade later, explodes the idea that travel in the Middle Ages was not an inherent part of being human.  Rather, he shows that the idea of travel was initially thought of in the military sense, explaining that “it was only in the late Middle Ages [ca. 1300-ca. 1500] that the terms ‘journey’ and ‘travel’ began to take on the meaning with which we are familiar.  Indeed, nothing either in the means of communication (which defined a restricted space) or in the landscape encouraged travel.”   By analyzing medieval travel through the Annales method, Verdon begins with one of the most basic aspects of travel—roads—and works his way out and upward to peoples’ motivations for travel.  Each topic builds upon the one before it, finally forming a complete picture.  And like Campbell, Verdon also discusses travel to the East, which he refers to as the marvelous and the imaginary.   While Verdon is interested in the travels of everyday people, as we might expect from a groundbreaking bottom-up approach, he pays little attention to women, children, and other minorities.  By stressing throughout his book that travel in the Middle Ages was hostile and dangerous—more so than today—Verdon continually reminds his audience that medieval and modern-day travel are opposite ends of the same spectrum.  
One major factor behind this dichotomy appears to stem from the difference between medieval maps and those we use today.  While both Campbell and Verdon discuss medieval maps briefly in relation to the East, it is another scholar, Catherine Delano-Smith, who deals exclusively with maps of the Holy Land in her 2004 essay “The Intelligent Pilgrim:  Maps and Medieval Pilgrimage to the Holy Land.”  According to Delano-Smith, pilgrims used maps “to enhance [their] understanding of the places [they] were about to see.”   Using sources such as Felix Fabri as a guide, she sketches the relationship between medieval pilgrims and maps by constructing a narrative around a hypothetical Holy Land pilgrim who lived at some point between 1050-1550.  Because geographical knowledge was not as nuanced in the Middle Ages as it is today (and also because there was a heavy correlation between Biblical writings and the physical world), Delano-Smith postulates that medieval maps—specifically mappamundi—were “entirely subordinated to religious belief and theological doctrine…”   To demonstrate this point, Delano-Smith uses the Bible and exegetical sources such as Bede and Eusebius to point out the correlations between religious texts and maps.  For example, maps of Jerusalem would frequently depict symbols that were known to represent specific events from the Bible, such as the Crucifixion or the stations of the cross.   While maps helped those medieval pilgrims who had access to them, most people were not in such a privileged position as Felix Fabri or Delano-Smith’s hypothetical pilgrim.   Just by the inherent nature of her subject, she is more in line with the top-down approach, even though her research is informed by newer methods of research. 
	Another line of research has blossomed from the seminal 1970s study, Jonathan Sumption’s Pilgrimage (later retitled The Age of Pilgrimage:  The Medieval Journey to God in its 2003 reprint).  While Sumption mainly provides a narrative of medieval pilgrimage with a focus on France and its surrounding immediate surrounding countries, Pilgrimage is significant not only because it looks at the whole strata of society—from kings and popes to everyday people—but also the different variations one might find among pilgrims, two things that up until that point had never been done before.  This bottom-up approach has paved the way for virtually all subsequent research, and at almost five hundred pages, Sumption uses an Annales-like approach within his narrative to write a comprehensive history of medieval pilgrimage.  Drawing on church records, legal documents, narratives and miracle stories, Sumption argues that he is able to paint “a reasonably coherent picture of mediaeval spiritual life as a whole.”   And he does, for the most part.  Sumption’s study is so large that, by necessity, several things are left out.  “This is a long book,” Sumption writes.  “I had no desire to make it longer.”   And even though topics such as women and other minorities are pushed to the side, Sumption provides a generous opportunity for future scholars to pick up where he left off.
	One such scholar is Debra J. Birch, whose book Pilgrimage to Rome in the Middle Ages (1998) has become an influential work in its own right.  Like Sumption, Birch provides her audience with a narrative.  However, unlike Sumption, her focus is on the pilgrimage to Rome as well as the life of pilgrims once in the city.  Spanning most of the Middle Ages (ca. 300-ca.1200), Birch uses classical sources such as Saint Augustine, Saint Ambrose, Saint Jerome, Egeria, and Eusebius—each of whom either lived in Rome, wrote about Rome, or made a pilgrimage to Rome. Birch also uses legal documents, financial records, narratives, and church documents to analyze the various motivations for pilgrimage (including why pilgrims chose Rome as their destination), the hazards of travel, and even special privileges afforded to pilgrims which eventually gave them a special status in society.   Both Sumption and Birch are referenced quite frequently as the field makes its way into the latter part of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century.  Their works mark a more significant shift towards a true  bottom-up approach than found in other works, such as Campbell’s.
	Diana Webb, author of Pilgrims and Pilgrimage in the Medieval West and Medieval European Pilgrimage is influenced by Sumption, but more so by Debra Birch.  She cites Birch in both of her works, and one notices the changes in her methods between them—we are now squarely into bottom-up territory.  In Pilgrims and Pilgrimage in the Medieval West, Birch primarily uses narrative to argue that pilgrimage was an integral part of medieval society and that pilgrims were accepted as a special class.  Indeed, pilgrimage was so common, Birch asserts, that popes, secular rulers, and governments provided and enforced rights for pilgrims—similar to those afforded merchants.   It is clear that Webb is echoing Sumption in her use of narrative and Birch in her basic argument.  Even though Webb uses narrative to exhibit her findings, the “over-riding purpose of this book…is to give some impression of the rich variety of the sources available and to invite the reader to look further, both into texts translated or summarised here and into others like them.”   To that end, Webb employs sources such as wills, sermons, government and church records, as well as the writings of Felix Fabri, Bede, and Theoderic.  In her subsequent book, Webb foregoes the narrative in favor of literary theory, ethnomusicology economics, and Cliometrics.  And while her first book focused on the time period after 1100, here her research spans about twelve hundred years, from ca. 300-ca. 1500.  However, Webb’s argument builds upon her initial one, that pilgrims were considered a social class unto themselves, but this time with a slight emphasis on women:
	Pilgrims may be classified…by where they went, and by their reasons for going.  Another important distinction can be made between pilgrims who made their journeys voluntarily and those who went involuntarily as penance for their sins or even as punishment for secular offences.  Pilgrims may also be viewed as belonging to an age band, an occupation of religious grouping, a social class and (not least) a gender.  Different groups disposed of different resources and also different degrees of freedom, both of which affected the capacity to make long journeys.  Female participation in pilgrimage was, of course, conditioned by all these variables. 

Within this socially recognized group of pilgrims, there are subgroups that divided pilgrims based on destination, motivation, whether the journey was voluntary or involuntary, religious beliefs, social standing, and gender.  Such diversity is an earmark of the bottom-up approach.
	Even in discussing a generally top-down area such as economics, Webb offers impressive bottom-up evidence supporting her argument that pilgrimage was also an economic activity.   She shows how pilgrims helped support the businesses located within the town that possessed the saint or shrine they were visiting.  Combining economics and Cliometrics, Webb demonstrates that the producing and selling of pilgrim badges (ampullae) was a lucrative enterprise:  “A sudden surge of pilgrimage to a miraculous image of the Virgin and Child at Regensburg [located in Bavaria, Germany] in 1519 took the authorities by surprise, and although they hastily arranged for the manufacture of badges and sold over 12,500 during the year, they were nowhere near meeting demand.  In the following year, 109,198 pewter badges were sold, in addition to 9,764 de luxe models in silver.”   While Webb does not provide monetary figures explaining how much it cost to make badges and how much they were sold for, the number of badges sold alone is sufficient to show how many pilgrims could be anticipated at any one shrine and how popular pilgrimage was.  Additionally, Webb’s use of literature combined with ethnomusicology and economics reveal that pilgrims not only played music while journeying, but that musicians and craftsmen could potentially make a lot of money from pilgrims visiting local shrines.   Her interest is clearly in the part of society scholars a few generations earlier simply would have ignored.
	In this vein, and in line with Webb’s observation that pilgrims were considered their own class in society, Kristine T. Utterback argues for “look[ing] at…pilgrimages as a common societal experience, [where] we can find patterns in pilgrims’ behaviors and actions where otherwise we might not.”   Using the work of anthropologist Victor Turner as a guide, Utterback borrows the stages he uses to divide ritual processes such as pilgrimage:  separation, liminality, and re-incorporation.  Most of the works I have discussed so far deal only with the first two stages of pilgrimage:  separation (making the decision to go and prepare for pilgrimage) and liminality (the pilgrimage itself).  Utterback’s article highlights the third stage of pilgrimage—re-incorporation—where pilgrims, who “have achieved a different status than they had when they left” are forced to adapt and “live differently than if they had never made a pilgrimage.”   Scholars, including Utterback, have used Margery Kempe and her pilgrimages as a prominent example of a person who goes on and is changed by several pilgrimages.
	In “Travels with Margery:  Pilgrimage in Context,” Rosalynn Voaden, a Professor of English at Arizona State University, argues through anthropology and literary theory that Margery Kempe viewed herself as a visionary and holy woman and that “pilgrimage and travel undertaken for spiritual ends were predominant forces in shaping Margery’s spiritual expression [and that they] provided the lens through which she came to understand herself.”   Like Utterback, Voaden draws on Victor Turner’s theory on the ritual process.  Specifically, she points to the liminality of pilgrimage, observing that “when the participants are removed from their accustomed physical and social states…a new kind of communitas…can develop.”   However, in Margery’s case, her affective piety and erratic behavior caused her to be treated as an outsider not only by society as a whole but also by her fellow pilgrims.  Again, this approach points to a bottom-up interest in society foreign to earlier generations.
	Likewise, in “The Mystic as Pilgrim:  Margery Kempe and the Tradition of Nonfictional Travel Narrative,” James P. Helfers uses literary theory to examine not only Margery Kempe the pilgrim but also the book that bears her name.   Whereas Donald R. Howard dismisses Kempe’s account because, in his view, “[she was] so wrapped up in [her] own experience that [she] told little at all about what [she] saw,”  Helfers argues that “Margery’s narrative actually bridges a gap between medieval allegorical tradition of pilgrimage narratives and the new, humanist, curiosity-centered tradition of the Renaissance.”   In other words, Margery’s spiritual concerns speak to medieval traditions, while posturing herself as narrator links her to humanist and Renaissance pilgrims such as Erasmus or Montaigne (long admired by those top-down traditionalists of old).
	Margery Kempe, although a well-known medieval pilgrim thanks to the rediscovery of The Book of Margery Kempe in the 1930s, is not the only female medieval pilgrim to have been studied in recent years.  With the rise of feminist theory, scholars such as Leigh Ann Craig have made significant contributions to the study of medieval travel and pilgrimage.  Originally a PhD dissertation, Craig’s 2009 Wondering Women and Holy Matrons:  Women as Pilgrims in the Later Middle Ages, uses—in addition to feminist theory—narrative, literary theory, statistics, anthropology, sociology, and Cliometrics to support her argument:  “Even though later medieval authors harbored grave doubts about women’s mobility and literary images of mobile women commonly accused them of lust, pride, greed, and deceit, women who succeeded in becoming pilgrims offer a rare glimpse of ordinary women taking on extraordinary religious and social authority.”   In her introduction, Craig offers a brief historiography of medieval women and pilgrimage.  Her observations support my own thesis.  She writes 
	[Jonathan] Sumption’s summary study [in Pilgrimage] offers two pages of anecdotal evidence on the topic of women’s pilgrimages, noting that they seemed to have been more common in the later Middle Ages, and that several shrines denied them admittance [see pages 261-3].  Diana Webb’s more recent general study of the topic [Medieval European Pilgrimage] also briefly touched on the phenomenon of female pilgrims, noting in general terms the complexity of social attitudes about the matter but also arguing that “women did in fact enjoy a large measure of freedom to go on pilgrimage throughout the medieval centuries” [see page 90]. 

Craig makes it clear that the study of medieval women pilgrims is a new field and she takes issue with just about every scholar who has come before her.   Craig readily admits that studying female pilgrims in the Middle Ages is a difficult task simply because of the lack of available sources.  Moreover, when sources are found, they are usually written by contemporary men who disapproved of women going on pilgrimage, and therefore susceptible to a top-down bias which she is actively attempting to overcome.  Despite this obstacle, however, Craig managed to find enough female pilgrims through miracle stories, narratives, and church and inquisition records to compose an impressive monograph.  A good portion of her examples come from miracle stories which detail the women’s ailments and the subsequent cure provided by the appropriate saint or relic.  In addition, Craig provides an appendix of bar charts and percentage tables which bolster her argument that “despite the opposition to women’s pilgrimages under less urgent circumstances, pilgrimage was nonetheless more likely to be imposed upon women than upon men as a treatment for heresy, insanity, or demonic possession.   For example, in a table displaying the types of miracles that were sought by pilgrims in seven late-medieval miracle collections, seventy percent of women and forty-seven percent of men wanted to be healed of an illness.   The prominence of women in Craig’s work harkens back to the bottom-up approach.
	While Craig’s work on female pilgrims and miracles is so far the only one of its kind, the study of medieval pilgrims and miracles in general (that is, not limited to women) is much older.  Ronald C. Finucane, in his book Miracles and Pilgrims:  Popular Beliefs in Medieval England is interested in studying “events at curative shrines” because “they provide a glimpse of the behaviour of medieval peoples at centres of popular religion and [they give] an indication of what sorts of people were involved.”   Relying heavily on narrative and Cliometrics, Finucane analyzes more than three thousand miracle stories associated with popular shrines and saints in England, including Thomas Becket, William of Norwich, and Godric of Finchale.  Finucane’s quantitative analysis proved to be so thorough that future scholars such as Diana Webb, Debra Birch, and Leigh Ann Craig have referenced it in their own research.  Thanks to the nature of his primary resources, Finucane is participating in the bottom-up approach.
	Saints’ miracles are not the only information available for study.  Hagiographies are useful when researching not only the saints themselves (and any miracles they have performed while living), but they can also come in handy when studying medieval pilgrimage.  Maribel Dietz writes, “by understanding the conventions of hagiography and the limitations inherent in its form…many modern-day historians have successfully used these texts to illuminate, not only the life of a particular individual, but also the social milieu, social interactions, and relations evidenced in the texts.”   Relying on Iberian hagiographies such as the Lives of the Fathers of Mérida, Dietz “trace[s] the connections between Spanish monasticism and travel from the fourth century to the beginning of Islamic rule in the early eighth century.”   The overall argument of Deitz’s book is that the Benedictine Rule was a key component in transforming monastic travel, giving way to other types of religious travel such as pilgrimage.  The Lives of the Fathers of Mérida (Vitas sanctorum partum Emeritensium [VPE]), sheds light on travel and monasticism by discussing the cult of the martyr Eulalia.  The shrine of Eulalia was the site of miraculous healings, and it attracted people from all over the world to Mérida.  Eventually the shrine would be a point of interest on one of the many pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain.  While Dietz does not focus solely on women or pilgrimage, her argument that pilgrimage developed out of ascetic travel and the Benedictine rule is significant because it offers another lens for scholars to view medieval pilgrimage.  While focusing on monks and other members of monastic community can be seen as a top-down approach, Dietz is actually engaging with the bottom-up approach in that she goes beyond monastic travel into the realm of “everyday” or “regular” pilgrimage.
	In the Middle Ages it was common to associate particular miracles with specific saints and shrines.  For example, if an infant died before it was baptized, the mother could pray to Saint Birgitta to bring the child back to life just long enough to perform the ceremony—this would ensure that the infant would not spend eternity in Limbo but rather go straight to Paradise.   Miracles could also heal deformities or disabilities.  In her pioneering work on disability in medieval Europe, Irina Metzler addresses miracles, but they are not her primary concern.  Rather, she asks the question “what constitutes a disability, or an ability for that matter, in a given culture?”   Because the definition of disability has changed over the centuries—indeed, the term “disability” did not enter the lexicon until the late sixteenth century —Metzler’s “aim is to…try and explain their [the disabilities] meanings within a specific cultural context.”  Miracle stories help her in doing this.  For example, St. Elisabeth and her shrine in Hungary were famous for curing previously “incurable” conditions:
	A man who had been lame for over a year “found no cure with others” and so went to the shrine of St. Elisabeth.  […]  St. Elisabeth cured a woman of dropsy whose physicians declared her incurable, and another woman with the same disorder whom an “experienced physician” had declared incurable; furthermore a woman with a cancerous growth who could not be cured “by any art” was healed. 

By using medieval, theological, and philosophical fields of inquiry, Metzler is able to illuminate the realities of living with impairment during the Middle Ages.  She is particularly interested in pilgrimage because shrines were the sites of healing.  Metzler is clearly using a bottom-up approach in her work, focusing on everyday people who went to shrines in hopes of a cure. 
	Guidebooks for travel—and specifically pilgrimage—have been in existence since antiquity.  Pilgrims such as Arculf and Theoderic wrote guidebooks to the Holy Land, and the Codex Calixtinus, was the seminal pilgrim’s guide to Santiago de Compostela.  In Worth the Detour:  A History of the Guidebook, Nicholas T. Parsons writes that 
	The focus of this narrative is on the cultural and social influences that moulded the development of guidebooks, the motives of those who wrote them, and the influence they had on their consumers.  […]  Our choice of guidebook, and the ways in which we choose to use one (dutifully, with skepticism, with blind obedience, or even with mockery), reveal a good deal about us and the cultural attitudes we instinctively subscribe to. 

Parson’s work spans the length of time between the ancient world up until the modern day.  Using literary theory, Parsons analyzes the potential audience of guidebooks such as the Codex Calixtinus and the texts themselves.  He points out that guidebooks could be seen as inspiration, encouraging the reader to do and see more than what is written.  Guidebooks could also reflect changes in taste:  the format of the Codex Calixtinus does not lend itself to being carried in a pilgrim’s knapsack but rather perused in a library or monastery whereas guidebooks detailing the Grand Tour were meant to be carried by the traveler and viewed as a companion.  This particular study on guidebooks is a bottom-up rather than top-down approach because Parson focuses not only on the motives of the authors, but also their influence on the readers.
	With medieval travel and pilgrimage having been studied quite extensively throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, it should come as no surprise that books meant for the casual reader or learner have started to be published.  One example is Paul B. Newman’s Travel and Trade in the Middle Ages.  Newman takes a very general and encyclopedic approach to the topic, referencing contemporary scholars such as Jean Verdon and Diana Webb in the bibliography (there are no footnotes or endnotes), and medieval sources such as Felix Fabri.  Newman makes the rather obvious argument that travel and trade were inextricably linked to transportation, and then goes on to discuss reasons for travel, modes of travel, trade, and goods.  To his credit, Newman does point out that this volume is only a survey of medieval trade and travel, and refers readers who are interested in learning more to the scant bibliography.  This work—while not as scholarly as some—is part of the bottom-up approach because it studies travel and trade not as if affected kings and other members of the higher classes, but as it affected (and was affected by) those in the lower classes.
	Just this year Cambridge University Press published The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing by Tim Youngs.  Viewed as an offshoot of 2002’s The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, (edited by Tim Youngs and Peter Hulme), which began its exposition in the early modern era, The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing goes further back and takes the Middle Ages as its starting point.  Youngs makes a valid point that “travel writing is—fittingly—a dynamic genre, often employed for radical aims.  [Therefore], the genre of travel writing cannot be easily fixed or contained, even within extremes.”   Using literary sources such as the epic of Gilgamesh, The Canterbury Tales, and Mandeville’s Travels, Youngs demonstrates that travel writing changes depending on the era, and that travel writing is indeed a product of its time.  For example, Gilgamesh is a four-thousand-year-old epic that used travel between the world of the living and the dead to teach morals, lessons, and as a way for the Mesopotamians to explain their existence.  In The Canterbury Tales, narrative is used as a framing mechanism to entertain and educate Chaucer’s audience of the fourteenth century.  In the Travels, the aim is different—the author is not interested in explaining how the beasts and exotic peoples of the East came to be, but rather for entertainment.  As seen with just these few examples, Youngs shows that travel writing is indeed its own genre and should be considered on its own terms.
Over the course of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century, the study of medieval pilgrimage has witnessed significant changes.  It has shifted from the traditional top-down approach to the use of methods outside of history such as literary theory, economics, and anthropology to better and further inform research of the bottom-up technique.  While the field has undergone considerable changes and is now firmly rooted in the bottom-up approach, there is still much to be studied.  For example, the field is sorely lacking in studies of women pilgrims outside of Europe and Christianity.  Taking into consideration the current state of the field—which is moving further East both in geography and religion—it is not a question of if but rather a question of these areas of research will finally be addressed.
	
Historiography of Medieval Women
	In her 1817 novel Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen’s character Catherine Morland bemoans the drudgery of reading history and its lack of women:
	‘But history, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in.  Can you?’
‘Yes, I am fond of history.’
‘I wish I were too.  I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me.  The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all—it is very tiresome.’  

Had Catherine (and, by extension, Jane) been alive today, she would not be complaining about the lack of women in history.  Indeed, women’s history is a very real field of research and has been for many years.  The study of women is a relatively new topic, but it has gained momentum throughout these past several decades with the advent of the feminist movement, feminist scholarship, and the the discovery of new primary source material.
	From the mid-1970s up to the present day, there have been numerous articles, essays, and monographs written and produced on women’s history.  Topics range from women in the classical world to the current day.  The goal of this paper is to trace the trajectory of medieval women’s history by discussing relevant works of scholarship, written by well-respected historians.  This paper is by no means comprehensive.  Works on this subject are many and varied, and there are works which I was not able to obtain, not to mention works I am not even aware of at this point in my academic career.  Rather, this paper will evaluate and discuss the sources which I uncovered and found germane to my research.   By tracing a very specific trajectory, I hope that this paper will serve as the foundation for my future research.  Accordingly, not only will I discuss where the field has been, but I will also discuss where the field is now and where it seems to be going.  Moreover, I will point out areas of study which I think are underrepresented and, as a consequence, what still needs to be said.  I will touch on the subject of medieval travel and women throughout my paper.  This very narrow area of research is even newer than the study of women’s history.  Early books about medieval travel do not even mention women, let alone make them the primary focus. It has only been in the past thirteen years that the concept of medieval women and travel has been treated with any great depth.   Of the material reviewed here, some are about travel, most are about women, and only two discuss women and travel.
	This observation leads me to my first book, Everyday Life of Medieval Travellers, written by Marjorie Rowling in 1971.  This book is—ostensibly—about medieval travel.  Rowling, however, writes about travel through the lens of economics.  For example, in her first chapter, titled “Roads, bridges and hospitality,” she writes “Roads have been for man, […] a means for the traffic and exchange of goods…”   Rowling has immediately set the tone for the rest of the book:  this is going to be a book that focuses primarily on the economic history of the Middle Ages and how it affected travel.  Indeed, economics and travel are heavily intertwined:  travel made trade between countries possible, and sea routes such as those found in the Mediterranean proved crucial to a country’s economic well being.  
	Economics and travel are a natural combination, and there are historical accounts that accompany this field, such as that of Marco Polo.  Rowling makes brief references to famous travelers such as Marco Polo and Felix Fabri, both having written accounts of their voyages.  She does not, however, quote either of them at great length (or at all!).  The extent of her acknowledgment of Polo’s importance is summed up in one sentence:  “Marco Polo is the only trader to leave an account of his travels, but what a colourful [sic] and adventurous narrative it is!”   Brief mention is made of Felix Fabri, but there is no hint in Rowling’s work that he traveled with and wrote about several female companions.  Indeed, women as travelers are not addressed in this book at all; the only woman to be written of by name is Heloïse, and her identity is contingent upon her relationship with Peter Abelard.
	It would be another four years until a major book about medieval women was published.  Medieval Women was written by the late Eileen Power (d. 1937), a well-known economic historian and medievalist, and edited by her husband, the historian M.M. Postan.  Even though Power wrote the contents of the book herself, it was not published until 1975.  By that time, her writings and ideas were already a half-century old.  Postan writes that Power’s “ambition was to produce a study fuller and better grounded in evidence than any of the existing books on the subject.”   Taking into account the number of years between Power’s writings and their eventual publication, it is somewhat surprising that a historian from the first half of the twentieth century would have such advanced and nuanced ideas about medieval women.  “The position of women,” Power writes, 
is often considered as a test by which the civilisation [sic] of a country or age may be judged.  The test is extraordinarily difficult to apply, more particularly to the Middle Ages, because of the difficulty of determining what in any age constitutes the position of women.  The position of women is one thing in theory, another in legal position, yet another in everyday life.  In the Middle Ages, as now, the various manifestations of women’s position reacted on one another but did not exactly coincide; the true position of women was a blend of all the three.  

Power’s observation that the “true position of women was a blend of” their position in theory, their legal position, and their position in everyday life is one that future historians would acknowledge and write about as well—even if they don’t say so in those exact words or give credit to Power.  Power was a trailblazer in this sense.  She recognized the importance of women and their history in the Middle Ages and noticed (as others would later) that they were seemingly absent from the majority of historical records.  She points out that “the expressed opinion of any age depends on the persons and classes who happen to articulate it; and for this reason alone it often represents the views of a small but vocal minority.”   This minority did not include women but was instead made up of men—either from the aristocracy or clergy—and they were indeed vocal.  It was this minority which formed ideas and wrote about women in their society.  Thus, much of the time, historians have to actively look for the women in the Middle Ages and piece bits of information together based on the ideas and writings of medieval men.  This approach to history—researching and writing about medieval women—would prove to be fruitful as the 1970s gave way to the 1980s and beyond.  It was not long until a book was written that would help set the course for subsequent research on medieval women.  Susan Mosher Stuard’s book Women in Medieval Society, published in 1976, has been heralded by many historians as a “pioneer collection … [which] helped to establish the collaborative, interdisciplinary path which much future scholarship in the field would follow.” 
	Medieval historians were, throughout the 1970s and 80s, still very interested in economics.  Some of them, however, dug a little deeper and researched the economy in conjunction with women.  In 1986, Martha C. Howell wrote Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities.  For Howell, the question was a simple one:  “What kind of work did women do in the urban market economies of late medieval Europe?”   This query would lead her to research gender itself and the way in which medieval women fit into a hierarchy that was established and controlled by men—the patriarchy.  Howell writes, “my initial concern was principally with women’s ‘contribution’ to the economy, but I soon came to see that the economic importance of women’s work in the late medieval city lay not so much in its quantity but in its roles in making the prevailing systems of production possible.”   In short, it was not the number of women working in the late medieval city that was important to their economy, but rather their roles in sustaining the current manufacturing methods.  Howell’s work focused primarily on urban women in the cities of Leiden (in the 1400s and 1500s) and Cologne (1500s), mainly because they were vastly different and each showed disparate results to her initial question.   It was by reading Howell’s work that I was introduced to the work of Karl Bücher, a nineteenth-century scholar and economist.  His book, Die Frauenfage im Mittelalter (The Women Question in the Middle Ages), written in 1882, discussed what he viewed as the “oversupply” of women.   He drew parallels between the late nineteenth century and the tail end of the Middle Ages (roughly 1200 to 1500), stating that both time periods suffered from too many women in comparison to men.  He argued that “men were … in measurably short supply because they, more than women, were exposed to war, disease and the hazards of medieval travel.”   In addition, he argued that women only participated in “urban market production” because they had to fend for themselves and did not have the luxury of having a man provide for them.  “Soon after Die Frauenfrage first appeared,” writes Howell, “several major studies confirmed its finding that women in late medieval cities of northern Europe practiced skilled crafts, belonged to guilds, and dealt in long-distance commerce.”   This observation—of Bücher’s work and subsequent research—confirm what others have said about the presence of women’s studies in the late nineteenth century.   Indeed, the presence of nineteenth-century scholarship on women is intriguing, even more so because the study of women seemed to decrease in the first half of the twentieth century.  There is no doubt that the second wave of the women’s movement, from the 1960s into the 1980s, played a significant role in the reemergence of women’s studies.  So far, I have not found any evidence to explain decline, so that is something I could pursue in the future.
	1986 also witnessed the publication of Margaret Wade LaBarge’s A Small Sound of the Trumpet:  Women in Medieval Life.  LaBarge was not an economist like Eileen Power, but rather a historian of the Middle Ages.  In the introduction to A Small Sound of the Trumpet, LaBarge writes that her study “concentrates on the activities of women who can be observed in the strongly feudal society of France, England, the Low Countries and southern Germany from 1100 to 1500.”   She divides her work into rather traditional sections.  There are two chapters on “women who ruled” (queens and noble ladies), two chapters on “women who prayed” (nuns and beguines, recluses and mystics), one chapter on “women who toiled” (townswomen and peasants), and a chapter each on “women as healers and nurses,” “women on the fringe,” and “women’s contribution to medieval culture.”  Her first two chapters deal with “the precursors” (Classical and Anglo-Saxon women), and “the mould [sic] for medieval women,” respectively.  In her introduction, LaBarge states
	It is, of course, true that a woman, in the Middle Ages as through history, could increase her status or influence because of her exceptional beauty or elegance.  She might also be recognised [sic] and admired for her personal qualities of intelligence, energy or ambition which distinguished her from her contemporaries.  This is probably the reason why most studies of medieval women have tended to concentrate on the most spectacular characters—Héloïse, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Joan of Arc, to take only the most obvious examples—because material is more easily available and their vivid personalities appeal to modern minds.  Just because they were so extraordinary, such individuals are not a very good guide to the activities and abilities of their less colourful [sic] sisters.  Fortunately the new historical emphasis on social realities and the everyday activities of all classes of men and women has helped to redress the balance of such concentration and to enlighten us about the lives of a much wider range of individuals, despite the more fragmentary evidence.  This book attempts to bring to light the not inconsiderable achievements of a number of women from all levels of medieval society in western Europe between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. 

While she claims that the most famous and spectacular women of the Middle Ages are not a reflection of everyday life (indeed, they are the exception) and therefore are not very useful in writing about such a topic, she does just that.  While her book does discuss “everyday women” such as townswomen and peasants, she frames the discussion around the literary work of Christine de Pizan, the famous French authoress who wrote treatises such as Treasure of the City of Ladies.  This work focused on Parisian women and de Pizan split them up into three groups based on social status:  “the rich and important, such as the wives of the wealthy merchants or those married to royal or princely officials living in Paris; the wives of craftsmen and tradesmen; and finally the feminine members of the urban proletariat, the servants and chambermaids.”   LaBarge bases her observations and research on and in relation to Christien de Pizan’s work, not her own.  She repeats this method when writing about other well-known medieval women such as Héloïse and Hildegard of Bingen.  In short, even though LaBarge claims to be writing mainly about everyday women, she instead bases her work on the more famous women figures and tries to draw parallels between the two.
	Unlike A Small Sound of the Trumpet, Sisters and Workers in the Middle Ages (1989), edited by Judith M. Bennett, Elizabeth A. Clark, and others, does focus primarily on everyday women of the Middle Ages.  Famous women such as Eleanor of Aquitaine and Joan of Arc are only mentioned in the introduction to further prove the editors’ point that they were the exception rather than rule (yet at the same time they also had to deal with a patriarchal society).  This collection of essays was inspired mainly by Marian K. Dale’s study of London silkworkers in 1933 (“The London Silkwomen of the Fifteenth Century”), but also by Eileen Power.  The editors explain that “the dominant question that guided this early research on medieval women (and indeed much subsequent research) focuses on the status of women:  Was the Middle Ages a golden age of rough-and-ready equality for women, as argued by Eileen Power in 1926, or was it a dark age of patriarchal oppression and restraint?”   They go on to acknowledge that this area of study is ongoing and complex, which is why the results and interpretations are so incredibly diverse.  The editors do not offer any definitive answers, but instead write “… the essays collected here broaden and deepen our perspectives not only on the contribution of medievalists to women’s history but also on the nature of women’s lives within the Middle Ages.”   And these essays do an excellent job in that regard.  For example, Susan Groag Bell’s essay “Medieval Women Book Owners:  Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors of Culture” is described as a “pioneer attempt to chart this area [of study].”   Before Bell, no one had written about medieval women as book owners.  With the use of charts, tables, art, and documentary evidence she makes a convincing argument that women were indeed book owners and some even had hundreds of books.  Additionally, she includes paintings depicting the Virgin Mary reading on a donkey on the journey to Bethlehem as well as one of the Virgin reading as Joseph cradles the baby Jesus.  Other essays deal with the economy, medicine, prostitution, education, Christianity, and religious orders.  All the essays in this collection contribute to the broadening and deepening of the study of women’s history, a study that would see more research on the lives of everyday people in the 1990s.
	It was in 1990 that the first book to discuss women as pilgrims and travelers was published.  Equally in God’s Image:  Women in the Middle Ages, edited by Julia Bolton Holloway, Constance S. Wright, and Joan Bechtold features an essay written by Anthony Luttrell titled “Englishwomen as Pilgrims to Jerusalem:  Isolda Parewastell, 1365.”  Luttrell explains that Isolda Parewastell was not a famous or well-known medieval woman (I had never heard of her until reading this essay), but we know about her today thanks to her petition to Pope Urban V which was copied into a papal register.   The petition reads as follows:
	Given at Avignon on the eighteenth day of the kalends of February in the fourth year [15 January 1366].
Your humble and devoted petitioner and maidservant Isolda Parewastell of Bridgwater [sic] supplicates Your Holiness that she, inflamed with the fervor of devotion, visited the tomb of the lord and other sacred places of the holy land every day for three years and more, and further that there, stripped in the name of Christ, she was hung on the rack head to the ground and sustained very hard beatings, and then, being left half alive, she miraculously escaped from the hands of the Saracens; she now proposes, for the honour [sic] and renown of the glorious holy virgin Mary and for the salvation of her own soul and those of her ancestors, to construct a chapel in the town of Bridgwater [sic] in the diocese of Wells, and to endow it with a perpetual and annual income for one priest of 36 florins, wherefore she humbly supplicates the same holiness to deign to grant her a special license for the founding and endowing of the said chapel as promised, reserving the right of patronage to her and her heirs and successors, with the requisite clauses.  Make an altar in the parish church within the parish in which you wish to build and endow the chapel.  B.
Further, she supplicates that you deign to release from one year and 40 days of penance enjoined to them all those who once a year, having truly repented and confessed, may devoutly visit the said altar on festivals ordained by chancery, with the requisite clauses.  Fiat.  B.  Without a further reading.  Fiat.  B. 

Through a careful reading and study of this petition, Luttrell was able to suggest and argue several points.  For example, he argues that Isolda “…was probably a quite ordinary pilgrim, though apparently unmarried and rich enough to stay several years in Jerusalem and to consider founding a church.”   Additionally, by studying the Bridgwater Borough Archives:  1200-1377 (edited by Thomas Bruce Dilks), Luttrell discovered an entry dated 10 August 1368, in which “Isolda Parewastell granted away a property in Horloke Street which had been given in 1321 to John Parewsatell and his sister ‘Isota’ or Isolda.”   Thanks to the archives, Luttrell was able to determine that Isolda was back in Bridgwater two years after her petition to Pope Urban V, that property had been granted to her and her brother John seven years earlier, and that she was most likely unmarried (if she had been married, the property would have probably been granted to John instead of to both of them; moreover, there is no mention of a husband).  Additionally, there is nothing in the Bridgwater Borough Archives to suggest that Isolda founded a church:  “…the Bridgwater parish church already possessed a chantry and chapel dedicated to the Virgin which had been in existence since 1260,” and there is “…no sign that she founded a chapel or chantry at Bridgwater or others profitted [sic] in England from her experience in Jerusalem.”   As for her time in Jerusalem, Isolda did not leave a written account of her experiences—much like many English pilgrims.  It is because of her papal petition that we know at all that she traveled to the Holy Land.  The fourteenth century witnessed a surge in female pilgrims and even though “women seldom left written accounts of their pilgrimages or wrote them in person … their growing participation attracted hostile male comment.”   For example, in the late fourteenth century, Geoffrey Chaucer lampooned female pilgrims through his fictional Wife of Bath, a prominent figure in The Canterbury Tales.  Alyson, the Wife of Bath, is well aware that in her time the men did the writing while women were excluded:
	By God, if wommen hadde written stories,
As clerks han withinne hir oratories,
The wolde han wirten of men moore wikkednesse
Than al the mark of Adam may redresse (693-696). 

Even more important is the Wife of Bath’s presence on the pilgrimage to Canterbury.  Chaucer would not have felt the need to include a woman pilgrim in his work if women were not going on pilgrimage, either to Canterbury or beyond.  The Canterbury Tales is just one literary example of many that helps prove women were indeed traveling away from home.
	While several scholars were beginning to become interested in medieval women as pilgrims and travelers, others were busy researching medieval women and the sources they could be found in.  Joel T. Rosenthal edited a collection of papers entitled Medieval Women and the Sources of Medieval History (1990).  While this collection does not include any writings on medieval women as travelers, its contributions are still important.  The essays range in topic from “Sexual Equality in Medieval Canon Law” (James A. Brundage), to “Old Norse Sources on Women” (Jenny Jochens), to “Women and the Literature of Obstetrics and Gynecology” (Helen Lamay).  In his introduction, Rosenthal poses the question “If history reflects the winners’ view, who, we are now prone to ask, were the so-called losers?  What material was ignored, buried, and falsified in the sources that the winners were so careful to edit in their own favor, and to whom did it belong?”   The answer, according to Rosenthal, is that the “so-called losers” were anyone or any group of people who fell into the category of the “outsider” or “other.”  Women were the “other,” alongside barbarians, Vikings, Turks, Jews and others.  Women were some of the “so-called losers” and consequently did not factor heavily in the dialogue of the medieval world.  Even though they did not play an obvious major role in the medieval world, women were still a part of it and found themselves either being written about in regards to their male counterparts or completely ignored.  “Most of those who wrote explicitly about women,” writes Rosenthal, “did so to denigrate them, and most of those who wrote for other purpose were apt to give them the short shrift.”   There was no middle ground; as far as the majority of medieval men were concerned, there was a “conceptual matrix defined by men who referred to themselves as ‘us’ and to women as ‘them.’  Listen to Rousseau:  ‘Let us begin, then, by examining the similarities and differences between her sex and ours.’”   Rousseau was living and working in the eighteenth century.  This example demonstrates that the idea of “us” and “them” (or the “other”) was still alive and well centuries after the Middle Ages.  Rosenthal concludes with a valid point, that “to approach the study of medieval women by means of the sources makes us confront a whole range of problems centering around the creation and shaping of texts.”   Historians are trained to ask questions about the texts they study.  Questions such as “Who created it?  Why was it created?  What is the context?” are just some of the questions that historians should constantly be asking and striving to answer.  
	Woman is a Worthy Wight:  Women in English Society c.1200-1500 (1992) takes this notion addressed by Rosenthal even further.  Editor P.J.P Goldberg writes, “It is the contention here, [in this book] … that it is not possible to understand the structure and working of medieval society without exploring the lives of both women and men…”   Thus, essays in this collection such as “For Better, For Worse:  Marriage and Economic Opportunity for Women in Town and Country” (P.J.P. Goldberg), and “A Woman’s Work…:  Labour and Gender in the Late Medieval Countryside” (Helena Graham), aim to look at and explore the relationships between medieval men and women.  The authors are acutely aware of the major flaws in previous historiography, for they acknowledge that “until comparatively recently most history was written in terms of the activities of a (predominantly male) élite.  In part this was a product of the view that history was about Great Events and Great Men.”   Goldberg would probably agree with Rosenthal’s sentiment that medieval women fell into the category of the “other” far too often.  As a response to women more or less being left out of history for centuries, this collection of essays stresses that an accurate and thorough investigation of the past is not possible if half of the population is excluded.
	The 1990s continued to be a fruitful and prolific period for medieval historians.  Books such as Upon My Husband’s Death (1992), A History of Women in the West (1992), Between Pit and Pedestal:  Women in the Middle Ages (1994), Power of the Weak (1995), and The Case for Women in Medieval Culture (1997), all addressed women’s history.  Each of these books contained a common thread:  they were all keenly aware of the lack of scholarship in women’s history up until recently, and they stressed that women were indeed a part of history and were worthy of further study.  However, it was not until 1999, with the publication of Women in Medieval Western European Culture, that a historian explicitly stated that even though many women were anonymous in the documents from the medieval period, it did not mean that they were invisible.   Thus, “women were far from invisible as long as one knows where to look.”   The authors of this collection demonstrate this last sentiment expertly.  There are twenty essays which discuss topics such as women and medieval culture, women and Christianity, women and law, and women and medieval politics.  True to the goal of “redesign[ing] the image of medieval society so that it encompasses a wider and more diverse group of people,”  the authors used a plethora of sources.
	The sources for women’s history are many and varied.  There are the sources used by the political and the legal historian:  works of theory, legal treatises and teaching texts, documents of litigation and court cases, contracts, and so on.  There are the sources used by the cultural historian:  works of literature, letters, works of art, and the like.  And there are the sources used by the social and the economic historian:  baptismal registers, financial lists, tax rolls, recipe books, manuals for housewives and for estate managers, household accounts, wills, and public fiscal documents. 

The essays found in this collection make good use of these sources.  By using these sources, the authors accomplished what they set out to do in terms of redefining the image that the contemporary world has of the medieval world.
	In addition to the progressive and forward-thinking essays contained in Women in Medieval Western European Culture, another book dedicated solely to young medieval women was also published in that same year,1999.  Edited by Katherine J. Lewis, Noël James Menuge, and Kim M. Phillips, Young Medieval Women was written to fill the gap caused by the absence of scholarly work on young medieval women.  As the editors correctly point out, “until now no single monograph or essay collection has appeared on the subject of young womanhood.”   The essays contained in this volume overlap in two areas of study:  medieval women and medieval youth.  This is an important point because studies of medieval youth tended to focus more on boys and young men than it did girls and young women.  Therefore, by writing these essays, two areas of study will benefit.  The works included in this collection cover topics such as maidenhood, prostitution, marriage, virgin-martyrs, rape, and gender and authority.  Each topic provides rich sources to pull from, such as the Malterer Embroidery, John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, translations of Joan of Arc’s trials, and more.  With sources such as these, the authors “demonstrate the ways in which this ideology [of young medieval women] operated and influenced the lives and representations of some of them.” 
	While 1999 was the year in which this groundbreaking scholarship on young medieval women was published, the following year witnessed the publication of the first monograph which focused solely on women as pilgrims.  Written by Susan Signe Morrison, Women Pilgrims in Late Medieval England:  Private Piety as Public Performance “explores the important phenomenon of women and pilgrimage in the late Middle Ages.”   Morrison tells how the book came about:
	A number of years ago I went to the library to find a book on women pilgrims.  I wanted to compare the fictional Wife of Bath and the historical Margery Kempe to other women pilgrims who actually existed in the late Middle Ages so I could see how the figures I dealt with in the classroom adhered to or deviated from the norm.  After a long search I realized there was no such book.  That is how this study came to be written. 

In short, Morrison recognized a need in the field of women’s medieval history and addressed it by writing this book.  As we will see later in this paper, her book opened the door for others scholars to write about this topic as well.
	Morrison makes a convincing argument throughout her book that “gender-specific illnesses, mainly having to do with fertility and childbirth, are fundamental to understanding women’s relationship to pilgrimage.”   To support her argument, she studies the pilgrimage shrine at Walsingham which claimed to have a few drops of the Virgin Mary’s milk.  Morrison dubs the pilgrimage route to Walsingham as the “Milky Way” because of the shrine’s connection to the Virgin Mary and the presence of women pilgrims at the shrine, looking for help and assistance in areas exclusive to motherhood:  fertility, childbirth, and the wish for the continued health of living children.  Morrison’s use of sources is varied and extensive.  For example, in researching the Walsingham shrine, she studied several wills left by women where the shrine was included as a benefactor.  For instance, in 1505 Lady Catherine, the widow of Sir John Hastings, bequeathed her velvet gown to Walsingham.   Other women left money, jewelry, clothing, and silver.  Some women even stipulated in their wills that a proxy pilgrimage be performed on their behalf; in 1448, Alice Winter set forth in her will that 
she wanted a man to be hired to make a pilgrimage, for her soul “and the souls of the people to whom she was bound, to the cross at Newton, the cross at Reydon, the cross at Terrington and St John’s Chapel at Terrington, the Holy Trinity and All Saints of Lynn and St Margaret of Lynn, St Felix of Babingley, St Leonard of Norwich and Our Lady of Walsingham, as well as to the cross ‘of the north door, London,’ and to St Thomas of Canterbury.” 

Extant wills such as Alice Winter’s confirm the theory that the shrine at Walsingham was very important to medieval women.  If it had not been, the women would not have bothered to leave anything to the shrine in their wills.  They obviously had concern for its continued care after they were dead and by donating money, wax, or other valuable items they were ensuring that the shrine would be available to other women pilgrims.
Along with primary source material such as wills, Morrison looks at three women pilgrims—Margery Kempe, Elizabeth de Burgh, and Elizabeth of York—for what they can show the medieval historian, mainly how women from different social classes viewed pilgrimage and how their activities were recorded.  For many scholars, Margery Kempe is the embodiment of women’s pilgrimage.  A wife and mother of fourteen, she traveled to Jerusalem, Rome, Germany, and shrines within England, including Walsingham.  Even though Margery was an ordinary woman, she was extraordinary in that she managed to get her pilgrimage accounts written down by dictating them to two scribes.  The manuscript was lost for centuries until it was discovered in 1934.  Like the study of women and pilgrimage, the study of Margery Kempe is still fairly young—especially when compared to other areas of historical research.  
Elizabeth de Burgh was the daughter of Princess Joan (who in turn was the daughter of Edward I) and a niece of Edward III.  Thanks to her aristocratic status, documents such as household accounts and narratives of her pilgrimage experiences still exist.  There is evidence that Elizabeth went on pilgrimages to Canterbury, Walsingham, and Bromholm (which held the shrine of the Holy Rood).   Additionally, she received permission from the pope to send a proxy pilgrim in her place to Santiago de Compostela, due to her age.  Morrison goes on to show Elizabeth’s deep-rooted connection to Walsingham:  “She established a Franciscan priory there in 1347, much against the will of the Augustinian canons who enjoyed a lucrative relationship with pilgrims.  Her patronage supported goldsmiths creating jewellery [sic], plate, images, and religious vessels.”   Morrison also highlights an interesting document which records Elizabeth’s payment to an artisan but also makes mention of a pilgrimage:
	John de Lenne [clerk of the wardrobe] accounts for payment to Robert the illuminator and Thomas the goldsmith staying behind at Bardfield, the lady being at Clare and going on pilgrimage to Walsingham, from 21 August to 3 October inclusive, namely for 42 days, each taking 2d a day, 14s 8d. 

Aside from going on pilgrimage—which the above passage confirms—Elizabeth also donated money in recognition of saints’ feast days and may have influenced friends and family members to go on pilgrimages of their own.
	Morrison’s last woman pilgrim, Elizabeth of York, was married to Henry VII and was queen from 1486-1503.  Privy Purse Expenses of the Queen are still extant for the years 1502-1503, and these records give a glimpse into Elizabeth of York’s secular life but also her piety.  For example, there are several entries in the Privy Purse Expenses concerning religious holidays, such as donations made in her name on Good Friday and Easter Sunday.  Morrison also notes that the documents make mention of pilgrimage:
	Sir William Barton, priest, is given money to present offerings of the Queen to shrines at Windsor (Our Lady and Saint George and the Holy Cross), Eton (Henry VI and Our Lady), Reading (Child of Grace), Caversham (Our Lady), Cockthorpe (Our Lady), the Holy Blood of Hailes, Prince Edward, Worcester (Our Lady), Northampton (Holy Rood and Our Lady of Grace), Walsingham (Our Lady), Sudbury (Our Lady), Woolpit (Our Lady), Ipswich (Our Lady), and Stokeclare (Our Lady).  This vicarious pilgrimage or pilgrimage by proxy, quite common in the Middle Ages and often set out in wills, took the priest twenty-six days to accomplish, the expenses for which he received tenpence a day. 

Like Elizabeth de Burgh, Elizabeth of York was extremely devout and generous in her offerings to the church and its shrines.
	Morrison demonstrates that the shrine of Walsingham was important for women in all walks of life; Margery Kempe and Elizabeth de Burgh made a pilgrimage to the shrine while Elizabeth of York sent a proxy in her place.  Moreover, Walsingham was a key shrine for Englishwomen to visit, due to its relationship with breast milk and the Virgin Mary.  In her extensive book, Morrison goes on to discuss medieval theories of space and its perceptions, women pilgrims in literature, the use of religious images, pilgrim badges and ampullae, and specific women who went on pilgrimage either by themselves or in a company.
	Several other books on the topic of pilgrims and women were published in the first decade of the twenty-first century.  Books such as Women in Early Medieval Europe (2002), Studies on Medieval and Early Modern Women (2003), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing (2003), Voices in Dialogue:  Reading Women in the Middle Ages (2005), and Wandering Monks, Virgins, and Pilgrims:  Ascetic Travel in the Mediterranean World, AD 300-500 (2005) are just a few.  But it was in 2009 that Leigh Ann Craig published her work Wandering Women and Holy Matrons:  Women as Pilgrims in the Later Middle Ages.  Despite the existence of several articles on women pilgrims, such as Marina Tomacheva’s “Female Piety and Patronage in the Medieval ‘Hajj’” and Rosalynn Voaden’s “Travels with Margery:  Pilgrimage in Context,” Craig’s was only the second book to focus solely on women as pilgrims (with Morrison’s book from 2000 being the first).  And now, in 2013, I am not aware of any new books on the subject since!
	Craig’s monograph is actually a reworking of her PhD dissertation, which she wrote in the early 2000s.  Additionally, one of her chapters was originally an article titled “Stronger than Men and Braver than Knights:  Women and Pilgrimages to Jerusalem and Rome in the Later Middle Ages,” which appeared in the Journal of Medieval History in September 2003.  Craig boldly addresses why this topic interests her:
	Even after years of attention to this project, the question of why one should care about a group as narrowly-defined as women who became pilgrims in the later Middle Ages still looms large in my own mind, and I wish to address it plainly.  As a subjective, human, female reader, my first inclination is to feel that Margaret [a fourteenth century female pilgrim from Pomerania] is of interest for her own sake.  She was a living person, and she had an unusual and powerful personal experience that was related to her bodily womanhood, and on both counts I find her story compelling.  As a medievalist whose scholarly interest is in women, I find Margaret and women like her to be important because they represent a rare find in our sources.  Margaret was an unremarkable person—neither an educated nun, nor a powerful queen, nor a venerated holy person—who was able to seek out, describe, and celebrate an unusual religious experience.  Her story, however incomplete it may be, speaks to us about the ways in which Christian devotion touched a very ordinary life.  Since Christianity was the single most important cultural vocabulary in use throughout the Middle Ages, this offers a new perspective on the cornerstone of my field of study. 

Craig goes on to discuss Margaret further, explaining that this ordinary female pilgrim “is a fine example of the operation of social norms in women’s lives.”   By studying Margaret and other women like her, Craig has discovered—through careful reading and analysis—what would have been expected from women in the later Middle Ages, as well as the areas in which they had power.
	Instead of dividing her book based on social conditions or specific women, Craig breaks her book into separate chapters which discuss particular kinds of pilgrimage.  For example, chapter three discusses miraculous pilgrimage, chapter four focuses on devotional pilgrimage, chapter five speaks to compulsory pilgrimage, and finally, chapter six deals with non-corporeal pilgrimage.  These chapters are couched at either end by a chapter on women pilgrims and how they were viewed and portrayed in medieval society (she argues that people had a fear of wandering women—these women were not adhering to social norms by traveling outside the home and were therefore something to be afraid of) and a final chapter in which Craig discusses the conclusions that one may come to upon finishing the book.
	Like Morrison, Craig’s focus is on the late Middle Ages.  Neither author discusses Muslim or Jewish pilgrims and their relevant shrines and pilgrimage destinations.  Morrison’s book deals with women from England in the late Middle Ages while Craig expands her research to include Italy, France, Sweden, and Germany.  And neither woman discusses (or even mentions) the significance of pilgrimage in Spain (outside of Santiago de Compostela) or Africa.  Moreover, ancient Christian pilgrims, such as Egeria, Melania the Elder and her granddaughter Melania the Younger, and Paula, a correspondent and confidant of Saint Jerome are completely ignored.  Indeed, each of these categories—Jews, Muslims, and ancient Christians—are not discussed in depth or even mentioned in the works I have discussed here.  Further research is needed on these other areas concerning women and pilgrimage.  It is not a question of if, but rather when, these missing works will be produced.

Linda Lomperis quotes fellow scholar James Clifford as saying, “Cultures do not hold still to have their pictures taken.”   While we are incapable of taking snapshots of cultures, we can write about them.  Ethnography is practiced today, and some scholars argue that books such as Marco Polo’s Travels, History of the Mongols by John of Plano Carpini and even Mandeville’s fictional travel account fall into that category .  However, I would argue that traveler-authors such as Marco Polo and John of Plano Carpini as well as those who wrote fictional accounts (Mandeville) were not writing ethnographies.  In fact, they could not even have been aware of what the term meant:  according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), “ethnography” does not appear in the English language until 1834 in the Penny Cyclopaedia, which spanned an impressive twenty-seven volumes.  Furthermore, “ethnography” is defined in the OED as “The scientific description of nations or races of men, with their customs, habits, and points of difference.”   
There is nothing scientific in Mandeville’s or Polo’s Travels, and the historical evidence does not support the thesis that these men were writing ethnographies:  Mandeville never traveled to the places he wrote about, whereas Polo was a merchant traveler who was primarily interested in economics and trade.  Upon close reading and examination of the texts, an argument could be made, however, that these travel accounts are a kind of proto-ethnography.  One can see where future ethnographers, such as Margaret Mead or Claude Lévi-Strauss, may have been influenced by Marco Polo and Mandeville.  I would argue that these thirteenth and fourteenth century narratives are types of proto-ethnographies.  Both describe other nations and races of men along with their customs, habits, and points of difference using either Venice or England as a point of reference.  However, the work is not done scientifically if only because the methods modern science were unknown to these authors.  But with the benefit of hindsight, we know that this kind of narrative will evolve into what we know today as the ethnography.  With this information we can trace the trajectory from the works of Marco Polo and John Mandeville, through the works of subsequent authors and up to the present day.
John Mandeville’s Travels has inspired much scholarship since its publication in the second half of the fourteenth century.  According to C.W.R.D. Moseley, Mandeville’s work surpassed Polo’s in popularity (300 versions of Mandeville’s MSS survive, compared to about 70 of Polo’s).   Scholars such as Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Linda Lomperis have used Mandeville to bolster their criticism of medieval writing.  Additionally, Lomperis questions the term “race” and how it fits into Mandeville’s book.  While she and I depart on the definition of “race” in the Middle Ages—I do not think the term had any meaning in the Middle Ages—her article was still intriguing (if not wholly convincing).   Referring back to the OED, “race” is a pre-modern term, first used around 1547.   This information helps supports my thesis that the term “race” was meaningless in the Middle Ages, which suggests that medieval men and women (specifically, travel writers such as Polo and Mandeville) were not familiar with this social construct.  “Race” is a pre-modern (and certainly modern!) concept, one which we as scholars of medieval history need to be careful of projecting onto the past.
Akbari approaches the theory of race in a different way and one in which I am more inclined to agree with.  She writes that in the Middle Ages the difference in “race” was actually a “bodily difference.”   It was this difference which helped in the identification of the monstrous races:  “monstrosity [was] either the consequence of the damnation of outcasts such as Cain or Canaan, or a manifestation of the diversity of nature.”   Popular examples of the former can be found in Beowulf in the characters of Grendel and Grendel’s mother, while the examples of the latter can be found in places such as Africa (specifically Ethiopia).  Both examples are found in Mandeville’s Travels, with his commentary on the Ethiopians as well as his observations on assorted monsters, with the sciapods among them. 
In conclusion, I believe (like Lomperis) that Mandeville’s main purpose in writing the Travels is for pleasure.   Unlike the Pilgrim’s Guide to Santiago or even Marco Polo’s Travels, it was not meant by any means to be a guidebook.  The purpose was to produce a book that would delight the reader.  The popularity of the book (see above) certainly proves that people were reading Mandeville’s Travels and getting something out of it.  Even though it wasn’t written as a guidebook, voyagers such as Christopher Columbus and Martin Frobisher—who traveled to the New World several hundred years after the book’s publication—took copies of Mandeville with them.  Even Leonardo da Vinci had the Travels in his library.  These men stand out as belonging to the modern world but it is clear they were influenced by medieval notions of science and travel.

This week’s readings focused on women travelers—mainly to the Holy Land—and their position in society.  Pilgrims such as Margery Kempe and the six traveling companions of Felix Fabri found themselves on the outside, frequently not included within the fellowship they were traveling with.  Leigh Ann Craig writes that “male pilgrims [were] hostile toward women … [and] only tolerated women at the price of their silence and invisibility.”   For Felix Fabri’s “ancient matrons,” this worked quite well and seemingly to their advantage; they gained supporters within the group, including Fabri himself.  Margery Kempe, on the other hand, was no one to keep silent and stay invisible.  Because of this, she suffered greatly throughout her journeys—dealing with abandonment, imprisonment, accusations of heresy, and poverty.
	Yet throughout her many hardships Margery persevered and continued to demonstrate her faith and love in Christ Jesus—most notably by weeping copious amounts of tears whenever she thought of the Passion, as well as by rolling and thrashing on the ground.  Her manner of dress (all white, reminiscent of the Virgin) was also extremely provocative and caused quite a stir.  It seems that the more Margery was subjected to ridicule and haranguing by her contemporaries, the more intent she was on these outward displays of her religious devotion.  (As I was reading this I often wondered if anyone had taken the time to count how many times the words “cry” and “weep” and their variations appear in the text!)
	Margery Kempe is the best known female mystic of her time.  I agree (up to a point) with Hope Emily Allen’s premise that the Book is “an authentic record of the social and religious conflicts of one woman’s life in mid-fifteenth-century England,”  but it is also important to bear in mind that today’s concept of the autobiography did not exist in the fifteenth century.  With that being said, I think Allen’s thesis is a good starting point when it comes to the study of Margery Kempe in relation to her society and religion.  Indeed, the Book is chock full of stories and anecdotes with Margery at the center of each and every controversy.  Would a book such this have the kind of appeal that it does for scholars today if Margery Kempe had not been a woman?  I think not.  The whole reason that Margery experienced such hostility from people that she met on her travels was because she was so openly religious and a woman.  In short, they had no idea how to treat her or behave around her.  As Rosalynn Voaden points out, “It was always the non-English [Margery] encountered … who recognised and validated her spirituality and devotional praxis…,”  while those who could speak her language caused her great suffering.  For example, she and a German-speaking priest—her confessor—were able to speak only to each other through God’s intervention.  This is demonstrated in Chapter Forty of Book One when they are at dinner with other priests who test them.  The visiting priests speak in English to see if the German priest can understand them, which he cannot.  He can only understand English when it is spoken to him by Margery:  “And then they had great marvel, for they knew well that he understood what she said and she understood what he said, and he could understand no other Englishman.”   
	English women were not the only ones who experienced trouble during pilgrimage.  Muslim women, too, had to deal with issues of safety and other hazards that go hand-in-hand with travel.  Unlike their Christian counterparts, who found themselves having to acquire permission from their husbands or fathers before going on pilgrimage, Muslim women did not need a male relative to give his blessing.  Rather, the hajj offered Muslim women a significant amount of freedom in that they did not have to veil themselves and they could go with or without permission from their husbands or fathers. 
	However, it was mostly through charitable contributions that Muslim women had real power.  For example, philanthropy such as building and public services (i.e. wells along the pilgrimage routes) were completed at the behest of powerful women such as Khayzurān and Zubayda, both ‘Abbāsid queens.   
	Even though the hajj allowed women some degree of freedom, they were not totally free.  They were still expected to travel with an appropriate male relative or escort and “often, more than one royal lady traveled in the same caravan, reducing the total expense while adding to the general splendor.”   Like their Christian counterparts, the Muslim pilgrims traveled in groups, not only for safety but also for solidarity.  Once in Mecca the sexes were segregated, similar to the procedures at the holy sites in Jerusalem.
	Clearly, while there were differences between Christian and Muslim pilgrims and how they dealt with and treated women, there were also striking similarities.  In neither religion were women totally accepted—as Margery Kempe and Marina Tolmacheva’s article demonstrated—and each had to make special accommodations (however begrudgingly) for female w

	Debra Strickland writes, in her article “Demons, Darkness, and Ethiopians,” “… demons represent an attempt to visualize the nature of evil itself, an evil in which virtually all non-Christians were believed to participate, either as leaders or followers.”   In short, Strickland is saying that the idea of there being evil in non-Christians was prevalent in the Middle Ages.  This notion was used to compare and contrast Christians with non-Christians (along with demons and even the devil) so that the intended audience of the text of pictorial image would know what they were, but more importantly, what the “other” was not.  That is, those who fell into the category of “other” (Ethiopians, Jews, members of monstrous races, demons, et al.), while they may be considered part of God’s creation (however abhorrent), where not considered part of the norm. 
	These past few weeks our readings have focused on travels to exotic places such as the Orient; we have also read and discussed fictional voyages.  For most medieval men and women, the East was an unknown place which they only knew through folklore, pictures, and writing.  Jeffery Jerome Cohen hits the nail on the head with his observation that as more of the world continued to be discovered, the boundaries of the unknown and its inhabitants had to be pushed further and further away:  “After Asia, Africa and Scandinavia had to be abandoned to Western occupation, the monsters were relocated to the New World, and finally (in our own century) to outer space.”   Indeed, it is safe to say that most of us will never make it to outer space in our life time, not unlike most of the medieval population who never made it to Jerusalem or India.
	Unlike John Mandeville, who in his Travels states “… [I] have seen and gone through many kingdoms, lands, provinces and isles…,”  the author of the Liber Monstrorum makes no such claim.  Rather, he refers to the stories of “ … monstrous parts [or ‘births’] of men, and the horrible and innumerable forms of wild beasts, and the most dreadful kinds of dragons, and serpents, and vipers…” as outright lies.   The author then goes on to describe these wondrous races and beasts matter-of-factly in a series of three books.  They are divided into monsters (Book I); beasts (Book II); and serpents (Book III).  While the author makes it clear that he believes these tales of monsters, beasts, and serpents are lies, he does make the concession that there may be a nugget of truth in the stories:
	Only some things in the marvels themselves are believed to be true, and there are countless things which if anyone could take winged flight to explore, they would prove that, although they should be concocted in speech and rumour, where now there is said to lie a golden city and gem-strewn shores, one would see there rocks and a stony city, if at all.  […]  … Let each judge for himself the following material… 

The Liber Monstrorum was written in the seventh or eighth centuries—a period which none of this week’s scholars (save Andy Orchard) spends much time on in their articles.  One wonders what happened between the seventh and eighth centuries, when this was acknowledged to be fiction, and the fourteenth century, when it was viewed as fact. 
	Even today, in the twenty-first century, there is a fear of the unknown.  That fear, however, does not apply to us in the same way it did to those in the Middle Ages.  We are aware of where India and Ethiopia are located and what crocodiles and hippopotamuses look like.  We also know—thanks to modern science—that hippopotamuses do not sweat blood.   And also thanks to modern science, we now know that people such as the Ethiopians do not have dark skin and “crisp” or “woolly” hair solely because of their close proximity to the sun.  While those unknowns are known to us today, we are still, in the words of Cohen, in the midst of “ … a long and never-to-be finished struggle to make sense of difference in all its presentations—racial, cultural, sexual, national, ethnic, gender, economic, intellectual, [and] metaphysical.”   This in particular is why monsters, demons, and the personification of evil will always intrigue us and will thus always be a rich source of scholarship.

Codex Amiatinus
	One of three pandects commissioned by Ceolfrith to be made at Wearmouth-Jarrow, the Codex Amiatinus is “the earliest surviving complete Vulgate Bible anywhere and our only complete pre-Conquest source for the Old Testament text in Anglo-Saxon England.”   Ceolfrith, on one of his many trips to Rome, brought back with him to Northumbria Cassiodorus’s Codex Grandior, a pandect made at the Roman senator’s Italian monastery of Vivarium in Squillace.  While the monks at Wearmouth-Jarrow knew that they possessed something incredibly special, they were merely aware that the Codex Grandior had only been in Cassiodorus’s possession—not that it had been produced under his direction.  Paul Meyvaert points out several times that had Bede and his contemporaries at Wearmouth-Jarrow been aware of this, their interpretation of certain pages (most notably the Cassiodorus portrait) may have been different.  Furthermore, Bede and the other monks were wholly unaware of Cassiodorus’s other important work, The Institutes, which, as Meyvaert asserts, would have saved Bede from much anguish and “provided the guidance he longed for.”   Unfortunately, Cassiodorus’s great pandect no longer survives, but we do have the Codex Amiatinus (as well as other writings from Bede) to help us put together how the Codex Grandior may have appeared during the lifetime of Cassiodorus, and, subsequently, Bede.
	The Codex Amiatinus can now be found at the Laurentian Library in Florence, Italy, where it has resided since 1782 when the monastery of Monte Amiato (hence the name Amiatinus), located in the Central Appenines, was suppressed.   The Codex Amiatinus is indeed a sight to behold, as R.L.S. Bruce-Mitford, writing about his first encounter with the pandect, can confirm:
	Having put in one’s slip, and waited a respectable interval, one watches with awe two attendants, with a third to open doors, staggering in under the load.  Half a dozen fat volumes have to be placed on the table, to take the strain off the binding, before one can open its cover.  It is with trepidation that one ventures to produce the bicycle lamp which one has planned to supplement, for minute scrutiny of the decoration, the inadequate light in Michelangelo’s octagonal reading room. 

Indeed, the Codex Amiatinus is massive: containing 1030 folios (2060 pages in all), the pandect is made from calfskin.  Each bifolium measures 27 ½ x 10 ½ in with the book itself measuring 10 inches thick when the covers are on.  Without the covers, the Codex measures 8 ½ inches thick.  Weighing in at 75 ½ pounds, it is no small wonder that at least two attendants are needed to carry the pandect with a third attendant whose sole purpose is to open doors and clear the path.  According to Bruce-Mitford, the pandect would have weight upwards of 90 pounds, taking into account all of its protective wrappings, traveling cases, and original covers.   Until relatively recently—at the end of the 19th century—it was believed that the Codex was Latin in origin because of the presence of uncial script.  Peter Hunter Blair writes “it was an Italian scholar who…first revealed the machinations of Peter the Lombard by showing that his name had been inserted into the space left by the erasure of Abbott Ceolfrith’s name”  in the dedicatory verse.  Additionally, Bruce-Mitford does a convincing job of demonstrating the alteration of the dedicatory verse in his article “The Art of the Codex Amiatinus:”
	The dedicatory verse now reads:

CENOBIUM AD EXIMII MERITO
VENERABILE SALVATORIS
QUEM CAPUT ECCLESIAE
DEDICAT ALTA FIDES
PETRUS LANGOBARDORUM
EXTREMIS DE FINIBUS ABBAS
DEVOTI AFFECTUS
PIGNORA MITTO MEI
MEQUE MEOSQUE OPTANS
TANTI INTER GAUDIA PATRIS
IN CAELIS MEMOREM
SEMPTER HABERE LOCUM

(The letters italicized are in a lighter ink, representing alterations.) 

Bruce-Mitford continues:
	[Folio 1v] shows clearly, in differences in the colour of the ink, and in the dark patches marking erasures, that certain words have been altered.  Behind these alterations the original words of the inscription, and the identity of the manuscript, lay concealed.  […]  It was the famous Italian epigraphist and historian of the Catacombs, G.B. de Rossi…who made the brilliant suggestion that for the words PETRUS LANGOBARDORUM the words CEOLFRITH BRITONUM should be substituted.  An original E remains, as the second letter of this line, and even a suggestions of the preceding initial C may be seen in the manuscript. 

Moreover, The Anonymous History of Abbot Ceolfrith not only lays out the making of the three pandects in Northumbria, but it also includes the dedicatory verse that Ceolfrith had inscribed on the Codex Amiatinus, a gift to the Pope:
	To the body of sublime Peter, justly venerated, whom ancient faith declares to be head of the Church.  I, Ceolfrith, abbot from the furthest ends of England send pledges of my devoted affection, desiring that I and mine may ever have a place amidst the joy of so great a father, a memorial in heaven. 

With these two pieces of evidence, it is clear that the Codex Amiatinus was conceived of by Ceolfrith and produced by his scribes at Wearmouth-Jarrow in England, and is not a Latin pandect.
	While the Codex is well known for its decorations—most notably the first eight leaves—the actual text of the pandect is hardly decorated at all.  Rather, the text is written in a series of double columns on over 2000 pages in uncial script, and according to David Wright, there were probably seven scribes who worked on the manuscript in nine sections—two of whom did two sections each.   Wright also discussed the controversial grouping of the first eight leaves, as does Bruce-Mitford.  Both men independently come to the conclusion “on the grounds of script [and, in the case of Bruce-Mitford], and for other reasons connected with style, technique, and pigmentation…that the whole of the first gathering [of the eight leaves] is the work of a single hand.”   In determining which folios belong in the grouping, subtle clues such as stains from one page being found on another and worm-hole patterns both indicate where pages had originally been placed.
	We know that the Codex Amiatinus was completed prior to June 5, 716, for Bede tells us in The Lives of the Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow that that is when his Abbot Ceolfrith suddenly announced to the communities of monks that he was going to Rome with the intention of dying there.  Ceolfrith took the Codex with him, as a gift to present to the Pope.  Some scholars such as Bruce-Mitford argue that the Codex was not originally intended as a gift for the Pope and Ceolfrith made this decision at the last minute while others suggest that it would have been reasonable to expect that the Codex, being one of three—with the other two already being housed at the churches of Saints Peter and Paul—could have been intended as a presentation piece from the very beginning.  I find the latter argument more convincing than the former.  Either way one may argue this point, the Codex Amiatinus made it to Rome without Ceolfrith—who had died in Langres, France on the way.
	Perhaps the most famous feature of the Codex Amiatinus is the “Ezra portrait” found on folio Vr.  Paul Meyvaert goes into great detail about how the “Ezra portrait” was based on the “Cassiodorus portrait” from the Codex Grandior and also influenced by other Roman traditions.  For example, he uses the image of Diognes the Gravedigger, with the tools of his trade scattered around him, and compares this to the image of the scribe with his writing tools scattered on the floor to demonstrate that this technique had never been used before in Insular art:  “This type of representation is totally absent from Insular art, and its presence in the Codex Amiatinus implies that a model of Mediterranean origin was being very faithfully reproduced.”   He (as well as Bruce-Mitford) discusses the importance of the scribe’s clothing—most notably his breastplate and headgear, which identify the scribe as a high priest:
	It can be doubted that the Wearmouth-Jarrow library possessed images of Hebrew high priests for the local artists to consult.  But such images were not really necessary.  To design the appropriate insignia for Ezra all they needed was chapter 27 of Exodus, or the Antiquities of Josephus, for a description of the rationale or jeweled breastplate with its twelve stones set in four rows.  As regards the distinctive headgear of the high priest, the source was probably the elaborate description in the Antiquities of Josephus, a work we know was at Wearmouth-Jarrow.  Josephus explains that the high priest shared the pilleum, or bonnet, with all other priests but in addition had a gold crown, above which rose in the middle of his forehead, as it were, a small gold chalice of the dimensions of the small finger. 

Additionally, we know that this portrait found in the Codex Amiatinus depicts Ezra simply because of an inscription found at the top part of the folio:  “Codibus sacris hostile clade perustis / Ezra dō fervens hoc reparavit opus.”   Furthermore, textual evidence shows that Cassiodorus spoke of dividing the books of the bible into nine separate volumes—something that we can see clearly in the Ezra portrait with the nine books laid out in a cupboard behind the scribe.  The nine books are as follows:  “eight books of the Octateuch and the Law (1 and 2 Samuel), six books of Kings and Paralipomenon (Chronicles); eight historical books; one book of Psalms; five books of the Wisdom of Solomon; sixteen prophetic books; four Gospels, twenty-one Epistles, Acts, and Apocalypse.”   The corresponding titles in Latin can be seen on the bindings of the books in the Ezra portrait.  Here again is another example of how and why the Codex Amiatinus had stumped scholars for so many centuries, firmly believing it was a Mediterranean work.
	Today we can easily take it for granted that the Codex Amiatinus is an Anglo-Saxon piece of art, yet at the same time we should remember the scholars who were not aware of its origins and, based on the information and technology they had available to them, came to the (in their minds) correct conclusion that the Codex had been produced in the Mediterranean region and had never left.  Of course, they could not have been further from the truth.  The Codex Amiatinus is a superb example of an early medieval manuscript that underscores the confluence of people and cultures.

Bede’s Legacy
	Bede (673-735) could hardly have guessed what a lasting legacy he would leave behind when at the closing of his Ecclesiastical History of the English People (EH) he wrote “I have worked, both for my own benefit and that of my brethren […] [and] my chief delight has always been in study, teaching, and writing.”   Clearly, Bede—who had never left England—never could have imagined the massive influence he would have on people in the religious and secular worlds within in his own country and beyond, not to mention during and well after his lifetime.  While Joshua A. Westgard makes a convincing argument in his article “Bede and the Continent in the Carolingian Age and Beyond” that Bede was aware of his influence and potential wider audience (after all, why would he bother writing an autobiographical sketch at the end of his EH if that weren’t the case?),  it still seems highly improbable that Bede could have foreseen how influential he and his works would prove to be in the coming centuries.  I doubt that Bede anticipated that we, a group of scholars studying Anglo-Saxon England, would be gathered together around this table on a continent totally unknown to him more than twelve centuries after his death.
	The Venerable Bede, probably the most famous English monk and scribe from the late seventh and early eighth centuries, was born in Northumbria on the lands of the double monasteries Wearmouth and Jarrow.  Here he would spend his entire life, with the exception of two visits to Lindisfarne and York, both undertaken in the last fifteen years of his life.   He tells us in his own words that his family sent him to live at the monastery at the age of seven under Benedict Biscop and his successor Ceolfrid, where he spent “the remainder of my life … and [I] devoted myself entirely to the study of the scriptures.”   It is also in this autobiographical statement that we see what will become the basis of Bede’s legacy, for he lays out his entire life’s work beginning with books and commentaries on the Bible and scriptures, then his letters and hagiographical works, followed by his writings on history, hymns, and poetry.  The list is so impressive and important that is worth quoting in full:
	I have worked, both for my own benefit and that of my brethren, to compile short extracts from the works of the venerable Fathers on Holy Scriptures and to comment on their meaning and interpretation.  These books are as follows:
The beginning of Genesis, up to the birth of Isaac and Ishmael’s rejection:  four Books.
The Tabernacle:  its vessels and priestly vestments:  three Books.
The First Part of Samuel, up to the death of Saul:  three Books.
On the Building of the Temple:  an allegorical interpretation like the others:  two Books.
Thirty Questions on the Books of Kings.
On the Proverbs of Solomon:  three Books.
On the Song of Songs:  seven Books.
On Isaiah, Daniel, The Twelve Prophets, and part of Jeremiah, with chapter headings taken from blessed Jerome’s Treatise.
On Ezra and Nehemiah:  three Books.
On the Song of Habakkuk:  one Book.
On the Book of the blessed father Tobias:  an allegorical interpretation on Christ and the Church:  one Book.
Chapters of Readings on the Pentateuch of Moses, Joshua, and Judges; on the Books of Kings and Chronicles; on the Book of the blessed father Job; on Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of songs; on the Prophets Isaiah, Ezra, and Nehemiah.
On the Gospel of Mark:  four Books.
On the Gospel of Luke:  six Books.
Homilies on the Gospel:  two Books.
On the Apostle [Paul]:  in which I have carefully transcribed in order whatever I have found on the subject in the works of Saint Augustine.
On the Acts of the Apostles:  two Books.
On the Seven Catholic Epistles:  one Book on each.
On the Apocalypse of Saint John:  three Books.
Also, Chapters of Readings from all the new Testament except the Gospel.
Also, a book of Letters to various person, including one on the six ages of the world; on the dwellings of the children of Israel; on Isaiah’s saying ‘And they shall be shut up in the prison, and after many days shall they be visited’:  on the reason for the leap year; and on Anatolius’ explanation of the equinox.
Also, The Histories of the Saints.  I have translated Paulinus’ metrical work on the Life and Suffering of the confessor Saint Felix into prose.  And I have corrected, to the best of my ability, the sense of a book on The Life and Sufferings of Saint Anastasius, which had been badly translated from the Greek, and worse amended by some unskilful [sic] person.  I have also written the Life of our father, the holy monk and Bishop Cuthbert, first in heroic verse and later in prose.
I have written in two books The History of the Abbots Benedict, Ceolfrid, and Hwaetbert, rulers of this monastery in which I delight to serve the Divine Goodness.
The Ecclesiastical History of our island and people:  in five Books.
A Martyrology of the feast-days of the holy martyrs:  in which I have carefully tried to record everything I could learn not only on what date, but also by what kind of combat and under what judge they overcame the world.
A Book of Hymns in various metres or rhythms.
A Book of Epigrams in heroic or elegiac verse.
On the Nature of Things, and On Times:  a book on each, and one larger book On Times.
A Book on Orthography, arranged in alphabetical order.
A Book on The Art of Poetry, with a small work appended On Tropes and Figures; that is, the figures and manners of speech found in holy scripture. 

Bede concludes his EH humbly, with a prayer:
	I pray you, noble Jesu, that as You have graciously granted me joyfully to imbibe the words of your knowledge, so You will also of Your bounty grant me to come at length to Yourself,
		the Fount of all wisdom,
		And to dwell in Your presence
		for ever. 

It is fitting that Bede, as a characteristically humble and modest monk, ended his EH with a prayer to Jesus, thanking Him for the gift of knowledge that enabled Bede to write and produce his prolific amount of works.  Additionally, he implored the Almighty to allow him into heaven when his time on earth was done.
	Based on their position in his list of works, Bede viewed his commentaries and books on the scriptures as the most important; indeed, Bede made sure that they were listed first and foremost, and he even spoke of devoting his entire life to studying scripture—not dividing it between scripture, history, and science as the list of works suggests.  Bede was proud of his exegetical works and they were without a doubt the most important with everything else coming second.  However, future civilizations, such as the Carolingians, came to view Bede’s scientific and historical works as his most important.  Westgard and Joyce Hill have done extensive work in this area of research, and the findings are illuminating.  “To judge by the surviving continental manuscripts dating from the ninth century,” Westgard writes 
Bede’s eight most popular works among the Carolingians were as follows:  Commentary on the Gospel of Luke (forty-one copies), The Reckoning of Time (thirty-four), Commentary on the Gospel of Mark (thirty), Commentary on the Apocalypse (twenty-five), Commentary on the Seven Catholic Epistles (twenty-five), Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles (twenty-five), On the Nature of Things (twenty-three) and the Ecclesiastical History (twenty).  Since Bede wrote more works of exegesis than any other single genre, it is noteworthy that three of the most popular works among the Carolingians were not biblical commentaries, but rather works of science and history. 

Hill also points out in her article “Carolingian Perspectives on the Authority of Bede” that “no other [author] was as well represented as Bede” in Paul the Deacon’s compilation of sermons and homilies which he created at the request of Charlemagne.  Bede’s works even appeared more than Gregory the Great’s!   Hill continues, “It is worth noting that Paul had not been directed to turn to modern authorities, but had been expressly told to collect certain flowers from the far-flung fields of the Catholic Fathers,”  thus solidifying Bede’s authoritative position within the church as well as secular institutions.  
	For the Carolingians, power existed in cumulative knowledge and wisdom.   This belief is demonstrated clearly in Paul the Deacon’s collection of homilies, placing the works of “Augustine, Leo the Great, Maximus of Turin, … Gregory the Great, … the Venerable Bede, Isidore of Seville, Origen, and John Chrysostom”  side by side.  Furthermore, Alcuin, in his De rhetorica, responded to Charlemagne’s question “How can our speech attain the authority which that of the ancients had?” by replying “Their books ought to be read and their words well impressed upon our memory.”   Indeed, the older a piece of wisdom or knowledge was, the stronger its authority—and it was therefore held in higher esteem by the Carolingians.

Medical Pilgrimage, Miracles, and Miraculous Healing:
Where it’s been, where it is, and where it might go
	In preparation for my master’s thesis, which I will start in earnest this summer, I have decided to write an article-length piece on the historiography of medical pilgrimage in the Middle Ages.  Medical pilgrimage is a broad term and I would like to explain exactly what I consider it to be:  in terms of my research, medical pilgrimage encompasses travel made by medieval pilgrims to shrines of prominent saints in hopes of a miraculous cure.  However, the actual act of traveling is only part of this experience.  At this time I am focusing my attention on the miracles themselves, which I believe are another integral part of medical pilgrimage.  In contrast to miraculous healings attributed to saints and their relics, people living in the Middle Ages were also aware of, and had access to, healing methods that were of a more secular nature.  That is, one could potentially seek help from a doctor or physician instead of or in addition to a saint.   Readings for another class this semester (History of Medieval Science and Medicine with Dr. Gibbs) have proven useful, along with select readings from previous semesters, in addition to substantial new research for this project.  It is my hope that this essay will ultimately serve as a kind of foundation for my master’s thesis, where I intend to incorporate some aspect of digital humanities, most likely in the form of a map.    In HIST-666 with Dr. Gibbs in the Fall 2013 semester, I made a map of Margery Kempe’s pilgrimages.  While I was aware that she traveled from her home in King’s Lynn, England, to Italy, the Holy Land, and Spain, seeing it plotted out on a map made me better appreciate the sheer distances she traveled in order to become closer to God.  I am also considering making a “layer” that will deal with routes traveled by the saints themselves, if applicable.  This would provide a quick reference to the viewer who may be interested to know where saints—and then their relics—traveled.  I imagine that this map will be made up of several layers, including plot points for important shrines and relics.  I also plan on tracing and plotting pilgrimage routes traveled by the pilgrims themselves.  In addition, I plan on plotting the routes made by relics throughout the Middle Ages; it was not uncommon for clergy to take saints’ relics on tour—somewhat reminiscent of traveling museum exhibits today.  It is my goal for this map to serve several purposes.  First, the map will be a kind of “one stop shop” in that one could view popular routes taken by pilgrims and saints’ relics.  Secondly, the map—with its various layers—would help point out which routes were common to pilgrims, saints, and relics (if any).  This would give a clearer picture of what medieval medical pilgrimage and its various components (represented by shrines and relics) looked like in that one could theoretically see more easily the “hot spots”—locations with a lot of activity related to pilgrimage and miraculous healing.  While I anticipate that several “hot spots” such as Canterbury, the Holy Land, and Santiago de Compostela will appear prominently on the map, I am curious to see what other “hot spots” there may have been that were not as famous as these major shrines.  But, sadly, all of this is beyond the scope of this paper.  My audience will have to wait a bit longer for the map and its related research and commentary.
With that end-goal in mind, I must first turn to the historiography of medieval medical pilgrimage (specifically miracles) and medicine.  Taking a chronological approach, I will outline the trajectory that secondary scholarship has taken in the last forty years in studying medieval medical pilgrimage as well as medieval medicine.  Medieval medicine is relevant to this kind of research because it illuminates what medieval attitudes toward medicine were, what was available to medieval pilgrims outside of miraculous healing, and whether or not they took advantage of a doctor’s or physician’s service.  Even though my ultimate aim is to research medical pilgrimage, this essay will instead focus on miracles and miraculous healings because they are part of the necessary groundwork I need to complete in order to move forward.
	Even though I am still in the beginnings of my research, I have engaged with an impressive amount of secondary literature.  These works have and will continue to provide me with sources—both primary and secondary—that I will need to study and analyze in order to make a meaningful contribution to the study of miracles and miraculous healing.  With this in mind, one can begin to pick up on important scholars and themes within the field of medieval medical pilgrimage and medicine.  For example, it soon became clear that scholars have been heavily influenced by Jonathan Sumption, who wrote Pilgrimage in 1975.  Sumption mainly provides a narrative of medieval pilgrimage with a focus on France and its immediately surrounding countries.  By using a bottom-up approach—that is, looking at the entire strata of society—coupled with the Annales method of scholarship, Sumption argues that he is able to paint realistic portrait of spiritual life in the Middle Ages.    He does this by drawing heavily on church records, legal documents, narratives, and miracle stories.  However, at 500 pages, his study is so large that by necessity several things are left out.  “This is a long book,” Sumption writes.  “I had no desire to make it longer.”   For example, while Sumption deals extensively with Canterbury and Santiago de Compostela, he provides only rudimentary information about pilgrimage to Jerusalem and does not address any of the miracles that have been purported to have taken place at its various shrines.  Even though he does not directly discuss medicine, Sumption set the stage for future scholars to pick up that banner.
	After Sumption, Ronald C. Finucane was the next scholar to publish a major book on medieval pilgrimage.  This work, first published in 1977, entitled Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England, would prove to be—like Sumption—influential to virtually all subsequent scholars of medieval pilgrimage.  The subtitle of Finucane’s work alerts the reader to what he will address:  an analysis of popular beliefs.  He does this by surveying 3,000 posthumous miracle stories using narrative and Cliometrics as his lenses.  Unlike Sumption, Finucane’s focus is mainly on English shrines, and he limits his study to “new” saints whose cults emerged between 1066 and 1300.   Finucane distinguishes these saints—William of Norwich, Thomas Becket, Godric of Finchale, Frideswide of Oxford, Wulfstan of Worcester, Simon de Montfort, Thomas Cantilupe of Hereford, and in France, Edmund Rich and Louis of Toulouse—as “new” because they did not hail from the Anglo-Saxon tradition which flourished prior to the Conquest of 1066.   Like Sumption, Finucane does not address medical pilgrimage directly, but his discussion on the illnesses and diseases suffered by people in the Middle Ages lays the groundwork for scholars such as Irina Metzler and Simon Yarrow.
Finucane’s work was revolutionary not only because of the sheer amount of posthumous miracle stories he studied analytically, but also because he portrayed these findings as popular history.  Thus, his audience would have extended beyond the scholars of his day.  Yet his quantitative analysis proved to be so thorough that future scholars of medieval history such as Valerie J. Flint, Diana Webb, Debra Birch, and Leigh Ann Craig have referenced it in their own research.  Additionally, scholars such as Frederick S. Paxton, Simon Yarrow, and Iona McCleery acknowledge Finucane’s influence by studying how clergy dealt with peoples’ beliefs in miraculous healings. 
Despite the success of Miracles and Pilgrims, Finucane’s argument is weakened by his condescending attitude and overall reductionist approach.  For example, he states that “so little was known about the body and disease [in the Middle Ages] that practically nothing—certainly in twentieth-century western ‘scientific’ terms—could be done for the ill.”   Finucane’s dismissive attitude of medieval knowledge of the body and disease does not sit well with this modern-day scholar, who would not be so quick to judge those who lived centuries ago by today’s standards.  In addition—and here we can see Sumption’s influence—he attributes common maladies such as poor eyesight or what we know today as rheumatoid arthritis to the medieval diet.   While many illnesses can be resolved by a proper diet, a more honest approach might acknowledge the troubles suffered by medieval persons, such as their environment and mental state, to name just a few.  Nevertheless, there is some truth in is view that shrines offered comfort to those sufferers from condition that could not be cured through other channels.
Benedicta Ward, in her book Miracles and the Medieval Mind:  Theory, Record and Event 1000-1215, uses a more theoretical approach to analyze miraculous events and their corresponding records.  She actually treats miracles as their own kind of theory; her first chapter is titled “The Theory of Miracles.”  In that chapter, she begins with a discussion of St. Augustine, who believed in and recorded miracles.  Ward is not unique in her discussion on Augustine and miracles—other scholars, such as Sumption, Finucane, and Simon Yarrow make it a point to address Augustine early in their monographs.  This makes sense because Augustine was—and still is—one of the most influential Christian authors throughout history.  And as a Church Father (along with the likes of Ambrose, Jerome, and Gregory the Great), people throughout the centuries have looked to Augustine for guidance and clarification.  For example, one might argue that since Augustine believed in miracles it only makes sense that they do indeed exist and it is up to us to interpret God’s will through them.  For Augustine, the major miracle was creation itself:  “After all, God has made a world full of innumerable miracles, in sky, earth, air, and waters, while the earth itself is beyond doubt a miracle greater and more excellent than all the wonders with which it is filled.   As far as Augustine was concerned, man himself was a wondrous miracle and the world was full of even more miracles; their presence, for Augustine, was evidence of the effort to reinforce the faith of the believers as well as to entire and convert non-believers.
After her discussion on Augustine, Ward ventures into her study of miracles in earnest, each chapter exploring a different shrine and saint.  For example, chapter three addresses miracles at the “traditional” shrines of St. Faith (third-fourth centuries), St. Benedict (fifth-sixth centuries), and St. Cuthbert (seventh century).  Immediately following in chapter four the focus is on “modern” shrines in the twelfth century, those of St. William of Norwich (d. 1144), St. Godric (d. 1170), and St. Frideswide.   The organization of this material into two separate chapters speaks to Ward’s statement that miracles “are intimately associated with the society in which they take place, and therefore as subject to change as any other record of events.”   This seemingly obvious declaration is not made until her epilogue.  It would have been beneficial to the reader had Ward stated this clearly in her introduction before jumping into a discussion about miracles and using the terms “traditional” and “modern” as a way to distinguish them from each other.   In other words, Ward conveniently separates these six saints and their miracles chronologically:  Faith, Benedict, and Cuthbert all hail from the time period before the twelfth century and are therefore referred to as “traditional” saints, whereas William, Godric, and Frideswide all appear during/after the twelfth century and therefore fall into her category of “modern” saints.  In her conclusion, Ward points out that “the miracles of the earlier period were subject to certain economic and social pressures and were in themselves a response to certain needs that in a later period altered; acts of power for protection and vengeance, for instance, were replaced by miracles of mercy and cures, in a society for which these were appropriate.”   Although she was writing just a few years after Sumption and Finucane, Ward staked out a path to a far more nuanced understanding of the role of miracles in medieval Europe—a society which she saw as being far less uniform and instead subject to local variations than her predecessors.  
Ward’s sixth chapter, “Miracles and Pilgrimage,” holds the most significance for my research on that same subject.  In it, Ward makes a convincing case about the relevance and importance of “major” shrines and pilgrimage sites such as St. Peter’s in Rome, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain.  She provides evidence showing that these major sites—far removed from most of the European Christian population—were not viewed as places of miraculous healing.  Indeed, she points out that St. Peter’s in Rome does not have a miracle collection like one would find at Canterbury.   Therefore, she concludes that no miracles occurred there.  The same is true of the Holy Sepulchre and Compostela; visitation to and veneration at these shrines required travel over long distances on the part of the ill pilgrim, and Ward argues that a sick person would be more likely to visit a local shrine for healing rather than risk death on the road to Rome, Jerusalem, or Spain.   Ward hypothesizes that these shrines were not destinations for healing was because the miracles of all three men had already been recorded in the Bible.  Moreover, she notes, there are no records of local cures, either; even the local population who lived near these shrines did not seek out miraculous healing or cures in Rome, Jerusalem, or Compostela.  In comparing these three major shrines to those of the twelfth-century saints, Ward observes that “while the new twelfth-century shrines needed miracles to establish or reassert the power of the saints or affirm that their bodies truly rested there, the major shrines of Christendom were already established beyond question, and no new discovery or translation was needed.”   In the introduction to his 2006 book Saints and their Communities:  Miracle Stories in Twelfth Century England, Simon Yarrow takes issue with Ward’s use and perception of the “medieval mind” that is mentioned in the title of her book and referred to throughout.  “Perhaps,” Yarrow suggests, “[this medieval mind] is too intellectual to be representative of the popular dimensions of belief about shrine-based, miracle-working.”   Additionally, he criticizes Ward for her classification of her medieval subjects as “‘simple and unlearned’” and that she seems to assume that the “‘popular expectations of the miraculous’ [in the medieval world] require little explanation.”   As I will discuss later in this essay, such a criticism fits with Yarrow’s overall hypothesis about miracles serving different purposes in popular and elite cultures.  However, I find both authors compelling and do not believe that Yarrow’s criticisms detract from the rigor of Ward’s research, which predates his by two decades.
Following Ward’s monograph from the early 1980s, William D. McCready dedicated his 1989 monograph to Gregory the Great’s works and views on miracles.  This is a significant book for my research because, as McCready points out, Gregory was the “foremost theologian between Augustine and Aquinas.”   More than 800 years separated Augustine and Aquinas, with just under 200 years separating Gregory and Augustine and over 600 years separating Gregory and Aquinas.  For Gregory, who lived in the sixth and early seventh centuries, the modern-day saints of his day (such as Symmachus, Benedict of Nursia, and Scholastia) were just as capable of miracles as the older, more ancient saints (like James, Peter, or Paul).  And like Augustine, Gregory believed that miracles were a useful tool in converting non-believers to the Christian faith.  McCready’s work finds itself in this paper alongside other secondary literature because of Gregory’s influence on medieval hagiography, which is an important avenue of study for scholars of miracles and miraculous healing to follow.  Not only that, but Gregory’s Dialogues and Homilies on the Gospels provide rich fodder for the contemporary scholar who is interested in miracles.  McCready notes that the Dialogues “include miracles [of sixth-century saints] as astonishing as any of those attributed to Christ and the apostles.”   Furthermore, one can discern even further Gregory’s stance on miracles by “comparing [him] … to Sulpicius Severus, John Cassian, or Gregory of Tours.”   Even as careful a scholar as McCready appears to be—or perhaps because of his rigor—his scholarship makes me want to read Gregory the Great for myself, perhaps making his writings a focus of one section of my thesis.
In addition to his writings on miracles, Gregory was also aware of and had an opinion about the medical profession, which I define as the profession or practice of secular healing.  McCready recounts a letter from Gregory to Marinianus, Bishop of Ravenna, in February 601.   According to McCready, Gregory recognized that illness and disease—which he primarily viewed as “a scourge sent by God to induce a state of repentance”—can also be the product of purely natural causes.   In regards to Marinianus, McCready postulates that Gregory centered his suggestions on natural and secular healing rather than appealing to God or the saints because the Bishop of Ravenna—holding a holy office and being a close contemporary of Gregory’s—was not in a position of moral bankruptcy.  Therefore, the only logical course of action, according to Gregory (filtered through McCready), was to seek the aid of a doctor.   Even the Church Fathers of early Christianity believed in and recorded miracles, yet were practical enough to acknowledge the usefulness of doctors and secular healing.  Thanks to the scholarship of McCready, I am now aware that Gregory the Great was aware of and interacted with secular medical professionals, and I have plans to include him in my thesis.
Also in 1989, Valerie J. Flint published her article “The Early Medieval ‘Medicus’, the Saint—and the Enchanter” in the Journal of the Society for the Social History of Medicine.  Influenced by Finucane in her other works, Flint attempts to show that the status of the medicus (also mentioned by Finucane) is in direct correlation to—and even dependent upon—the figures known as the saint and the enchanter.   According to Flint, the medicus, the saint, and the enchanter are all related when it comes to healing.  While the saint represents pure faith, both the enchanter and the medicus have an element of secularity to them.  She presents a hierarchy with saints at the top, medicus in the middle, and enchanters at the very bottom.   Moreover, she posits, it is the job of the medicus to bridge the gap between saints and enchanters.  In other words, even though the medicus could never hope to wield the divine powers of the saints, he can assist them within his realm of the natural world in their fight against the enchanters.  In short, she explains that it is the responsibility of the medicus to help and support the saints against the supernatural and bizarre methods of the enchanters, whom Flint argues is in “constant competition” with the saints.   In addition, Flint acknowledges that her sources for this study—Merovingian hagiographies dating from the sixth to the eighth centuries, and specifically Gregory of Tours—are not traditional in the sense that they are not necessarily the first place one would look when searching for “information about matters of science.”   In defending her choice, she argues that sources such as these are important and vital to the social history of medicine because they can shed light on and “offer insights into the wider world within which the ‘medicus’ operated which are not easily obtainable by other means.”   Her own method provides clues as to how I might proceed in my thesis:  when one knows what one is looking for in these hagiographical texts, it is possible for one to discern information from unlikely sources, such as she does with how the medicus interacted with and reacted to saints’ shrines and miraculous healings as well as enchancters.  But she warns, “Hagiographical material is full of traps for the historian and is hard to use; but it is full, also, of gold if only one can learn to sift it out.”   So it is with trepidation and a heightened sense of caution that I will venture into the study of hagiographical manuscripts in the not-so-far-off future.  Indeed, scholars today frequently draw on hagiographies simply to see what they can glean in terms of the dichotomy between miraculous healing and healing found in the secular or natural world.  Flint’s observations are intriguing, and subsequent scholars have used these as a jumping-off point for their own research.  For these reasons, I believe that Flint’s writings will have an impact on my research, although at this point it is difficult to determine how and in what way.  For now, it is enough to note that she is responsible for positioning saints, the medicus, and enchanters within a distinct hierarchy and that each depends on the other two for its status.  Flint’s discussion on the relationship between miraculous and secular healing will aid me in my research.
Benedicta Ward’s influence on Katharine Park can be seen in her essay “Medicine and society in Medieval Europe, 500-1500,” most notably in Park’s distinction between the early Middle Ages (500-1050) and the high and late Middle Ages (1050-1500).  “My aim throughout,” Park writes, “is to trace the gradual growth in medieval society of a complicated and sophisticated medical order.”   While Ward, Finucane, and Sumption are concerned with miracles of healing, Park takes secular medicine between 500 and 1500 as her main focus, with the goal of demonstrating that by the dawn of the sixteenth century medicine had evolved into specialized categories which required a certain amount of expertise on the part of the practitioners.   Despite this change in subject matter, Park is clearly influenced by Finucane in her article, especially when she compares secular medicine to miracles.  For example, Park stresses that scholars “must keep in mind … [of] the vast numbers of disabled who flocked to the healing shrines of medieval Europe.  The deaf, the blind and the crippled—some congenital, some the victims of dietary deficiencies, infections, or accidents—were a standard feature of the social landscape.”   Although this article was written just over a decade after Finucane, it offers a far more nuanced view of medieval afflictions and their cures.
	When this essay was published in 1992, the study of medieval disease and its effect on medieval people was still new.   Park makes the observation—which is borne out in primary sources such as miracle collections, health treatises and more—that people in the Middle Ages (much like today) did not go out of their way to get sick or injured.  And when they did fall ill, they would take measures—sometimes extreme—to rid themselves of the disease.   Moreover, Park, as a historian of medicine (as opposed to disease) is more interested in how “[medieval] societies responded to their experience of illness” rather than identifying the actual diseases that affected people and society.   This is a useful distinction to make and one that I must bear in mind as I continue my research.  As a scholar of medieval medical pilgrimage, I recognize that I must not be as concerned with diagnosing the illnesses of the people I study so much as I am with discovering why and how they sought miraculous healing.  However, with that being said, it will still be wise on my part to make myself aware of the types of illnesses common to the Middle Ages, and determine for myself how they related to the phenomena surrounding miraculous healing.
	Several years later, in 1995, Frederick S. Paxton wrote “Curing Bodies—Curing Souls:  Hrabanus Maurus, Medical Education, and the Clergy in Ninth-Century Francia.”  Picking up chronologically where Flint left off, Flint’s study focuses on Hrabanus Maurus, a Benedictine monk.  While Paxton was not the first to study Maurus’ life and works in detail—scholars such as Loren C. MacKinney in the late 1930s and Heinrich Schipperges in the early 1960s also studied Maurus—he parts ways with them in his interpretation of Maurus’ work De institutione clericorum (Concerning the Instruction of Clergy).  This work concerned itself with what a man should know if he intends to become a clergyman.  Whereas both MacKinney and Schipperges argued that the existence of Maurus’ De institutione clericorum was evidence that some kind of medical education for all clergymen was “practically universal,”  Paxton asserts that Maurus did not in fact write his De institutione clericorum “in order to promote medical learning among the clergy” but rather to emphasize the importance of “moral rectitude, knowledge of scripture, and the ability to preach.”   He supports his argument by pointing out that whenever Maurus used medical language in De Institutione clericorum, he did so metaphorically.  In other words, Maurus—according to Paxton—was more concerned with the ills of the spirit rather than of the body.  Furthermore, he points out that even Gregory the Great—a significant influence on Maurus—used medical language metaphorically in the preface to his Regula pastoralis (Pastoral Care), “twice referring to the infirmitas [sickness] of the candidate for clerical orders, and once to the tumor of pride.”   In a way, Paxton builds upon Flint in his study of this prominent ninth-century Benedictine monk.  But whereas Flint is concerned with medicine as it relates to healing the physical body (represented by the medicus), Paxton focuses on the care of the soul, which can be viewed as a kind of medicine unto itself.  After Gregory the Great, Hrabanus Maurus is another primary source that I could use in my thesis.
It is not until the year 2000 when Simone C. Macdougall takes Flint’s suggestion of studying the medicus in relation to miraculous healing in her article on Henri de Mondeville, the famous thirteenth and fourteenth century French surgeon.  “The Surgeon and the Saints:  Henri de Mondeville on Divine Healing” stands in stark contrast to Paxton’s article in that she focuses on a surgeon whose healing is of the natural world.  While Mondeville and Hrabanus Maurus are centuries apart, they represent the dichotomy between the saint and the medicus referred to by Flint.   While those in the so-called “saint camp” have pure faith in religion, those in the “medicus camp” have pure faith in medicine.  In this case, Maurus represents the saint, since although he was not a saint, he still had total faith that religion could cure a person’s illness or malady, while Henri de Mondeville represents the medicus. Indeed, Mondeville did not look kindly upon his religious counterparts, whether they were saints or monks:
	Mondeville was at once hard-headed and pragmatic; altruistic in his views as to the role of surgery, but with a business mind when it came to cornering the market of patients that were his livelihood.  In this context, saints and other divine healers were unwanted competition.  […]  How could he reconcile the powerful conviction that so many held in divine healing with his own promotion of his profession and the efficacy of its ways?  He was further aware of the view, apparent in many miracle stories, that all suffering came from God and, therefore, such suffering could only be cured by God or by divine agency of his saints.  Mondeville’s reaction to these dilemmas is revealed in his attitude to divine healing in general, his treatment of St. Eloi in particular; his aim to establish surgery on venerable, indeed divine foundations in itself, and, above all, in validating all its operations on the grounds of rationality. 

According to Macdougall, Mondeville’s reliance on rationality foreshadows the rational thought that was a hallmark of the Enlightenment.  What’s more, in his work Chirurgia (Surgery), “he promotes the qualities of his own field of surgery, based on theoretical knowledge and informed practice, which he maintains offer greater surety to those seeking alleviation of their suffering.”   Not only does Mondeville view saints and other divine healers as competition for the same patients, he also “criticizes ignorant surgeons and quacks who exploit it [miraculous or divine healing] to cover their own inadequacies.”   In addition, he also refers to “the creation of man as a surgical operation” where God is not only a surgeon (cirurgicus practicus) but also a healer.   
	In 2006, a book which I am confident will prove most useful to me in my own research was published:  Disability in Medieval Europe:  Thinking about physical impairment during the high Middle Ages, c. 1100-1400 by Irina Metzler.   In contrast to Park, Metzler is interested in figuring out what conditions were considered disabilities in the Middle Ages.  She distinguishes a difference between impairment and disability, writing that “impairment is a physical condition, whereas disability is a socio-economic state.”   Aware that she is using a modern-day label for situations that took place centuries ago, she also points out that it is necessary to inquire “whether one can actually refer to medieval people with impairments as ‘disabled’ persons.”   Indeed, this is a question I have found myself asking throughout my research—I am hesitant to put a modern label on those who lived so long ago.  Perhaps in response to Finucane and MacDougall, Metzler states “I will argue here [in section 5.2, “Medicine, transgression and miracle”] that precisely because medicine, medieval as well as modern, had so little to offer to the physically impaired by way of cure, that people turned to miracles.”   After listing several examples of people who could not be healed by physicians who then sought healing at shrines, Metzler points out that “all the examples demonstrate…that if the medical or surgical profession failed, then a person might turn toward the miraculous in the hope of a cure,”  (something, I might add, that Henri de Mondeville would surely cringe at!).  Metzler’s research is innovative in that she focuses specifically on disability and impairment.  Fincuane’s influence on her work can be witnessed throughout her monograph.  For example, she credits his categorization of diseases—self limiting, chronic but also subject to remission, and psychogenic—as the groundwork for her own classifications.   She takes these categorizations one step further, however, in distinguishing impairment from disease.  In addition, she takes Finucane to task for more or less dismissing illnesses and impairments suffered by medieval people; after all, Metzler points out, “medieval impaired people cannot all be regarded as hysterics.”   I agree with this and other criticisms of Finucane’s work, such as his apparent gender bias, which she cites even in acknowledging her debt to his scholarship.
	2006 was a banner year for useful scholarship, as another monograph that will prove extremely useful to my research was published:  Simon Yarrow’s Saints and their Communities:  Miracle Stories in Twelfth Century England.  While Yarrow readily acknowledges the profound influence that both Ward and Finucane have had on his research and scholarship, he also voices legitimate concerns about Ward’s Miracles and the Medieval Mind:  Theory, Record and Event 1000-1215 and Finucane’s Miracles and Pilgrims:  Popular Beliefs in Medieval England.  The concerns he brings up in his introduction are concerns that I hold as well, mainly that while still useful to a certain degree, both Ward and Finucane seem to oversimplify their subject matter and in turn do not give the medieval people they study the full credit they deserve.   Another work which has significantly influenced Yarrow is Peter Brown’s The Cult of the Saints:  Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (1982).  In this monograph, which falls in between Ward’s and Finucane’s works chronologically, Brown took the posthumous miracle as his starting point and analyzed it through the lens of Enlightenment thought—in this case, the work of David Hume.  By doing this, Brown’s goal was to “emphasize … change rather than continuity in late antique society,” and in his own book Yarrow aims to “set up a flexible theoretical framework informed by Brown’s insights and those insights of other disciplines [such as Ward’s and Finucane’s] within which interactions between monasteries and the laity can be seen to have been mediated through the miraculous.” 
	There has been much written and published in recent years in the field of medical pilgrimage and miracles.  In 2011, Rachel Koopmans published Wonderful to Relate:  Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England.  In it, she observes that between the years 1080 and 1220 at least seventy-five collections of saints’ posthumous miracles were recorded and compiled, something she claims had never been fully quantified before her.   Koopmans’ area of focus is from “c. 1080-1140 and c. 1140-1200,” dates which she has determined correspond to the “two main phases in the surge of popularity of miracle collecting in England.”   Additionally, she finds that the thirteenth century witnessed a kind of “drying up” when it came to miracle collecting.  This is an incredibly significant observation, because in my own research it soon became apparent that many of the scholars I have engaged with deal only with saints and their miracles from the twelfth century (Finucane, Yarrow) or in comparison to “old” saints—those that were revered prior to the Norman Conquest in 1066 (Ward).  Until I came across Koopmans, I was convinced that these scholars were using 1066 as a convenient “turning point,” one in which they could couch their research on popular saints immediately before and after that decisive year.  While I still believe that 1066 is a convenient boundary around which scholars can place their research, there is something to be said for an astute observation such as Koopmans’, basically that there simply were not enough collections of miracle stories in the centuries immediately following the twelfth to warrant any kind of study in earnest.  While this may still turn out to be the case, I think it would be a good use of my time to follow up on Koopmans’ statement with research of my own in an effort to determine what it is exactly that I can contribute to the scholarly debate.  The field is already flooded with studies, books, essays, and articles on twelfth-century saints, so I want to see what else I might be able to find outside that century, perhaps using Flint’s method of drawing on materials that do not overtly or superficially relate to such an inquiry.
	Throughout her book, Koopmans demonstrates the change over time in the format, authorship, and audience of miracle collections.  For example, miracle collections in the first half of her study (c. 1080-1140) were relatively short, full of rhetorical devices, and centered on stories told within the monastic community.  In contrast, in the second half (1140-1200), she finds that the miracle collections grew significantly in size and featured fewer rhetorical devices,  many (sometimes most) of these stories coming from lay people outside the monastic community.   While her focus throughout this work is the act of miracle collecting itself, Koopmans uses several angles to study it.  She makes her case by using records of oral history (or what can best fall under that category in studying the Middle Ages), by examining common practices and features of tellers and their stories, and by looking at collections of Anglo-Norman and English monks, among other methods.  In addition, three appendices appear at the end of the monograph, addressing manuscripts of the “Christ Church Miracle Collections for Thomas Becket,” “The Construction of Benedict of Peterborough’s Miraculae S. Thomae,” and “The Construction of William of Canterbury’s Miracula S. Thomae.”   While the first appendix is just a list of manuscript titles, Koopmans has taken the information for the latter two appendices and arranged them in a way similar to that of a family tree.  This makes it much easier for the reader to determine how many stories in Book 1 of Benedict of Peterborough’s Miraculae S. Thomae deal with visions or miracles  or what kinds of miracles were most popular in the various books of William of Canterbury.   Such a visual presentation confirms my desire to produce maps of pilgrimage and healing to similarly lay out my evidence in an intuitive format.
	In her conclusion, Koopmans again addresses her observation that miracle collecting was waning in the thirteenth century, even though I know that archaeological evidence such as pilgrim badges and documentary evidence such as shrine record books suggest that the act of pilgrimage itself was still quite healthy.  She postulates two main reasons for this decline in miracle collecting.  First, she note that collections of miracle stories already existed and so there was no apparent need to add to the existing ones or create new ones.  Second, she observes that the mode of thought about miracles had experienced a fundamental change and that thinkers and philosophers of the thirteenth century were not as quick as their twelfth century counterparts to label an act a miracle; rather, they found it more useful to “[create and write] highly structured arguments about miracles,” distinguishing them from “marvels.”   This monograph bears the markings of a first book—indeed, in several respects the writing reflects my own!  Koopmans can come across as a bit chatty at times, but perhaps that is just her way of putting forth the effort to appeal to a wider audience.  I will be interested to test her hypothesis against other evidence to document shifts in miraculous healing in the high and late Middle Ages.
	In a collection of essays on miracles in western Christianity that was slated for publication in 2013,  both Iona McCleery and Simon Yarrow provide significant contributions.   McCleery, in her essay “‘Christ More Powerful than Galen?’ The Relationship Between Medicine and Miracles,” goes outside the normal landscape of England to Portugal in order to study three miracle cults:  the cult of Gil de Santarém, the cult of Our Lady of the Olive Tree in northern Portugal, and the Holy Name of Jesus from Lisbon.   Through studying these miracle cults, McCleery asks questions that address how the meaning of words—such as medicine— can change over time, as well as attempting to answer what other methods of research—such as anthropology—can be useful to historians of miracles.  McCleery uses what she calls a “socio-statistical approach”  to present her findings.  For example, she provides percentages of important demographics as they relate to each cult:  male vs. female, child vs. adult, the types and kinds of illnesses and diseases reported, town or village of origin, and occupation (if known).   McCleery is heavily influenced by Finucane and Pierre-André Sigal, placing their work in the socio-statistical sphere as well.   In turn, she is also influenced by Valerie Flint, Irina Metzler, and Simon Yarrow.  Yet while she acknowledges the influence of other scholars, McCleery does point out that—unlike, say, Yarrow—she is more interested in healing than the miracle act itself.   This brings up a point of interest for me, because I have tended to view miracles and healing (miraculous cures!) as a package deal.  Yet it is significant that scholars who no doubt already have some kind of influence on my work do not share this view.  Be that as it may, I do not see any reason at this point why I cannot study both miracles and healing.  After reading only one of McCleery’s essays, where we happen to agree on several points (she shares my opinion regarding Finucane’s reductionist tendencies), I am eager to read more of her work and incorporate it into my own.  I am also excited by the rigor of her methodology, and again, I believe my maps may help guide me to handle my data with similar attention to detail.
	From the same series comes Simon Yarrow’s “Miracles, Belief and Christian Materiality:  Reliquing in Twelfth-Century Miracle Narratives,” in which he is influenced by Peter Brown and Caroline Walker Bynum, and interprets these miracle narratives from the twelfth century through the lens of Enlightenment thought—specifically the empiricist philosophy of David Hume.   It is this way that Yarrow introduces the real star of his essay, Guibert of Nogent, a Benedictine monk and historian from the twelfth century.  While Yarrow refers to Guibert throughout his essay, he barely returns to Hume, and only in the context of attempting to understand how different kinds of medieval people understood miracles and relics.  However, Hume is useful for introducing Yarrow’s argument, which is that there is a fundamental difference between religion of the elite and the religion practiced by those who were more provincial and country-like.  Yarrow is an important figure because he has surpassed his predecessors, incorporating the best ideas from other scholars of miracles to come to an even more nuanced view of how relics and miracles served different purposes to different people.  I am especially interested in his findings that people within the same society could have diverging understandings of miracles, much less people in different times and places.  I have not yet decided how this could play out in my maps.
	This year, in 2014, Hilary Powell uses performance theory to study and analyze pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Æbbe and the miracles attributed to her in Coldingham in the Scottish Borders.  Here, as in other works, the author’s main subject is a saint’s shrine from the twelfth century.  Powell makes the argument that “in the medieval West healing and performative acts were inextricably linked” and ran the gamut from the recitation of charms to the use of medicinal herbs to rituals involving entire towns or villages.   She supports this argument by analyzing the Miracula of St. Æbbe, which lists a few places where pilgrims revered her:  the reliquary on the altar in the church at Coldingam, her tomb, and also a small oratory.  The saint’s oratory—located on the top of a nearby hill—plays a major role in the performance of pilgrimage on the part of those pilgrims seeking a cure.  Powell points to several examples in the Miracula where the emphasis is on “the physical performance of pilgrimage.”   Indeed, of the forty-two miraculous cures in the Miracula, thirty-four of them take place at the oratory.   Of those thirty-four miracles, six depict pilgrims stopping at the spring at the foot of the hill upon which the oratory stood to wash and drink from it.  Several other stores relate St. Æbbe appearing before a pilgrim and urging him or her to go to the spring; each time the pilgrim is healed, whether of blindness, a physical deformity, or “a piece of goose bone lodged in [the] throat.” 
	It is significant to Powell that St. Æbbe herself took a journey that was perilous and physically demanding—her flight from a Scottish tyrant, Aidan, who wished to marry her.   Expanding on the theory of performativity, Powell compares Æbbe’s flight from Scotland to that of Moses and the Hebrews out of Egypt.   Not only does she equate Æbbe to Moses, but the hill upon which her oratory stood is equated to Mt. Sinai—a symbol of freedom and release from bondage, physical or otherwise.   Moreover, the Miracula’s author stressed that Christ himself was the source of healing, with the saint acting as the mediator.  Following this train of thought it would therefore make sense to equate the pilgrims’ trek up the hill to Æbbe’s oratory to those instances in the Bible where mountains were featured prominently—particularly toward the end of Christ’s life.   Yet again, such a clear presentation of data leads me to believe my best bet will be to map out sites of pilgrimage and medieval healing—something I have not encountered in any of these readings.
	In writing this historiographical essay, I have learned several things.  First, I have learned that the twelfth-century seems to be the most popular time period for scholars who study miracles and miraculous healing in the high Middle Ages.  This observation leads me to consider other centuries—such as the thirteenth, when the cults of the Virgin were more prominent—and perhaps other avenues of research (for example, relics, as opposed to miracles).  Second, I have discovered that many scholars do not consider miracles and healing to be a package deal—rather, they can be seen as mutually exclusive.  At this point in my research I do not totally agree with this notion; I think it is important that we, as historians of the Middle Ages, do our best to avoid placing twenty-first century judgments on those who lived centuries before.  No one will disagree with the fact that we know much more today about illness and disease than those who lived in the Middle Ages; but that is not important.  What is important is whether or not those people actually believed in the miraculous healings that were recorded at saints’ shrines across England and the rest of Europe.  Third, it is too easy to take what other scholars have done already and dismiss it as shoddy and substandard.  This has not been my intention.  For example, while I take issue with how Finucane presents his findings on illness and disease in the Middle Ages, where he simply attributes most—if not all—of the maladies to vitamin deficiency and poor diet—I do acknowledge that his findings are significant and will be useful to me in my own research.

Secrets of the Archimedes Palimpsest
	With the rise of technology-based scholarship in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, researchers and academics alike are finding new ways to study and compare well-known historical documents which have already been studied for some time and therefore are not new in and of themselves.  However, other new technologies, such as X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) imaging, have also helped uncover texts that had been assumed lost forever, such as the Archimedes Codex.  
	  To begin with, it is essential to know what a palimpsest is, and why the Archimedes Palimpsest is so important.  According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a palimpsest is “a parchment or other writing surface on which the original text has been effaced or partially erased, and then overwritten by another; a manuscript in which later writing has been superimposed on earlier (effaced) writing.”   What’s more, the Archimedes Palimpsest—which is actually a thirteenth century prayer book—is important because of the folios used to create it.  Reviel Netz and William Noel write in their book about the Archimedes Project, 
	The manuscript is now called the Archimedes Palimpsest, but this is a bit confusing.  Make no mistake:  the manuscript is a prayer book.  It looks like a prayer book, it feels like a prayer book, it even smells like a prayer book, and it is prayers that you see on its folios.  It is only called the Archimedes Palimpsest because folios taken from an earlier manuscript containing treatises by Archimedes were used to make it.  But remember the Archimedes text had been scraped off. 

The manuscript folios used to create the Archimedes Palimpsest most likely date from ninth and tenth century Constantinople, when the Byzantine Empire was at its cultural zenith and its capital was “immensely wealthy [and] physically secure…the imperial palace was a center of culture and its monasteries flourished.”   Since that time, the manuscripts containing works by Archimedes such as Floating Bodies, Method, and Stomachion have quite literally traveled the globe.  Throughout their book on the Archimedes Palimpsest, Netz and Noel recount the history of the palimpsest, noting important events such as the sack of Constantinople in 1204, and make it abundantly clear that the folios and the subsequent palimpsest made their way to other important medieval cities such as Jerusalem.   Eventually, the palimpsest found its way into the collection of a French woman, Anne Guersan, whose father acquired the manuscript in Greece in the first part of the twentieth century.   Finally, the palimpsest was bought at Christie’s auction house in New York on October 29, 1998, for $2.2 million by an anonymous American collector (whose identity—at least for the time being—I have not yet figured out). 
	Shortly after the sale, the collector (known as Mr. B) chose Noel, who at the time was the Curator of Manuscripts at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, MD to be the Director of the Archimedes Palimpsest Project.  In short, it was Noel’s job “not to do the work [on the project], but to get the right people to do it.”   By April 2000, conservator Abigail Quandt had begun taking the palimpsest apart, and the two hand-picked imaging teams (one from Johns Hopkins and one from the Rochester Institute of Technology) began their competition that June.  All told, about ninety people took part in the project in one form or another—whether it was management and administration or data and information technology.  Chapter 9 of Netz’s and Noel’s book, “The Digital Palimpsest,” is dedicated to detailing the various techniques and methods that were developed and used in order to glean more information from the folios, as well as the bumps and roadblocks the team inevitably encountered along the way.  For example, both imaging teams used a technique known as multi-spectral imaging.  This type of imaging uses light to produce images.  It can even reveal text and images that cannot be seen the naked eye.  Netz and Noel provide an excellent example:
	The successes of imagers around the world in revealing hidden text by using cameras under different narrowband [multi-spectral] lighting conditions are remarkable.  For example, a team at Brigham Young University has attained extraordinary results by imaging the carbonized rolls of a library that was buried in Herculaneum under the volcanic ash of Vesuvius in the early afternoon of Tuesday, August 24, 79 AD.  When viewed in normal light, you cannot see any text written on many of these rolls at all.  But when imaged at a specific wavelength, the text ‘pops out’ in the most remarkable way. 

The researchers at the Archimedes Palimpsest Project were encouraged by the success at BYU, but they knew that the palimpsest was a different creature altogether.  Netz and Noel go on to say that because the palimpsest and the rolls were so different—both physically and chemically—they did not expect to get the same results.  “There is no one wavelength,” they write, “at which the Archimedes text pops out.”   But with multi-spectral imaging, the team was able to produce images that showed the contrast between the Archimedes text and the thirteenth century prayer book text that had been written over it and right angles.  Eventually, the imagers succeeded in getting rid of the prayer-book text completely, only to have the scholars (specifically Neviel Retz and his colleague, Natalie Tchernetska) request that it be put back in.  Their explanation as to why the prayer-book text was useful—while it may not be readily apparent—was simple:  
The scientists had made the prayer-book text disappear by making it exactly the same color as the parchment.  The trouble was that now, when the Archimedes characters disappeared beneath a bit of prayer-book text, the scholars didn’t know why.  It was no longer clear to them whether the Archimedes letters were invisible because they in fact did not exist or because they were actually hiding underneath the letters of the prayer book. 

This apparent disconnect between the scholars and scientists proved to be a useful learning opportunity for the team.  Netz and Noel explain that
	If you ask scientists to come up with a solution to a difficult problem, you [the scholar] will make errors in defining that problem and they, more likely than not, will fail to get the best solution the first time.  […] Mike [an expert in managing highly technical systems, such as imaging systems] said that it was quite normal in such imaging projects for scientists to produce a misconceived product.  We were just at the beginning of a long process by which the imagers come to understand fully what the scholars need and through which they could refine their techniques. 

The long process paid off, because throughout the next several years Netz and Tchernetska were able to identify texts such as the lost speeches of Hyperides as well as Commentary on Aristotle’s Categories dating from the second or third century AD.  
	As far as I can tell, work on the Archimedes Palimpsest still continues at the Walters Art Museum, and the project has profited greatly from a generous benefactor in the form of Mr. B, the anonymous collector and actual owner of the palimpsest.  I cannot help but think that this palimpsest and the secrets it has held for so long and only recently revealed are sublimely characteristic of Archimedes himself.  He was, after all, as Netz points out, “playful” and “sly” in his writings; “he meant for his readers to be puzzled.”   There is no doubt that Archimedes would take pleasure in learning of the impact of his writings and of all the trouble modern day scholars and scientists have gone to in order to learn a little more about him.
		
A Brief Introduction to Medieval Pilgrim Badges
	Pilgrimage has been a hallmark of religions—not just Christianity—for centuries.  Each religion has its own pilgrimage and holy sites.  For example, Christians have the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and St. Peter’s in Rome; Muslims have the Kaaba in Mecca and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem; Jews have the Wailing Wall at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem; Buddhists have the birthplace of Buddha in Lumbini, Nepal; indeed, one could argue that before the rise of Christianity, the Pagans had their own sites of pilgrimage, such as Stonehenge or Avebury.  With the act of pilgrimage came its accoutrements, such as knapsacks, staffs, cloaks, broad-brimmed hats, and badges.   This essay will discuss these medieval Christian pilgrim badges in an effort to provide some of the groundwork for my master’s thesis, where I will potentially plot the originations and endpoints (the “travel routes,” so to speak) of pilgrim badges and souvenirs on a digital map.  This paper will not only address the badges themselves, for it will also make use of references made to pilgrim badges in art and literature.  In addition, this paper will also discuss the theoretical frameworks that recent scholars have begun using in studying pilgrim badges.  Although frustratingly little has been written on this important area of inquiry, pilgrim badges are useful to our understanding of medieval Christian pilgrimage because they can provide information in regards to a shrine’s popularity, and perhaps even provide some clues as to why people went on pilgrimage in the first place.
	Much of what we know today about pilgrim badges comes from a combination of archaeological and documentary evidence.  Throughout my research for this topic I was surprised to learn that the study of medieval pilgrim badges is not as rich as I thought it would be.  This is in part because the materials mainly used to create the badges were lead, tin, or pewter.  The probability that they would have been melted down to make something more useful or simply cast aside as cheap knickknacks is highly likely.  In addition, in 1538 Henry VIII declared that the most popular English saint, Thomas Becket, whose shrine was at Canterbury, was no longer considered a saint.  Other changes Henry implemented as part of the English Reformation further led to the destruction of such evidence, as people were compelled to get rid of their pilgrimage souvenirs.    Most of the information I have been able to collect for this paper comes from one man:  Brian Spencer.  From 1952 until his retirement in 1988 he worked at the Museum of London, where he held the position of Keeper of Medieval Antiquities since 1972.  According to his 2003 obituary in Peregrinations, the journal of the International Society for the Study Pilgrimage Art, 
	What began as a single lecture on “Pilgrim Badges and the London Pilgrim” became a lifelong journey of learning, scholarship, and generosity as he almost single-handedly created the study of a new field.  He defined what these objects were, their function, manufacture, style, and iconography.  He identified every major souvenir and badge found in England and many on the continent in the last few decades.  His grasp of medieval popular culture, history, and hagiography was unparalleled.  His impact is reflected in the frequency with which his work is cited not only in almost every article and book on medieval souvenirs, but in works as far afield as the painting of Robert Campin, the works of Chaucer, and souvenirs from the temple of Bodhgaya in India. 

In short, Spencer singlehandedly took a topic of medieval popular culture and transformed it into an entire field worthy of study for its own merits.  Before Spencer’s work on medieval pilgrim badges, there was not much known or written about them.  He has influenced practically every scholar who has written on pilgrim badges—indeed, his name is mentioned at least once in every article I read in my research.  His book Pilgrim Souvenirs and Secular Badges has proven one of the most useful resources for this paper.  In it, he catalogs 332 badges (which he also refers to as souvenirs) that were collected at religious shrines between the late twelfth and early sixteenth centuries (approximately 400 years).  Of those, 265 (79.8%) are religious souvenirs where over half (136) of those souvenirs are attributed to Canterbury alone.   In a similar fashion, Michael Mitchiner’s Medieval Pilgrim & Secular Badges also catalogs badges, but his timeframe is from the thirteenth century to the early 16th century (in this case, approximately 300 years).  Mitchiner notes that the spike in pilgrim badges was a direct result of the canonization of Thomas Becket in 1173.  And while Spencer gives his audience a somewhat broad and general overview of the different kinds of badges and souvenirs, Mitchiner takes it one step further and lays the information out in a table format.  Therefore, it is easier to see through Mitchiner’s catalogs what types of badges and souvenirs were popular during the thirteenth century but fell into low esteem by the sixteenth century (ampullae), and what materials were used to make badges and souvenirs of all kinds (tin, lead, pewter, brass, or silver). 
While both Spencer and Mitchiner discuss the kinds of badges that were made and the materials used to create them, Mitchiner does not go into much detail about the history of pilgrim badges.  Spencer provides his audience with a detailed and lengthy introduction that takes into account such things as the molds used to cast badges, the popularity of pilgrim badges and souvenirs in the mass market, and a thorough description of the methods used to retrieve the badges and date them.   Spencer also outlines in his introduction not only where the badges originated, but also where they were discovered.   Mitchiner formats his catalog into centuries and then into subcategories of the badges’ origination; he gives the location of discovery in each individual description.  Simply by reading the introductions to both Spencer and Mitchiner and even casually flipping through the catalog, it is clear that pilgrim badges and souvenirs varied in size, shape, and material.  But the presence of these catalogs also speaks to the popularity of pilgrimage and its corresponding symbols.  For example, ampullae (the plural form of “ampulla,” which is a small two-handled bottle or flask) from shrines such as Thomas Becket’s at Canterbury (Fig. 1) and Edward the Confessor’s at Westminster (Fig. 2) were in demand.  In addition, ampullae in the shape of a scallop shell—the traditional symbol of pilgrimage—have been found in great numbers (Fig. 3).  In later years, badges in the shape of the sword that killed Thomas Becket or his gloves would become popular, along with badges depicting his return from exile in France (Figs. 4, 5, and 6).  
It is clear from the archaeological evidence that pilgrimage was, in the words of Spencer, an “everyday affair.”   The literary evidence also bears this out.  One example is the fifteenth century postscript to Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.  The Tale of Beryn, a sort of medieval fan-fiction addition to the tales, describes the pilgrims’ actions once they reach Canterbury:
They all prayed to St. Thomas in such wise as they could.  And then the holy relics kissed, each man as he should, while a goodly monk told them the names of every one and then to other holy spots they turned till they’d completely done, continued in their devotions till service were sung through, and then as it was nearly noon, to dinnerward they drew.  Then, as the usual custom is, pilgrim’s signs they bought; for men at home should know what saint the pilgrims here had sought.  Every man laid out his silver on the tokens he liked best, and while they were all doing this, the miller then pressed his bosom full to Canterbury brooches while the Pardoner and he at last, secretly in their pouches, hid there with such cleverness that none of them would know, except the Summoner who saw and said to both then “Ho  !  you must go halves with me”, whispering this in their ears … They set their tokens on their heads, some on their caps did pin, and then to eat their dinner good they rushed back to the inn. 

As a popular reaction to the Canterbury Tales, this addition offers further insight into pilgrimage in the Middle Ages.  It implies that Chaucer’s Pardoner attempts to sell bogus relics not just because he is corrupt:  there appears to have been a genuine market for such items.  What’s more, in this short selection, we see pilgrims kissing the relics, buying badges and souvenirs since it was “the usual custom,” and then pinning them to their caps as a sign of their completed pilgrimage.  In addition, Thomas A. Bredehoft observes that in the Ellesmere Chaucer, there is a depiction of the Squire wearing what could be either a religious or secular badge on the front of his hat (Fig. 7).   While neither The Tale of Beryn nor the image of the Squire in the Ellesmere manuscript comes from Chaucer’s own pen, both point to the way pilgrimage badges were used and displayed (on hats!) in the early fifteenth century.
The Tale of Beryn is not the only literary example which demonstrates pilgrimage.  Dated to the late fourteenth century, Piers Plowman offers some interesting examples.  The following comes from the Prologue:
	Pilgrims and palmers * pledged them together
	To seek Saint James * and saints in Rome.
	They went forth on their way * with many wise tales,
And had leave to lie * all their life after --
I saw some that said * they had sought saints:
Yet in each told they told * their tongue turned to lies
More than to tell truth * it seemed by their speech.
Hermits, a heap of them * with hooked staves,
Were going to Walsingham * and their wenches too;
Big loafers and tall * that loth were to work,
Dressed up in capes * to be known from others;
And so clad as hermits * their ease to have. 

Here in this selection—which is contemporaneous to the Canterbury Tales and slightly predates The Tale of Beryn—one can see that pilgrimage was in fact an “everyday affair,” so much so that it made it into the vernacular literature of the day because the authors knew that their audience would be familiar with pilgrims and pilgrimage.  Even Erasmus, who was writing in the sixteenth century, felt compelled to write about pilgrimage.  In Pilgrimages to Saint Mary of Walsingham and Saint Thomas of Canterbury, Erasmus parodies and satirizes not only pilgrims but the act of pilgrimage itself.  He states outright that he does not care for those people who use pilgrimage for their own gain:  “Such performances [of pilgrimage] may be allowed indeed as an indulgence of men’s fancies; but it is not to be borne that they should claim any pious merit in them.  In this colloquy those also are stigmatised who exhibit doubtful relics for real, who attribute to them greater value than they are worth, or sordidly manufacture them for gain.”   In his colloquy “Pilgrimage for Religion’s Sake,” set in Antwerp, Menedemus is speaking to Ogygius, who has just returned from a six-month pilgrimage:
	Menedemus:  You are covered with scallop shells, stuck all over with leaden and tin figures, adorned with straw necklaces, and a bracelet of serpents’ eggs [a rosary].
Ogygius:  I have visited Saint James of Compostella [sic]; and on my return, the sea-side Virgin so famous with the English… 

From these two examples, it is clear that Erasmus was highly doubtful of pilgrims’ intentions, and he also did not care for the trinkets and souvenirs that accompanied the journey.  
	Less than a decade ago, scholars began taking a more theoretical approach in studying pilgrim badges.  For example, in “Literacy Without Letters:  Pilgrim Badges and Late Medieval Literate Ideology,” Thomas A. Bredehoft uses literacy theory to understand the relationship between illiterate people in the Middle Ages and the text on badges which they owned.  Bredehoft’s definition of badges is broad but useful:  “The generic term ‘pilgrim badges,’ it should be noted, includes not only those badges explicitly associated with specific pilgrimage destinations, but also badges of similar materials and manufacture that may have had strictly secular use and functions.”   For Bredehoft, it is not the intended use of these pilgrim badges that is of primary importance, but rather the fact that these pilgrim badges—both religious and secular—represent medieval popular culture, something that is just recently receiving greater attention from scholars.  Moreover, Bredehoft points out that while the badges are symbolic of a popular culture, they also bridged the gap between the poor and the elite, which is evident by the presence of pilgrim badges having been sewn into manuscripts such as the Belles Heures of Jean de Berry. 
	Likewise, in Hanneke van Asperen’s article, she uses the imprints of two badges that had been attached to a blank page (f. 21r, reproduced here in Fig. 8) in Jean de Berry’s (November 30, 1340-June 15, 1416) Belles Heures to shape her study of pilgrim badges found in medieval manuscripts.  Brother of King Charles VI of France, Jean de Berry was not only a famous patron of the arts (the equally famous Dutch Limbourg brothers, Herman, Paul, and Jean, illustrated Jean de Berry’s famous Belles Heures prayer book), but also a devout Christian; he “and his brother Charles V kept amongst their relics some splinters of the tomb of [Saint Catherine of Alexandria].”   The Belles Heures is not the only medieval manuscript to contain traces of pilgrim badges (or, in some cases, the pilgrim badges themselves).  The act of sewing pilgrim badges into prayer books was apparently quite popular starting in the latter half of the fifteenth century and “can be connected with the development of a new type of badge:  the punched medal.”   Van Asperen’s succinct account of metal casting and the switch to punched medal is worth quoting in full:
From the twelfth century onwards, pilgrims’ badges for the most part were cast.  The liquid metal, usually pewter, was poured into a mould of slate or sandstone.  During the fifteenth-century, a new technique to make pilgrimage souvenirs came into use besides the usual casting.  An image was punched into a wafer-thin sheet of metal with a die of iron leaving a negative imprint on the back of the badge.  Because the metal is so flimsy, the badge is light, with a tendency to break or tear.  This technique was mainly used for badges of copper alloy or silver, more precious materials than pewter.  The silver badges could even be gilded, for a more demanding clientele [such as John de Berry]. 

Because these new pilgrim badges were lighter and had holes in them, they lent themselves to being sewn into prayer books or even attached to something like a rosary.   And as can been seen on the folio in the Belles Heures, the badges were light and fragile enough that they did not tear the parchment (again, see Fig. 8).
	Van Asperen goes on to discuss the badge imprints found in the Grandes Heures, which once belonged to Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy (July 31, 1396-June 15, 1467), where according to her more than forty-six of the medal badges decorated the pages.   There is ample evidence to prove the Philip the Good was an avid collector of pilgrimage badges and souvenirs, so it is highly likely that he was responsible for the addition of the badges.   Perhaps the most compelling observation is made in van Asperen’s conclusion, where she writes that “the imprints [of the badges] are a fine example of the devotional practice to attach badges to books of hours.  The owner used the badges to give a personal twist to the images of the book, so that it fitted his pious intentions even better.  The imprints illustrate the purpose of the book as an instrument of devotion rather than a precious object intended solely for admiration.”   As van Asperen so convincingly argues, the book of hours—meant for the individual lay person and usually quite small in comparison to other medieval manuscripts—was an ideal place for pious individuals to keep pilgrim badges and souvenirs as a way to aid in their devotion.
	Other scholars study pilgrim badges through the material they are made of.  In her article “Material and Meaning in Lead Pilgrims’ Signs,” for example, Jennifer Lee was drawn to study lead pilgrim badges because she was interested in how the shape that the lead is formed into is directly correlated to its value.  In short, a lump of lead had very little value in the Middle Ages, but when it was made into a pilgrim badge or souvenir (and possibly touched to a saints’ relic or holy water), its value increased.   In her article Lee relies heavily on Herbert of Bosham, a scholar and adviser to Thomas Becket as well as one of his first biographers.  Several years after Thomas’s murder, Herbert wrote the Liber Melorum (Book of Harmonies), which “yields significant insight into clerical ideas about the new pilgrims’ signs in the developing pilgrimage cult at Canterbury.”   Lee observes that Herbert devotes significant portions of his work to lead pilgrim signs, noting that it is “the humility of the [the] lead [that] is integral to its significance.”   In other words, the lead is symbolic of Christ’s teaching which stressed that the least exalted on earth will be exalted in heaven. 
	Scholar T. Craig Christy takes yet another approach in studying medieval pilgrim badges, this time in relation to Johannes Gutenberg and his invention of moveable type.   Christy portrays Gutenberg as an acute entrepreneur who first made his living making and selling mirror badges at Aachen.  This was a lucrative venture:  Christy points out that “pilgrimages were the mass social phenomenon of the late middle ages [sic], and pilgrim badges [were] the article of mass consumption.  On the one hand the cost of these typically flimsy, tin-lead alloy keepsakes was minimal, which made them affordable to the masses.”   Yet, Christy continues, “they served multiple purposes:  they were at once a treasured memento, an emblem of pious accomplishment, and a guarantor of safe passage, given the respected status of those engaged in holy pilgrimage.”   The pilgrim badges sold at Aachen were unique because they had tiny mirrors attached to them.  At one point, pilgrims were able to touch their souvenirs and badges to the relics physically, but as Aachen grew in popularity pilgrims were no longer able to receive the miraculous healing by direct touch.  The problem was circumvented by attaching convex mirrors to the badges so that the pilgrims could “draw in and store for future use the powerful rays believed to be emanating from the holy relics.”   Christy takes Gutenberg’s 1438 partnership with “prominent Strassburg citizens” as a sign that he “had figured out a new way to mass produce either the badges, the mirrors, or both.”   Christy traces Gutenberg’s trajectory from pilgrim badge and mirror maker to printer by pointing out several key aspects that are common to each craft.  For example, the knowledge of “adding antimony [a brittle blue-white metalloid] to the lead-tin-copper alloy as a means of hardening the metal and yielding well-defined edges … would later be of critical importance in the production of sharp, clear letters.”   And—somewhat obviously—the method used for processing huge numbers of pilgrim badges and mirrors could be applied directly to printing.
It is worth noting that architectural evidence from the Middle Ages supports the observation that pilgrimage was a common form of travel and its popularity warranted huge building projects such as restoring and expanding churches and shrines.  For example, the abbey church at St. Denis was rebuilt in the twelfth century by Abbot Suger.  In the Book of Suger Abbot of St. Denis on What Was Done During his Administration, Suger explains and justifies the reasons why he expanded the church:
Even while this was being carried out great expense [the decorating of the church], however, because of the inadequacy we often felt on special days such as the feast of the blessed Denis, the fair, and many other time, when the narrowness of the place forced women to run to the altar on the heads of men as on a pavement with great anguish and confusion; for this reason, moved by divine inspiration and encouraged by the council of wise men as well as the prayers of many monks, in order to avoid the displeasure of holy martyrs I undertook to enlarge and amplify the noble monastic church consecrated by the divine hand, devoutly praying both in our chapter and in church that he who is beginning and end, alpha and omega, should join a good end with a good beginning by way of a sound middle, and that he might not exclude from the building of the temple a bloody man who wholeheartedly desired this more than the treasures of Constantinople.  Thus we began with the former main entrance, dismantling a certain addition said to have been built by Charlemagne on a very worth occasion, because his father, the Emperor Pepin, had ordered that he be buried outside that entrance, face down, for the sins of his father Charles Martel.  As is obvious, we exerted ourselves, vehemently enlarging the body of the church, tripling the entrance and doors, and erecting tall, worthy towers. 

Suger recognized that the abbey church was an extremely popular site of pilgrimage (after all, most of the French kings from Clovis up to Louis XVIII were buried there—except for Charlemagne, who was buried in Aachen, another popular pilgrimage site).  And because of its popularity, it behooved Suger to do whatever he could to accommodate the many people who traveled to St. Denis—not only for pilgrimage (where merchants were no doubt selling pilgrim badges and souvenirs), but also for events such as feast days and fairs, which also helped to fill the church’s coffers.
As I hope this paper has shown, medieval pilgrimage and the acquisition of pilgrim badges and souvenirs were both popular activities for people across the social spectrum.  The widespread act of pilgrimage is apparent thanks to archaeological, documentary, literary, and architectural evidence.  Even though this field of research is still relatively new, there is much interest in the study of pilgrim badges, as is demonstrated by the varying theoretical approaches addressed here.  My research has shown me that the study of pilgrim badges—especially those from England—is well under way and that while there seems to plenty of theoretical approaches to studying pilgrim badges and souvenirs, to my knowledge no one has yet made a map depicting the “travel routes” of the badges themselves.  By combining the archaeological, documentary, literary, and architectural evidence with methods used in digital humanities (i.e. mapmaking), I see an opening for me to make my own contribution to this new field of research.

Topic:  The purpose of this annotated bibliography is to lay some of the ground work for my master’s thesis, the topic of which will be medieval medical pilgrimage.  I am interested in answering such questions as “why did people seek miraculous cures?”, “what was the role of secular healing?”, “how did people in the Middle Ages reconcile miraculous cures (saints, shrines, relics) and secular healing (doctors, physicians).  In addition to asking these questions, I also plan to make a map with several layers that will deal with routes traveled by the saints themselves, if applicable.  This would provide a quick reference to the viewer who may be interested to know where saints—and then their relics—traveled.  I imagine that this map will be made up of several layers, including plot points for important shrines and relics.  I also plan on tracing and plotting pilgrimage routes traveled by the pilgrims themselves.  In addition, I plan on plotting the routes made by relics throughout the Middle Ages; it was not uncommon for clergy to take saints’ relics on tour—somewhat reminiscent of traveling museum exhibits today.  It is my goal for this map to serve several purposes.  First, the map will be a kind of “one stop shop” in that one could view popular routes taken by pilgrims and saints’ relics.  Secondly, the map—with its various layers—would help point out which routes were common to pilgrims, saints, and relics (if any).  This would give a clearer picture of what medieval medical pilgrimage and its various components (represented by shrines and relics) looked like in that one could theoretically see more easily the “hot spots”—locations with a lot of activity related to pilgrimage and miraculous healing.  While I anticipate that several “hot spots” such as Canterbury, the Holy Land, and Santiago de Compostela will appear prominently on the map, I am curious to see what other “hot spots” there may have been that were not as famous as these major shrines.  
OVERVIEW:
The Middle Ages (ca.400-ca. 1500) was not as stagnant as originally thought.  Even though people were not as “connected” as they are today and obviously knew much less than we do about science, the people who lived in the Middle Ages were nevertheless aware of things such as travel, pilgrimage, miracles, healings, doctors, physicians, disease, and cures.  This observation is supported by the archaeological and documentary evidence that has been discovered.  For example, there are several pilgrim narratives and guides (The Pilgrim’s Guide to Santiago de Compostela, The Book of Margery Kempe) as well as miracle collections (see Ronald Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims:  Popular Beliefs in Medieval England).  In addition, there were collections and guides on natural healing (Old English Herbarium).  Once the writings and teachings of Aristotle were rediscovered in the 12th and 13th centuries (thanks to Muslim scholars), his work influenced medieval philosophy, which in turn influenced medieval medicine and religion.  All of these things—philosophy, hagiography, medicine, and religion—were all highly interconnected, as the primary sources and secondary literature demonstrate.
I would like to take a moment and say that this annotated bibliography took longer than I was expecting, mostly because for this project I used Zotero in earnest for the first time.  Those in the know weren’t kidding around when they said that the learning curve is steep (I’m still learning and at times I feel like Sisyphus, constantly rolling the boulder that is this project and others up the hill only to have it fall down again), but the payout has been worth the effort.  For one, my hand isn’t cramping up as much as it would have if I had written my notes out by hand.  Second, by typing my notes directly into Zotero I got rid of the middle step where I would take my handwritten notes and type them up.  Third, I know now where my notes are and will be in the future—in Zotero, attached to the corresponding book, article, or essay.  Finally, thanks to the tagging feature, I will be able to keep better track of what I have read and what I still need to read, along with notating the usefulness of what I have encountered.
While the main goal of this project was to produce an annotated bibliography, my secondary goal was to use this process as a kind of “dry run” for when I start writing my thesis in just a few months from now.  Taking the time now to play and fiddle around with Zotero will save me valuable time in the future.  

THEORY 
Brown, Peter. The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1982.
	
According to the back cover of this book, Brown is “credited with having created the field of study known as late antiquity.”  This book, which has served as a foundation for scholars such as Simon Yarrow, “is not a complete treatment of the rise of the cult of saints in late antiquity” (xiv), but rather an “essay in interpretation” (xiv).  With that being said, there is a clear bias here—Brown makes use only of those sources that either influenced or challenged him—but this monograph is still valuable because of its timeframe.  Unlike Finucane (discussed below), Brown’s book discusses the saints of late antiquity, which no doubt had an influence on the cult of saints and hagiography in the Middle Ages.

Caciola, Nancy. “Mystics, demoniacs, and the physiology of spirit possession in medieval Europe.” Comparative studies in society and history 42, no. 2 (2000): 268–306.
Using performance theory as the lens through which she studies mystics and demoniacs in medieval Europe, Caciola discusses the role of these women in society and how their ‘performance’ dictated their roles.  At this point in time I do not plan on studying mystics and demoniacs in any real depth, so this article as a whole will not be very helpful.  However, Caciola does provide some potential leads in her footnotes, specifically Donald Weinstein and Rudolph Bell, Saints and Society and Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion.
Craig, Leigh Ann. Wandering Women and Holy Matrons: Women as Pilgrims in the Later Middle Ages. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2009.