Religious Pilgrimages in the

Mediterranean World 1st Edition Antón

M Pazos
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmeta.com/product/religious-pilgrimages-in-the-mediterranean-world-1st-
edition-anton-m-pazos/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Geography of World Pilgrimages: Social, Cultural and

Territorial Perspectives Lucrezia Lopez

https://ebookmeta.com/product/geography-of-world-pilgrimages-
social-cultural-and-territorial-perspectives-lucrezia-lopez/

Religious Competition in the Greco Roman World 1st

Edition Nathaniel P. Desrosiers

https://ebookmeta.com/product/religious-competition-in-the-greco-
roman-world-1st-edition-nathaniel-p-desrosiers/

Chess Explained The c3 Sicilian 1st Edition Sam Collins

https://ebookmeta.com/product/chess-explained-
the-c3-sicilian-1st-edition-sam-collins/

Starting Out The c3 Sicilian 1st Edition John Emms

https://ebookmeta.com/product/starting-out-the-c3-sicilian-1st-
edition-john-emms/
The Paper Issue 83 1st Edition Origamiusa

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-paper-issue-83-1st-edition-
origamiusa/

Mediterranean Naval Battles That Changed the World 1st

Edition Quentin Russell

https://ebookmeta.com/product/mediterranean-naval-battles-that-
changed-the-world-1st-edition-quentin-russell/

Pagan Inscriptions, Christian Viewers. The Afterlives

of Temples and Their Texts in the Late Antique Eastern
Mediterranean (Cultures of Reading in the Ancient
Mediterranean) 1st Edition Anna M. Sitz
https://ebookmeta.com/product/pagan-inscriptions-christian-
viewers-the-afterlives-of-temples-and-their-texts-in-the-late-
antique-eastern-mediterranean-cultures-of-reading-in-the-ancient-
mediterranean-1st-edition-anna-m-sitz/

The American Revolution 1774 83 2nd Edition Daniel

Marston

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-american-
revolution-1774-83-2nd-edition-daniel-marston/

The Western Mediterranean and the World : 400 CE to the

Present 1st Edition Teofilo F. Ruiz

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-western-mediterranean-and-the-
world-400-ce-to-the-present-1st-edition-teofilo-f-ruiz/
Religious Pilgrimages
in the Mediterranean World

Religious Pilgrimages in the Mediterranean World examines the evolution

of recent theoretical and methodological trends in pilgrimage studies. It
outlines key themes of research, including historical, anthropological, socio-
logical and cultural approaches, to provide a comprehensive and interdisci-
plinary overview of the subject.
Charting pilgrimages from 1500 through to the current day, the volume
traces the recent research of Jewish, Muslim and Christian pilgrimages in
the Mediterranean while also exploring avenues for future studies that go
beyond the limitations of the past. Chapters also engage with travel litera-
ture, tourism and nationalism in relation to pilgrimage in this cutting-edge
volume.
Featuring essays from leading scholars in the fields of religious studies,
geography and anthropology, this book is cross-cultural in focus and critical
in approach, making it an essential read for all researchers of pilgrimage,
religious history, religious tourism and anthropology.

Antón M. Pazos is currently a member of the Pontifical Committee of

Historical Sciences and Vice President of the International Commission
for History and Studies of Christianity (CIHEC). He is also Emeritus
Scientist of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC,
Spanish National Research Council).
Religious Pilgrimages
in the Mediterranean World

Edited by
Antón M. Pazos
First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 selection and editorial matter, Antón M. Pazos; individual chapters,
the contributors
The right of Antón M. Pazos to be identified as the author of the editorial
material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-032-30928-6 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-30930-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-30729-7 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/b23008

Typeset in Sabon
by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.
Dedicated to His Excellency the Most Reverend
Mgr. Julian Barrio, Archbishop of Santiago
de Compostela, on the occasion of his 75th birthday.
Contents

List of Figures ix
List of Contributorsx

Introduction: Pilgrimages, Religion and Mediterranean 1

ANTÓN M. PAZOS

1 Catholic Pilgrimages between c. 1500 and c. 2000 11

JOSÉ ANDRÉS-GALLEGO

2 Reimagining Pilgrimage: Recent Studies of Protestantism

and Pilgrimage 38
RAYMOND MENTZER

3 To the Holy Land: Anthropological Issues in Contemporary

Holy Land Pilgrimage 52
JACKIE FELDMAN

4 Recent Research on a Renewed Pilgrimage: The Way of

St James in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries 67
ANTÓN M. PAZOS

5 A Decade of Research: Travel Literature and the Artistic

Heritage of the Way of St James 89
MIGUEL TAÍN GUZMÁN

6 The Contemporary Resurgence of the Pilgrimage to

Santiago: Beyond Religion 113
XOSÉ M. SANTOS
viii Contents

7 Religion and Nationalism in Jewish Pilgrimage and Holy Sites:

The Western Wall and Rachel’s Tomb as Case Studies 128
KOBI COHEN-HATTAB

8 Muslim Pilgrimage Observed: Ruminations on an Emerging Field 145

NIMROD LUZ

9 Aftermath: Studying Life after Pilgrimage 158

HILLARY KAELL

Index 173
Figures

7.1 Memorial Day for Israel’s fallen soldiers in the Western

Wall plaza, April 15, 1975, NPA, Jerusalem, D149-072136
8.1 Regional distribution of Muslims. [Population by region
as of 2010]. Pew Research Center146
Contributors

José Andrés-Gallego is currently a Professor Emeritus of the Universidad

San Pablo-CEU de Madrid, Spain.
Kobi Cohen-Hattab is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Land of
Israel Studies, Bar Ilan University, Israel.
Jackie Feldman is a Full Professor at the Department of Sociology and
Anthropology, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel.
Hillary Kaell is an anthropologist and historian of North American
Christianity. She is a Full Professor at McGill University in Montreal
(Canada), where she holds a William Dawson Research Chair.
Nimrod Luz currently works at the Departments of Behavioural Science
and Land of Israel Studies, Kinneret College on the Sea of Galilee.
Raymond Mentzer holds the Daniel J. Krumm Family Chair in Reformation
Studies, Department of Religious Studies, University of Iowa, United
States of America.
Antón M. Pazos is currently a member of the Pontifical Committee of
Historical Sciences and Vice President of the International Commission
for History and Studies of Christianity (CIHEC). He is also Emeritus
Scientist of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC,
Spanish National Research Council).
Xosé M. Santos is a geographer specialized in Religious Tourism Research.
He is a Full Professor at the Department of Geography, Universidad
de Santiago de Compostela, Spain, and was Director of the Centre for
Tourism Studies and Research (CETUR) from 2005 to 2014.
Miguel Taín Guzmán is a Full Professor at the Department of Art History,
Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, Spain, where he has held the
Camino de Santiago and Pilgrimages Chair since 2019.
Introduction
Pilgrimages, Religion and Mediterranean
Antón M. Pazos

The title of this book establishes certain boundaries, which, like all bounda-
ries, may be overstepped but are nonetheless a perfectly clear reference to
delimit a territory. As far as possible, what we are attempting to analyze
here is, firstly, pilgrimage, that is, a more or less lengthy journey to a place
distinguished by a special attraction, which travellers hope may contribute
something to the enrichment of their lives, quite apart from other incidental
factors that may be added, as occurs in any human objective, which is never
devoid of supplementary connections. Secondly, the book will be concerned
with religious pilgrimages, which in earlier times were defined as journeys
deuotionis et peregrinationis causa, without excluding other motivations
more or less related to the matter of religion. Finally, we have tried to limit
ourselves to pilgrimages that could be described, without forcing the term
too far, as the Mediterranean.

Not everything is pilgrimage

Classical authors in the field of humanities always sought to delimit the
subject they were going to deal with. Concepts such as “liberalism”,
“sovereignty”, “people”, “state” or “power”, to confine ourselves to the
world of political society, required clarification: Hobbes does not say the
same as Montesquieu, nor Constant the same as Guizot, to cite liberal
authors.1 Medieval scholastic philosophers began every analysis with an
“an sit”, a relevant question as to whether or not the subject they were
going to discuss existed, and if it did (as was always the case), they tried to
define its content.
Today, though not always nor in all authors, it seems that that concern,
which we might call “chorographic”, to delimit and be aware of the terri-
tory one is going to cover or explore has been somewhat lost. Studies on
pilgrimages have not escaped this scourge, which is spreading, little by lit-
tle, through books and articles. There comes a time when we do not know
what we are talking about because everything is pilgrimage. The problem –
a familiar one – is that in that case, nothing is pilgrimage.

DOI: 10.4324/b23008-1
2 Antón M. Pazos

As in the physical world, every term, every field of study, has certain
limits of elasticity; they may be greater or lesser, but they exist. If it is
stretched beyond its limits, it breaks. If someone today says – as has been
said – that they made the pilgrimage to Santiago by walking around their
own property until they had completed the distance that separates it from
the shrine in Compostela, or if we say that all the roads that enable you to
reach the city of the son of Zebedee are the Camino de Santiago, we have
exceeded the elasticity of the term and have broken it. If all are knights, all
are serfs (or, as W. S. Gilbert put it, when everyone is somebody, then no
one’s anybody). If all paths are ways of St James, there is no longer a Way
of St James because there are no features that allow us to distinguish what
is the Camino – with its historical basis, verifiable in archives, its stages, its
hostels and its hospitals built centuries ago – from what is not: a dirt track
opened just the year before would do. 2
Do all roads lead to Santiago? Yes, if you go in the right direction. Are
all roads the “Camino de Santiago”, the Way of St James? No, the great
majority are ways towards Santiago. Pilgrims certainly made detours to
visit the shrines that were near the path they were following. Did they con-
sider those shrines part of the “Camino de Santiago”? No. At most, they
would have seen them as shrines close to the Way of St James, which were
optional visits. If those sanctuaries had not been mere detours from the
route to fulfil a devotional visit, they would have to be included in the con-
cept of the “Camino de Santiago”.
These considerations, which are elementary, sometimes seem to be dis-
regarded, and so it seems nowadays that “pilgrimage” covers everything
included in travel: museums, historical sites, places of memory, disaster
tourism (so-called “negative” or “dark” pilgrimages), natural areas, or
routes invented ad hoc by promotion companies for purely commercial
purposes, but that manage to convince their customers that they are going
on a pilgrimage. The very difficulty of defining what religious tourism is
seems to be even greater in relation to the term we are discussing. What no
one would include in “religious tourism” can perfectly well fall within the
ambit of pilgrimage.
I think that once it has reached its zenith, the concept will naturally start
to decline and will once again be precisely delimited, or will at least rid
itself of many accretions that should never have been accepted.
In the case of this book, we have tried not to stray too far from the core
concepts of what a pilgrimage is. I would even say that we have endeavoured
to consider it in its most traditional sense of pilgrimage for religious
motives, although nowadays, it can be – and indeed often is – called reli-
gious tourism. In any case, religious tourism or tourism linked to religious
pilgrimage, even placing emphasis on the current concept of “tourism”, has
always been present in every pilgrimage. It is not a contemporary novelty
or a sign of secularization, it seems to me. Medieval pilgrims, as well as
 Introduction 3

being pious, were curious. Otherwise, they would have stayed at home, as
they were urged to do, especially female pilgrims, in so many sermons, and
contented themselves with pious exercises and devotions that they could
perform at home or at their parish church. Luther himself draws attention
to this curiosity, which he definitely did not consider at all as something to
be recommended.3 Certainly, the curious pilgrims of the nineteenth cen-
tury were more like tourists in the present-day sense. That is, they were
attracted by objectives that would never have been part of a medieval pil-
grim’s plan. It is unthinkable that a medieval pilgrim would have made a
detour from her already difficult – and hazardous – journey just to see a
landscape or gaze at a castle. In the nineteenth century, it was no longer so.
Non-religious visits could account for a significant part of the pilgrimage.
They were not the main object, to be sure, but many of those visits had
nothing to do with pilgrimage or with devotion. A single example will suf-
fice, that of a Spanish woman writer, well known for her advanced ideas
and habits, which she never considered incompatible with her Catholicism
or her pontifical title of nobility: Countess Emilia Pardo Bazán. In her jour-
nalistic account of a great pilgrimage to Rome – videre Petrum – made
from Spain, which she published in book form with the title Mi romería
[My Pilgrimage],4 she described her return journey – once she had fulfilled
her initial goal of visiting Pope Leo XIII – via Florence, Padua, Loreto and
Venice. There was a religious element in some of those stops, such as Loreto
and Padua, but others were purely for artistic purposes, such as Florence,
or artistic and political, in the case of Venice, where she interviewed the
Carlist pretender to the Spanish throne, Carlos de Borbón Austria-Este,
who lived there.5

Religious pilgrimages
By religious pilgrimages, therefore, we mean those in which the personal
motive or final objective is of a religious nature. They may be strictly reli-
gious, as is the case with those of a clearly sacred character for a particular
religion, such as Christian pilgrimages to the Holy Land, following in the
footsteps of Christ, or Muslim pilgrimages to Mecca. But they can also be
less well defined, such as the current pilgrimages of devout Jews to Israel,
the climax of which is to pray at the “Wailing Wall”, Catholic pilgrimages
to Rome, or mixed or interfaith pilgrimages, which, as one would expect,
have a different character in each of the religions that converge there.6 The
pilgrims from one of those religions will probably have a more spiritual
perception than those from the others that are there at the same time, but
they are all pursuing an objective of a sacred nature. Sometimes, religious
pilgrimages acquire an even more strongly marked character, as happens
upon proclamation of a Holy Year, which has well-defined religious con-
notations that the pilgrim must comply with: a weak religious pilgrimage
4 Antón M. Pazos

thereby becomes a stronger one. In any event, it is not always so. In the case
of the Way of St James, the number of pilgrims who walk it undoubtedly
increases in Holy Years, but there is no substantial increase in the propor-
tion of those who make the journey for religious reasons. On the other
hand, there is a big increase in the number of strictly religious pilgrims who
do not walk to Santiago de Compostela, that is, those who get there in indi-
vidual or collective means of transport. In any case, religious motivation is
difficult to assess, although it could be said that the lower the social status
of pilgrims and the more unsophisticated they are, the more likely it is that
the underlying religious basis will be strongly preserved.
We will see several examples in the various contributions to this volume.
One of the chapters has a markedly personal character, as it arises from the
experience of the author himself, Jackie Feldman, who not only cultivates
his academic field of study but also works in a practical capacity as a guide.
That direct experience makes it possible to get to know the various groups
one works for in much greater depth, continuity and detail than in a purely
anthropological study or a survey. In a way – albeit with qualifications – it
is like becoming a member of the group and knowing its level of commit-
ment, its sensibility and its interests from the inside.
Naturally, this refers to the chapters more related to the social sciences in
which fieldwork can be done. But the high degree of religious tension one
seems to detect in those contemporary pilgrimages is certainly interesting.
The religious factor is therefore present and marks the journey, although in
almost all the chapters it is made clear that this does not imply giving up visits
or experiences regarded as tourism, which occur on any journey: visiting
historic civil buildings, enjoying outstanding landscapes – although some-
times, as in Evangelicals and Protestants, they are of a religious nature – or
sampling the local cuisine.
Even unique experiences, such as bathing in the Dead Sea, to which visits
are usually linked to purchases related to the special local cosmetics, do not
exclude religious fervour, before and after visiting a spa.

The Mediterranean world

The interest in analyzing more remote pilgrimages more alien to the
European mental world, which has grown enormously in recent years, has
led to a neglect of those closer at hand, which are also the most ances-
tral and the most numerous. In this book, we have tried to focus on the
Mediterranean basin. Not only are these pilgrimages the most traditional;
but they also allow us to see the religious variety inherent in this geo-
graphical area, which has subsequently influenced the whole world. Jewish,
Muslim and Christian pilgrimages, with all their relevant subdivisions,
offer a very varied view in a geographical space that is certainly minimal
by global standards. In this connection, the fact that Jerusalem, Rome and
 Introduction 5

Mecca lie within this area means that a large number of pilgrimages that
could hardly be called “Mediterranean” because they come from Eastern
or Northern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa or the Far East can be accom-
modated here. If they find a place in one or other of the various chapters,
it is precisely because of their “genetic” relationship with the old Mare
Nostrum.
There are obviously some issues in the book that cannot be limited to the
Mediterranean world since the authors – such as Nimrod Luz or Hillary
Kaell – aim to provide an overall view of conceptual problems. Religions
more distant from the Mediterranean cultural sphere are therefore men-
tioned, as they offer data that can be considered common to every pilgrimage,
include the Mediterranean ones, naturally.

Chapters and authors

I will start with the last chapter, which I have just mentioned. Here Hillary
Kaell addresses a general question that has received very little attention, as
she points out: what happens after the pilgrimage? In other words, what
impact has it had on the life of the pilgrim or religious tourist? That pil-
grimage influenced pilgrims in other eras is beyond doubt. It can be seen
in all those wills, bequests, chapels and altars all over Europe whose ori-
gin lies in a pilgrimage by the donor or promoter. Or in all those lives
of saintly – or not so saintly – characters who changed after going on a
pilgrimage to a place where they decided to mend their ways. In other
words, pilgrimage was at the origin of many conversions. Moreover, quite
a few European surnames are related to pilgrimages, such as Rey, King or
Roi, connected to the journey to Santiago. In short, pilgrimage in former
times was more demanding, more intense and longer-lasting. What about
present-day pilgrimages? Are they summed up in or reduced to a series
of images that rapidly disappear in the morass of social media? At least
nineteenth-­century pilgrimages, although they had lost the force of earlier
centuries and become gentrified, left abundant traces in memoirs and pho-
tographs. Kaell also raises the need for a new agenda:

In discussing these topics, my first goal is to highlight pertinent research

and suggest areas for further investigation. I focus on the methodology
I know best: “fieldwork” studies, within which I include scholarship in
anthropology, sociology, cultural geography, tourism studies and reli-
gious studies.

Of the other chapters, some concentrate more on general bibliogra-

phy that brings up problems and suggests new routes. Others focus on a
more limited phenomenon, which can be seen from various angles and
perspectives. So it is with Kobi Cohen-Hattab, who analyzes the influence of
6 Antón M. Pazos

religion and nationalism on two significant sites in Israel, Rachel’s Tomb

and the Western Wall. The former finally became associated with the
Holocaust, and the latter was linked to the Israel Defense Forces. They are
cases of interference and conflict, studied over time and in terms of their
current implications.
Jackie Feldman’s chapter also refers to the Holy Land – for that is how
the pilgrims he analyzes see it – but it focuses on an anthropological study
of contemporary Protestant Christian pilgrimage. It is, in any case, a very
specific type of pilgrimage, limited, within Protestantism, to American
evangelical Christians since the Christian pilgrimages that arrive in Israel
are very varied. Feldman draws on his experience as a guide, which enables
him to make observations that are difficult to capture in any other way. It
is therefore useful not only for academic analysis but also to provide inside
knowledge of the sensibility of many pilgrimage groups with a very strong
religious charge. His study analyzes current pilgrimages in the light of the
classic concepts of recent decades:

Following a brief survey of the historical background of pilgrimage

to the Holy Land and the organization of contemporary pilgrimages,
I examine the tensions between communitas and conflict, and between
pilgrimage and tourism. Finally, I look at the interactions between
Christian pilgrims, who have mainly come to confirm their faith, and a
significant religious other, as represented by the Jewish-Israeli tour guide.

He devotes a section to analyzing the relationship between tourism

and pilgrimage, in which it is interesting to note his interest in examining
the bubbles that some groups establish on their pilgrimages, especially
Protestant groups. It is an attitude that “may also foster the creation of
social enclaves that isolate pilgrims in environmental bubbles, in which
national, social or doctrinal boundaries move with the pilgrims from home
to sacred site and back”.7
His chapter may be useful for various fields of study since, as he finally
concludes, “the three encounters of contemporary Holy Land pilgrimage
discussed here – communitas and conflict, pilgrimage and tourism, and
Christianity and other religions – provide frames and materials for inter-
cultural and interreligious comparison”.
Though also from Israel, and with references to the Muslim pilgrimages
made there, Nimrod Luz’s study, as its title indicates, offers “ruminations
on an emerging field”. The new field, in which scholars, especially in the
English-speaking world, are beginning to take an interest is that of Islamic
pilgrimages other than Mecca, of which there are thousands. As the author
testifies from his own experience, “rarely do I visit the Haram al-Sharif in
Jerusalem without chancing upon pilgrims from the Indian subcontinent
or in growing numbers from Indonesia”. The same is true in a great many
 Introduction 7

places where Islam has become established and has adapted to local cus-
toms and influences, as was bound to happen. The current ease of travel and
“the omipresence of capitalist forces” have encouraged pilgrimages to such
a point that in order to be able to study them, as already indicated in other
chapters for their respective fields, we have to delimit the scope: “To begin
to fathom these changes, let us first explore the connections between Islam
and pilgrimage and try to postulate what can be categorized as Muslim
pilgrimage. Once these questions are answered, even tentatively, we will be
able to better define and delineate the field and scope of Muslim pilgrimage
studies”. In this regard, the chapter offers a perspective – difficult to find in
other books – on current Muslim pilgrimages and the changes taking place
in them, and in studies of them, in the Islamic world.
We then move on to the field of Christian pilgrimages, with two general
chapters that present a historical approach.
The first, by José Andrés-Gallego, gives us a historical overview of
Christian pilgrimage, in this case, Catholic, also starting, like Mentzer’s
chapter on Protestants, from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and
extending up to the present. Drawing on classic pilgrimage authors such
as Nolan and Nolan8 and Julia,9 the author offers a very well-structured
synthesis of the development of pilgrimages in the last few centuries from
various angles. His chapter enables us to see, at a glance, the stages of
an always living but ever-changing phenomenon, and at the same time, it
offers interesting leads for confronting the current issues, that is, constructing
that new agenda which, as we have seen, several authors have proposed is
needed in order to correct the course of the mass of somewhat incoherent
or misguided works that are appearing, in ever-increasing numbers, in the
twenty-first century.
The chapter is structured in four main parts: the reorientation of Catholic
pilgrimages between 1454 and 1531, the rhythms, the new critical cur-
rents of modernity and liberalism, and the centuries of Marian apparitions.
There are sections that are worth highlighting, such as those devoted to
the change from terrestrial to maritime pilgrimage in the sixteenth cen-
tury, pilgrimage as a spiritual path in the Jesuits, the transplantation of
Mediterranean pilgrimage models to Hispanic America, the development
between pilgrimage and penance, the influence of the nineteenth-­century
ecclesiastical disentailments on pilgrimage routes, and the dialectic between
short and long pilgrimages. As we can see, there are many sections that can
offer clues – from a strictly historical point of view – for contemporary
works in other academic specialities, from geography to anthropology.
Raymond A. Mentzer’s text on Protestant pilgrimages focuses on the
studies produced in three quite precise areas:

First, specialists have examined the continuation of various late

medieval practices surrounding pilgrimage despite the strong objections
8 Antón M. Pazos

raised by Protestant ecclesiastical authorities and theologians. Others

have investigated the revival of pilgrimage to Palestine among
American Evangelical Protestants in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Finally, historians have analysed the ambiguous meaning
of pilgrimage for followers of the contemporary French Reformed
tradition.

It is interesting that he reinforces the comments in Feldman’s chapter

about the unhistorical or presentist nature of the Protestant pilgrimages,
which started again in Palestine in the nineteenth century: “Nineteenth-
century American Evangelical Protestants were eager to reconnect with the
ancient Near Eastern landscape of Christianity, but pointedly sought to
disassociate themselves from traditional Catholic and Orthodox pilgrimage
sites in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth and elsewhere”.
It is also worth pointing to his comments on the use of “places of
memory” in recent Protestant pilgrimages, especially in France, which we could
consider to be in line with what has already been said about the creation,
in Protestant denominations, of capsules of their own, disconnected from
other forms of Christian pilgrimage: “This reconceptualization and expan-
sion of the meaning of pilgrimage among Protestants to signify travel to
a place of memory is nowhere more evident than in the French Reformed
tradition”, which, moreover, has become part of the recent reconstruction
of Protestant pilgrimage and its adaptation to current circumstances, but
without abandoning – at least as a reference – the reservations already
raised by Luther at the very beginning of the Reformation.
We now come to the part devoted to pilgrimages to Compostela, com-
prising three chapters. The text by Antón M. Pazos draws together the
significant publications on the Camino de Santiago in recent decades. As is
well known, or at least can be easily assumed, since it is in line with other
trends in the academic world of pilgrimages, works on the Way of St James
have grown exponentially since the end of the last century. A selection
is therefore needed, focusing especially on the major lines of work and –
a significant point – on the institutionalization of these research studies
through specialized journals, some created ad hoc in the twenty-first cen-
tury by institutions (political and ecclesiastical) interested in promoting the
Santiago pilgrimage.
A field that has seen numerous publications is travel literature; this is
also true of other destinations.10 It threatens to proliferate inordinately in
the contemporary Jacobean pilgrimage, where every traveller is a poten-
tial writer. Travel literature is the subject of Miguel Taín’s chapter, which
studies eleven substantial accounts of journeys full of cultural, geographical
and even technological information, such as the development of the new
railway lines used by travellers. The journeys analyzed range from the
fifteenth century to the nineteenth, and the travellers involved originated
 Introduction 9

from English, Bohemian, French, Armenian, German, Flemish, Spanish,

Italian and Hungarian lands.
The last Jacobean chapter deals with a very recent phenomenon, but one
that is linked to the medieval tradition: the construction of a support net-
work for pilgrims. What were once medieval hospitals, where quite a num-
ber of pilgrims died, are now albergues or hostels, run by either the Church
or public institutions, like most of those in Galicia, which are funded by
the regional government (and where, fortunately, none seems to have died).
Santos Solla studies precisely the human factor in all the infrastructure of
the pilgrimage on foot that has developed so markedly in recent years:
voluntary albergue hosts to attend to pilgrims’ needs, signposting of the
paths, upkeep of the hostels, information, promotion of new routes and
relations with the political authorities. The associations of friends of the
Camino form a very close-knit network of hundreds of people who, according
to the author, are the lifeblood of the pilgrimage along the Way of St James,
to the point that “in the text, I argue that their disappearance, as happened
in the nineteenth century, could have a significant impact on the future of
the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela”.
As we can see from these brief indications, the book offers a wide range
of material and suggestions that can be usefully put into practice for
studies related to pilgrimages to the great centres of devotion located
around the Mediterranean basin, all of them rich in historical substance and
constantly developing.

Notes
1 By way of example, see the excellent synthesis by Manent, Histoire
intellectuelle.
2 The need to specify what can be considered the Camino de Santiago is pre-
cisely the research project I am working on at present, through an agree-
ment with the autonomous government of Galicia, the political community
of which Santiago de Compostela is the historical and administrative capital.
3 See, for example, the first part of Raymond Mentzer’s chapter in this book.
4 Pardo, Mi romería.
5 On the impact of this visit, see Paz, “Una nota”.
6 They include Christian-Muslim mixed pilgrimages in North Africa or
Islamic-­H indu ones in India. See Teissier, “Christian Pilgrimages”; Singh,
“Muslim Shrines”.
7 He had already studied pilgrimage bubbles much more markedly in pilgrimages
of Israeli students to the concentration camps established in Poland: Feldman,
“Israeli Youth Voyages”.
8 Nolan and Nolan, Christian Pilgrimage.
9 Julia, Le voyage aux saints.
10 Such as the edition of the travel diary, not intended for publication, written by
the young Alfonso de Borbón Austria-Este on his journey to the Holy Land
in 1868, a journal exhumed from the Archivo Histórico Nacional [National
Historical Archive] (Madrid, Spain): Borbón, Viaje.
10 Antón M. Pazos

References
Borbón Austria-Este, A. de. Viaje al Cercano Oriente en 1868 (Constantinopla,
Egipto, Suez, Palestina). Translated and edited by C. de la Puente y J. R. Urquijo
Goitia. Zaragoza: Universidad de Zaragoza, 2022.
Feldman, J. “Israeli Youth Voyages to Holocaust Poland: Through the Prism of
Pilgrimage”. In Redefining Pilgrimage: New Perspectives on Historical and
Contemporary Pilgrimages, edited by A. M. Pazos, 87–101. Farnham: Ashgate,
2014.
Julia, D. Le voyage aux saints: les pèlerinages dans l’Occident moderne (XVe–XVIIIe
siècle). Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Éditions Gallimard,
and Éditions du Seuil, 2016.
Manent, P. Histoire intellectuelle du libéralisme. París: Pluriel, 2012.
Nolan, M. L., and S. Nolan. Christian Pilgrimage in Modern Western Europe. Chapel
Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.
Pardo Bazán, E. Mi romería. Madrid: Imprenta y Fundición de M. Tello, 1888.
Paz Gago, J. M. “Una nota sobre la ideología de Pardo Bazán: Doña Emilia, entre el
carlismo integrista y el carlismo moderado”. La Tribuna 5, no. 5 (2007): 349–362.
Singh, R. P. B. “Muslim Shrines and Multi-Religious Visitations in Hindus’ City
of Banaras, India: Co-Existential Scenario”. In Pilgrims and Pilgrimages as
Peacemakers in Christianity, Judaism and Islam, edited by A. M. Pazos, 127–159.
Abingdon: Routledge, 2016.
Teissier, H. “Christian Pilgrimages in Muslim Lands: The Case of Algeria”. In
Pilgrims and Pilgrimages as Peacemakers in Christianity, Judaism and Islam,
edited by A. M. Pazos, 119–126. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016.
Chapter 1

Catholic Pilgrimages between

c. 1500 and c. 2000
José Andrés-Gallego

In order to speak about Catholic pilgrimages from the sixteenth century

to our own day, the first thing we must establish is whether there are existing
publications that adhere strictly enough to that conceptual framework.
There are none, or rather, if there are any, I am not aware of them. The
closest, among the most recent work known to me, are the proceedings,
collected by Philippe Boutry and Dominique Julia, of the round table on
Pèlerins et pèlerinages dans l’Europe moderne organized in the Department
of History and Civilization of the European University Institute of Florence
and the École française de Rome.1 As it is precisely a volume of proceedings,
the papers that make up the book rarely focus on overviews; only Dominique
Julia writes “Pour une géographie européenne du pèlerinage à l’époque
moderne et contemporaine”, which is one of the very few general surveys
that address my subject. 2
Julia attributes particular importance to the Protestant Reformation and
to the simultaneous development of the “state” (I take this to mean as an
administrative superstructure and, at the same time, one that is imposed
as sovereign on the political community, the civitas); the development of
the “state” had begun to reinforce the demarcation of the territory into
various “plots”, the repression of begging and of the wandering of vagrants
and the control of journeys in general, to the point of preventing them or
even prohibiting them if they were considered dangerous or merely dubious,
as pilgrimages were, strictly speaking. Julia naturally tries to separate the
wheat from the chaff, trace the development of these activities in “modern”
centuries and address the social profile and geographical origin of pilgrims.
What we would now call “police” sources are an enormous help to him in
achieving this. (Do not forget that police comes from the Greek politeia,
which is the conception of the ideal citizen).
Dominique Julia has devoted several individual and collective books to
my subject. Le voyage aux saints: les pèlerinages dans l’Occident moderne
(XVe –XVIIIe siècle) is especially interesting to me because it allows us to
observe in detail the set of changes that mark the beginning of the period

DOI: 10.4324/b23008-2
12 José Andrés-Gallego

I am studying, the transition from the fifteenth to the sixteenth centuries,

and also throws light on what happened between 1500 and 1800.3
For the subsequent period (the nineteenth and twentieth centuries),
I have been especially struck by Nolan and Nolan’s book in relation to
Western Europe, covering all Christian denominations.4 The latter point is
of special interest because it helps us to compare the different strands that
arose from the Lutheran Reformation and the various church organizations
to which it gave rise, and conversely, it acquaints us with the situation of
Catholic minorities in majority Protestant countries in the 1980s.
Nolan and Nolan provide very descriptive conclusions of the study
they conducted on European Christian pilgrimages that remained active
between 1975 and 1984. They also devote a well-informed chapter to the
history of every one of the 6,150 shrines that continued to attract pil-
grims in those years, and this enables us to establish a link with the period
addressed by Dominique Julia. Indeed, many of those shrines already
existed around 1500. Specifically, no fewer than 32 per cent of the shrines
that received pilgrims in 1975–1984 dated from before 1400, and a fur-
ther 15 per cent were established in the period around 1500 (specifically,
between 1400 and 1529).
At the other extreme of the literature lies a large number of travelogues
of an autobiographical nature from all periods, critical editions of which
have obliged those responsible for preparing them to highlight the facts that
could serve to gain a fuller understanding of the phenomenon.
And we must add the endless supply of local histories and the range of
many of them. For example, the Historia de la Virgen del Pilar, in eleven
volumes, each of around a 1,000 pages, published in 1971–1983 by Francisco
Gutiérrez Lasanta, gives an idea of how a forbidding task it is. All we can
do is advance little by little through partial syntheses, which, when read,
gradually reveal significant similarities and differences in that “interiority”
of pilgrim movement. And even so, a complete view will always be an unat-
tainable goal. We are speaking of a phenomenon of oceanic dimensions.

The reorientation of Catholic pilgrimages from

1453 and 1531: 1453 and the naval reorientation
of pilgrimages to the Holy Land
I will not limit myself to commenting on the conclusions of the various
authors I am using as guides; I will begin, with their help, by “constructing”
an overview and tracing, albeit in a cursory manner, the current state of
knowledge in each of the resulting sections. In this connection, it must be
said that the first thing one observes in the bibliography is that around
1500, there arose at least six important changes which influenced the
historical phenomenon that pilgrims already constituted. I will list them
according to when they occurred.
 Catholic Pilgrimages between c. 1500 and c. 2000 13

The first thing to take into account was the fall of Constantinople (1453),
which made it, if not impossible, then certainly more difficult to undertake
pilgrimages to the Holy Land, as people had been doing for over a millen-
nium. European Catholics were obliged to opt for travelling by sea to reach
the Eastern Mediterranean and attain their objective from there. Perhaps
the best and most pertinent example (because I have to refer to bibliogra-
phy related to him, given his importance) is St Ignatius of Loyola; wounded
in 1521 in the defence of Pamplona against the French armies supporting
the monarchs of the Gascon dynasty of Albret (or Labrit), who had been
expelled from the throne of Navarre in 1512, he read a flos sanctorum
while convalescing, which led him to start a new life and become a pilgrim
bound for the Holy Places.5
His pilgrimage was narrated by Ignatius himself – in the third person – to
the Jesuit Luís Gonçalves da Câmara between 1553 and 1555, and it has
been republished innumerable times, especially since 1943, often under the
title Autobiography.6 And it is a book of great substance if it is read from
the perspective of getting to know problems and attitudes that must have
been common to those intending to do the same: reach the Holy Land.
That – the sea route – was the prevailing solution among Catholics;
among the Orthodox Christians of Eastern Europe and Islamized Asia
Minor and the Egyptian Copts, the break was apparently more abrupt,
and it has even been said that only pilgrimages to nearby shrines sur-
vived. But the case of Egypt was different; here, external relations with
Portugal and Castile, whose monarchs were rivals of each other, had a
great influence. The Castilian diplomacy of the Catholic Monarchs, just
around 1500, ensured that that milestone on the journey to the Holy
Land remained intact among their subjects; for centuries, many pilgrims
had not forgotten that Egypt was part of the space inhabited by Christ
in His earthly lifetime.7 On the other hand, bad Portuguese-Turkish rela-
tions meant that Ethiopian Christians stopped going to the Holy Land
around 1500.8 The continuity of Iberian pilgrimages to the Holy Land in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is clear from the set of contri-
butions collected by the same author, Víctor de Lama de la Cruz, in the
catalogue of the exhibition Urbs Beata Hierusalem: los viajes a Tierra
Santa en los siglos XVI y XVII, presented in its day at the Biblioteca
Nacional de España, whose richness in every sense – including its iconography –
may be regarded as proverbial.9
From the point of view of receiving pilgrims, the Turkish conquest
of Constantinople (1453) did not interrupt the “Custody of the Holy
Land” that Clement VI had formally entrusted to the Franciscans in the
mid-fourteenth century,10 but it did oblige the “custodians” to adapt to
the new situation. It was a creative adaptation in some respects; one of
these, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, was fixing the “Stations”
that Christ had passed through from the Garden of Gethsemane to
14 José Andrés-Gallego

Calvary, in what was already called the “Via Crucis” and constituted
one of the most important devotions of those who made the pilgrimage
to Jerusalem.11

1521 and the influence of the Protestant Reformation

on pilgrimages
Pilgrimages had notable detractors in Europe before 1500, and they were
joined in the sixteenth century by such notable figures as Erasmus on the
Catholic side and Luther on the Protestant. Even among the most cultivated
or rigorous Catholics, the idea was still held that neither was pilgrimage
proper to strict Christians nor did practising penance require journeys that
lent themselves to moral deviations of all kinds and of which there was
ample experience.12 But even so, the disengagement in Protestant-majority
countries, in contrast to the vigour of Catholic pilgrimages, is beyond
doubt. In the study cited above, Nolan and Nolan map the 6,150 pilgrimage
shrines in 16 West European countries that they studied between 1976 and
1984, and the resulting geography is very eloquent.13
For now, while the fall of Constantinople diverted the pilgrimage to the
Holy Land, the Protestant Reformation was a great impediment to the con-
tinuation of the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, which was gradually
reduced to a goal reached by Portuguese, Spaniards, Italians, French and
Catholics from the Low Countries that remained under the sovereignty
of the kings of Spain. In the last two groups mentioned, Francophones
and Walloons, that continuity is clear from the study devoted to them
by Georges Provost,14 based on the documents of the “Hospital Real” of
Santiago from the second half of the seventeenth century. It also enlightens
us as to the predominant nature of those pilgrims: young men, unmarried
and of predominantly urban and generally modest origin.
It is important to add that in the seventeenth century a similar recovery
of the Santiago pilgrimage is recorded in Germany, as may be seen from
Ilja Mieck’s study.15

1531 and the emergence of Mediterranean-style pilgrimages

on the other side of the Atlantic and the Pacific
The collapse of pilgrimages in Protestant Europe contrasted with the
opening up of a whole continent – which had already become known as
America – to the development of this type of activity. I am not forgetting
that this volume is devoted to Mediterranean pilgrimages, but I cannot fail
to mention, albeit cursorily, the extension of the Mediterranean “model” to
the other side of the Atlantic.
The “Mediterraneanness” of the concerns of the settlers and their
descendants was more vigorous at this time than one might think. In 1766,
 Catholic Pilgrimages between c. 1500 and c. 2000 15

in the foothills of the Andes, a gentleman resident in Mendoza de Cuyo

asked the city council for permission to set up a juego de bolas (bowls
court), offering to pay 12 pesos for the authorization. But he also requested
that half of this – six pesos – should be used to order masses for souls in
purgatory and the other half to ransom, for 29 years, as many as possi-
ble of “the poor Christians suffering in the hands of the Moors and [in]
Algiers”, Fez, Morocco and Tétouan, as a result of Muslim piracy in the
Mediterranean.16 It was not a matter of pilgrimage, obviously, but the
reference testifies to the fact that Spaniards on the other side of the Atlantic
were not unaware of the travails that European pilgrims to the Holy
Land on the Mare Nostrum had to suffer.
Around 1500, the discovery of America and the consequent evangeli-
zation had begun to displace or reorganize the pre-Christian pilgrimages
where they existed and also give rise to new ones. The main event was
undoubtedly the incident involving the indigenous American Juan Diego
in 1531. I refer to the apparition of the Virgin Mary now known as Our
Lady of Guadalupe on Tepeyac hill, soon followed by the construction of
a Marian shrine, which now houses Juan Diego’s tilma (mantle), on which
Mary’s image was imprinted. We cannot go into the long debate between
those who affirm the historicity of the event and those who deny it.17 The
episode is of interest here because the phenomenon soon gave rise to a flow
of pilgrimages which continues to this day.
In 1565, in the Philippines, the rescue of the Holy Child of Cebu in
the destruction of the lower city of Cebu by the soldiers commanded by
Legazpi enormously reinforced devotion and travel to its shrine from the
surrounding Philippine islands.18
In South America, the construction of the first chapel that housed the
image of what become known thereafter as Our Lady of Luján, the most
visited Marian shrine in the Southern Cone, dates from 1630.19
Following the Spanish model, or for purely devotional reasons, the
American continent was structured in “pilgrimage districts” – that is,
shrines that attracted mainly the residents of the nearest towns – similar
to the networks that Nolan and Nolan were to find in Europe, with two
differences: first, it was a system created by peoples of very different culture
and ethnicity: indigenous and black people, descendants of Spaniards and
the mixed-race mestizos and mulatos who immediately began to be born,
and second, the distances tended to be much larger than in Europe. These
two factors gave the phenomenon a particular aspect.

Pilgrimage as a spiritual exercise in St Ignatius of Loyola

and the Jesuits
It should be noted, moreover, that all this coincided with the upsurge of
internalized piety driven mainly by the treatise De imitatione Christi,
16 José Andrés-Gallego

which the invention of printing turned into a veritable bestseller of asceticism

in the following centuries. It was no accident that this way of living was
presented as the good life and life itself as an endless “pilgrimage” for
everyone.20 God could be and had to be found by each person in their own
heart, where, according to the Catholic faith, the Holy Spirit dwells. There
was no need to go on a physical pilgrimage: “qui multum peregrinantur,
raro sanctificantur”. 21
Less than a century later, in the Spiritual Exercises, which he wrote in
Catalonia on his way to the sea to set sail for the Holy Land, Ignatius of
Loyola does not insist that this internal pilgrimage replaces the external
one but includes it as something possible for which one must prepare one-
self, always ready for the two to become one. The Exercises were really
an internal pilgrimage that would lead each of us to a better knowledge
of what God wishes for us. And then, one of the five main activities that
every Jesuit novice had to undergo was to go on a pilgrimage for a time in
the physical sense, with no money other than what they were given in alms.
And this was still maintained, in relative comfort, at the beginning of the
third millennium. It was at the latter distant date that the Jesuit Brendan
McManus, moved by the experience of St Ignatius, decided to walk to
Santiago as a result of his brother’s suicide, and the journey produced in
him the catharsis that he was to narrate in Redemption Road: the solitude
and the effort, the beauty of some moments and the harshness of others,
eventually aroused acceptance, gratitude and hope in him, according to his
own account. 22
The experience related by Villameriel 23 and the various accounts col-
lected by Arthur Pahl24 gives us an idea of what is implied, from the historical
point of view, by the frequency with which pilgrims become “seekers of
God” when they travel the paths.
The idea of continuity between internal and external pilgrimage has never
been abandoned since then, right up to the present day. 25 It was to reap-
pear in one century after another, in works such as Bernard du Verger’s Le
Pelerin Moral (1615) or François Arnoulx’s Le Pélerin du Paradis (1623). 26

1543: pilgrimage as an instrument of Tridentine Catholicism

That close bond between external and internal pilgrimage was another ele-
ment of the change that took place in the sixteenth century. As the Jesuits,
precisely, played a preponderant role at the Council of Trent (1542–1563),
this item was added to the “purification” of Catholicism, as we might call
it, and the re-evangelizing impulse that followed. And this was the fourth
item. It is not that a primordial role was given to physical pilgrimage at
the Council. What emerged from it was a new evangelizing “pedagogy”,
which included pilgrimages. Confraternities already existed and had done
for centuries. Strictly speaking, it is not possible to say exactly when they
 Catholic Pilgrimages between c. 1500 and c. 2000 17

began since they were often confused with craft or professional guilds, and
this forces us to connect them with the associations recognized in Roman
law. But they had begun to multiply in the twelfth century, and from the
sixteenth they sprang up everywhere.
Quite often, they arose with the intention of organizing worship spe-
cifically at pilgrimage shrines. Session XXV of the Council of Trent (3–4
December 1543) established regulations on the invocation, veneration and
relics of saints and on sacred images and confirmed that it was good to
invoke them, to honour their relics as “living members of Christ and tem-
ples of the Holy Spirit” and to respect images for what they represented.27
So not only did pilgrimages to places where there were relics continue but
there was a proliferation throughout Christendom of construction of local
“ways of the cross”, usually ending at a “calvary” located outside the town,
on a hill, crowned by three crosses. Although it is not possible to establish
a chronology of the development of this practice, there are records showing
that this type of route existed in some European cities in the seventh cen-
tury and that the 14 “stations” were fully established in the fifteenth.
In part, the creation of this type of “sacred way” was given impetus by
the fall of Constantinople (1453) and the consequent difficulty of walking
to the Holy Land. But the local studies we know suggest that their construc-
tion was pursued particularly in the seventeenth century and that in that
century it also began to be customary to create them inside churches.
Between these two practices – the stations of the cross inside the church
and the local pilgrimage or “calvary” – the representation of the Passion
of Christ in organized processions in Holy Week culminated in the forma-
tion of a dense network of penitential journeys over widely varying dis-
tances which still further accentuated the contrast between Protestant and
Catholic religiosity.
Apart from this, studies on these practices constitute, once again, an inex-
haustible bibliography, but one in which localism (parochialism) predominates,
and this makes it very difficult to introduce specific milestones of a general
nature, or at least that play a prominent role. There are very few attempts to
offer an overview.28 Praiseworthy though they are, they can scarcely go beyond
what I am saying unless they resort to local examples whose representativeness
on a Mediterranean scale is almost impossible to establish.

The priority of Rome and the Marian shrines and the greater
presence of women
The urban redevelopments of Rome undertaken by Julius II and his suc-
cessors from 1505, over the following century and a half, have also been
endlessly studied and were at once the result of the increase in the flow of
pilgrims and the driving force behind that increase. Tingle has examined
in particular detail the regeneration of the penitential journey to Rome of
18 José Andrés-Gallego

British and French Catholics as a response to the Reformation.29 And what

she has highlighted has been emphasized by other historians in relation to
the “national” hostels which were renovated or created in the wake of the
great architectural alterations centring on St Peter’s Basilica. At St Julian
of the Flemings, St Claudius of the Burgundians, Santa Maria dell’Anima
of the Germans, St Anthony of the Portuguese and St Louis of the French,
among others, the registers from the sixteenth century, and especially the
seventeenth and eighteenth, are preserved and it has been possible to analyze
them in detail, as witnessed by the work coordinated by Boutry and Julia.30
This reconsideration simultaneously driven by and driving the increase
in the flow of travellers from the beginning of the sixteenth century also
occurred in shrines containing relics especially linked to the Passion: the
“Holy Shroud” of Turin, the “Sudarium” of Oviedo, the “Holy Face” of
Jaén, the “Crown of Thorns” in Paris and the places where part of the
Lignum Crucis could and can be venerated. In 1512, Julius II granted a
Jubilee, to be celebrated every year on which 16 April fell on a Sunday, to
the Monastery of St Turibius of Liébana, in Spanish Cantabria, precisely
because it held the largest fragment of the cross to which Christ was nailed.
The existence of the monastery is documented at least as early as 790,
before the finding of the tomb of St James.31
The Christian “Jubilee” was a Jewish legacy, and one cannot speak of
a break between the two. By 1500, however, they had been defined in a
particular way for centuries. Specifically, “jubilees of redemption” had
been regulated by Urban VI in declaring 1390 a “holy year” and establishing
that it was to be celebrated every 33 years (the probable age of Christ when
He was crucified). From 1475, it began to be celebrated every quarter-­
century by the decision of Paul II. It consisted of pious, charitable and
penitential activity, with a recommendation to make a pilgrimage to Rome
and visit the tombs of St Peter and St Paul, and it had been gaining strength
throughout the fifteenth century as an aspect of the recovery of pontifical
dignity after the Western Schism.32
By that time, however, the celebration of jubilees or “holy years” in
Santiago de Compostela and other places had been added. Although they
cannot be said to have arisen then, that period (the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries) was a turning point in the spread of “souvenirs” as objects
that were part of what many pilgrims acquired at the destination of their
pilgrimage and took home with them. The development of this practice
appears specifically linked to the jubilees in Rome and Santiago.33
And the same thing happened at the Marian shrines that became most
vigorous in the sixteenth century, especially those in the West that were
most directly linked to the life of the Virgin Mary, namely the Pillar in
Zaragoza and the Holy House of Nazareth at Loreto, in Italy. In Zaragoza,
the increased flow of pilgrims all over Christian Europe led in the seven-
teenth century to the start of the construction of a new basilica, 34 and
 Catholic Pilgrimages between c. 1500 and c. 2000 19

in the foundations, coins were found declaring the divinity of Christ in

Hebrew. They were actually “souvenirs” commonly manufactured in various
European cities around 1500.35
Loreto, for its part, had begun to attract pilgrims around 1291. It had
become one more stage on the pilgrimage to Rome, and this was reinforced
with the growth of the naval pilgrimage to the Holy Land after Constantinople
fell into the hands of the Turks in 1453. Of the importance of Loreto it is suf-
ficient to say that the donations made by pilgrims in the sixteenth century
turned the Holy House into one of the richest sites in Europe.36
In short, in the sixteenth century we can speak of the real preponderance
of pilgrimages to shrines containing relics of the Passion and Marian sanc-
tuaries. It is not that pilgrimages to those dedicated to other saints ceased
but that the preference for destinations related to Jesus and Mary became
more marked.
This last point – the enhanced influx of pilgrims to those Marian
shrines – could be connected to a different but related fact, which is that the
participation of women increased to the point that scholars have referred
to a certain “feminization” of pilgrimages. The presence of more women
on long-distance pilgrimages is presented, to cite no other examples, as
another feature of the sixteenth century in several of the papers collected
by Juliette Dor and Marie-Élisabeth Henneau in Femmes et pèlerinages.37

The “tempo” of all this

Upward fluctuations
Let us now combine the influence of these factors, the diversity present in
each of them and the legacy of shrines and journeys from previous centuries
that remained unchanged by these new forces (even if modifications were
introduced in the way pilgrimages were made to them). I have referred to
events that constituted very clear historical landmarks (1453, 1475, 1492,
1505, 1512, 1521 and 1543). But it is one thing that those landmarks led
to a reduction or increase in the flow of people and the ways in which they
travelled as pilgrims and another that they did so at very different paces
and gave rise to equally diverse kinds of organizational development. To
mention an important example, pilgrimages to the Holy Land had to be
conducted largely by sea, but initiatives arose from shipowners themselves
helping to make that traffic more fluid.
However, that fluidity was achieved at the expense of the dominant policy
in the ports under Islamic control in which the ships had to dock. It was
therefore a process not without its ups and downs. Moreover, it should be
remembered that Barbary pirates lasted until the nineteenth century and
that this was a factor that the Muslim authorities themselves could not
systematically control.
20 José Andrés-Gallego

Nevertheless, sea transport not only established itself as the solution to the
problem of reaching the Holy Land but also highlighted the fact that it was a
solution capable of combining the three great pilgrimages in one. We cannot
be sure that there were no precedents, but we know at least that between
1511 and 1519 an Antwerp shipowner offered a sea tour, which was to start,
according to the programme for 1514, by docking in La Coruña, making it
possible for travellers to reach Santiago de Compostela in two days. Having
re-embarked, they would continue towards Lisbon and Cádiz and cross the
Mediterranean from West to East – in stages, of course – until they disem-
barked in Jaffa, travelling overland from there to Jerusalem. Finally, the ship
was to return to Civitavecchia, from where they could reach Rome. The fact
that the shipowner published the advertisement in Nuremberg means that he
was not content to settle for carrying Dutch passengers but was hoping for
Germans, and this just a few years before the people of Nuremberg itself,
then an independent principality within the Empire embraced Luther’s doc-
trines. This reference is reported by Julia and highlights not only the effects
of the fall of Constantinople but also the fact that, in spite of it, the recovery
of maritime traffic since the so-called late Middle Ages had reached this sig-
nificant degree of fluidity when it came to making pilgrimages.38

The impediment of wars and the ways of avoiding the difference

between Protestants and Catholics
From the beginning of the period following the Reformation, these prac-
tices were encouraged by Catholic priests. Julia also observes how often the
Northern Low Countries became the organizers of pilgrimages to Rome
and other shrines, despite the Protestantism of the new rulers, once they
had gained independence from the Spanish monarchy. The priests arranged
with the faithful who wished to do so for each person to leave the country,
and on arriving in a land of Catholic political sovereignty they turned the
journey into organized processions with a well-disciplined ritual in which,
among other things, they took care to ensure that the women were duly
separated from the men, even though the journey was the same. For those
coming from the Northern Low Countries it was relatively easy to reach
the French border or that of some other Catholic principality of the Empire
in this way, and from there to make a pilgrimage to shrines such as Notre-
Dame de Montaigu in Brabant or Kevelaer in North Rhineland.
But the fact is that even in countries with a Catholic majority, wars of religion
and international conflicts of any other kind involved interruptions to the flow
of travel at a different rate in each area. And conversely: peace made it possible
for the roads to accommodate Protestant and Catholic travellers at the same
time, and at Catholic pilgrimage centres not a few priests suspected that there
were vagabonds passing themselves off as Catholic pilgrims to live off hospi-
tality. We find this in Roncesvalles at the height of the seventeenth century.39
 Catholic Pilgrimages between c. 1500 and c. 2000 21

In fact, that attitude is less surprising if we bear in mind that in the

sixteenth century there were places where people who had converted to
Protestantism continued making pilgrimages despite the orders of their
pastors and civil rulers, as is highlighted in the chapter of this book by
Professor Mentzer. After all, local or district-level pilgrimages were times
and places for “socializing”, where the religious element served as a
framework in which to extend interrelationships among ordinary people.
Sometimes, the religious was entirely linked to the economic (among other
things, because the actual maintenance of the cult and the fabric of the
shrine required money).
At an even more local level, Julia states, surprisingly, that in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries, Catholics continued to find hidden images
whose discovery invariably gave rise to the formation of a wave of pilgrimage
to the shrine constructed for the purpose.40 I find this statement striking
because the phenomenon had been recorded in Spain since the earliest cen-
turies of what later became known as the “Reconquest” of the peninsula,
that is, from the eighth to the sixteenth centuries. Those who reported the
discovery were mostly shepherds, sometimes farmers. (Remember that this
was true of the tomb of St James, as far back as the early ninth century).
On other occasions, it was the process of transporting images on carts or
pack animals that led to the animals taking the initiative and stopping
somewhere so that it was impossible to make them go any further. This
was often interpreted as a sign of God wanting that image to be venerated
precisely there, where the oxen or mules refused to take another step. And
the process whereby the pilgrim tradition was created was the same.

It was a nomadic tradition which required and requires settled

services: the hinterland of pilgrimages and the dialectic between
short and long distances
On the other hand, pilgrimages involve constant travel, requiring services
to make it possible (and they also give rise to actions aimed at trying to
profit from the pilgrim traffic). In other words, it is not just a matter of
reaching a synthesis on pilgrims and pilgrimages; within it we must also
include the settled life of those who did not make pilgrimages but made
them possible. In the fifth volume of his Historia de la Virgen del Pilar,
subtitled “Las peregrinaciones”, Gutiérrez Lasanta41 addresses what I am
saying, and what he does is to list and partially summarize the history
of the hospitals, hostels, boarding houses and other places in Zaragoza –
where the Pilar was located – that served the travellers who arrived in the
city. But the history remains, at best, solely “external”, purely institutional.
It does not address the interaction that existed between the sacred world
that the pilgrims were looking for and the profane world they needed in
order to achieve what they were seeking. I tried to do this in a parallel
22 José Andrés-Gallego

history between the village called Roncesvalles and the hospital and church
situated half an hour away by road, which could serve as an example for
subsequent studies.42 The research was based on an entirely local history
addressed from what aimed to be a universal perspective. Similar histories,
on a greater or lesser scale, are documented everywhere, for example, in
South-Eastern Spain, and also through the interplay that arises between
local romerías (pilgrim processions) and district-level peregrinaciones
(pilgrimages) to Our Lady of Cortes, in the town of Alcaraz (Albacete).43
In this case, the researcher is concerned with the anthropological issues
revealed in pilgrims; but others raise the variety of consequences that pil-
grimages had for the development of the associated trades. One of the most
remarkable and eloquent examples is that of the pajareros (bird fanciers)
of what had begun to be New Spain in the sixteenth century. Among the
natives, there was a fondness for birds, and before the Spanish arrived and
called them pajareros there were already quasi-nomadic families engaged in
hunting birds, training them to sing and selling them or exchanging them
for whatever they might need. And these – birds – were among the first gifts
that the natives began to take to the Virgin of Guadalupe. They gave a very
clear reason, which was that the first thing Juan Diego heard, before finding
himself face to face with the Virgin Mary, was birdsong, which surprised
him because birds were not usually found on the Hill of Tepeyac. And he
approached the place where they could be heard. From then on, the pilgrims
who climbed the hill used to take songbirds. And the same thing was done
when the toing and froing began at other shrines that were created (and it
continues to this day). Bird fanciers became semi-nomadic for this purpose;
they travelled with a pile of cages, some 10 or 11. The number of birds they
carried depended on the species and therefore varied between just 1 and 13
on each level. With their wives and children or alone, they – the bird fan-
ciers – used to go on “pilgrimages” themselves from one shrine to another,
according to the festival calendar, well into the third millennium.44
All this would call for the highly desirable comprehensive approach and
would require expanding the perspective of pilgrimage researchers with
these and other issues. Because every pilgrimage in every period required
all this to be done and to occur in one way or another.

The development of currents of criticism from the

seventeenth century and the effects of the liberal
revolution

The change of sensibility towards penance in Catholic countries

While the penitential nature of pilgrimages finally succeeded in causing
most of them to disappear in predominantly Protestant countries, currents
of criticism also gathered force within the Catholic Church. I have already
 Catholic Pilgrimages between c. 1500 and c. 2000 23

referred to the objections of Erasmus and other leading figures in the six-
teenth century. In the seventeenth century, however, the dissemination of
the work of Bishop Jansen and of the rigorist movement to which it gave
rise – “Jansenism” – represented a decisive advance in criticism of what
came to be considered excesses in penitential practices. At the risk of sim-
plifying this important phenomenon, the influence of Jansenism operated
through two main channels: that of doctrine and that of spirituality. There
were Catholic countries, such as France, where Jansenist doctrine and
spirituality were remarkably strong and created problems of both kinds:
in strictly theological terms and in respect of forging a rigorist and, ulti-
mately, puritanical spirituality.
What Provost observed in the Jacobean pilgrimages from Catholic
Francophone Europe in the seventeenth century was probably not unre-
lated to this, namely that the enormous fluctuations imposed by periods of
war, congestion on the roads and legislation by the authorities suppressing
long-distance pilgrimages of this kind finally succeeded, in the late
eighteenth century, in making people stop going to Santiago.45 We know
that Francophone pilgrims continued to arrive throughout the nineteenth
century. But there were fewer and fewer of them.
At the other extreme, in Italy and Spain, doctrinal Jansenism scarcely
appeared and Jansenist spirituality was less influential and in a later period.
But it did eventually have an influence during the eighteenth century and did
not exclude pilgrimages. In both countries, local pilgrimages, in particular,
had (and still have) a festive aspect, especially with eating and dancing,
which became the object of the strongest moralist criticism and of contempt
among more cultured people. Even the penitential character displayed, in
spite of everything, by pilgrimages and processions was rejected; the presence
of flagellants and hooded figures dragging chains still survived, and there
were rulers in these and other countries who did all they could to prohibit
and effectively wipe out this type of practice, so repellent was the sight of
the blood on the backs of flagellants, to mention a particularly graphic
example, in the second half of the eighteenth century.
In the same volume that contains Provost’s contribution, Sandro Landi46
examines the far-reaching reform of the hospitality system enacted in
the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in 1751–1752, which made pilgrimages a
strictly regulated practice, particularly with the intention of distinguishing
between true pilgrims and “poveri in cammino”. De facto, it contributed to
the decline of this religious practice itself.
Of course, in Catholic pilgrimages of those centuries as a whole – not just
those to Santiago, Rome and Palestine – the process was not so clear-cut;
quite a lot of people maintained and supported attitudes that opponents
considered seriously lax. Ultimately, moral laxity was precisely one of the
main reasons for hostility to the Jesuits, which culminated in the suppres-
sion of the Society of Jesus by Clement XIV in 1774.47
24 José Andrés-Gallego

This date (1774) gives us an idea of how slowly the change we are dis-
cussing took place, especially in the religious sensibility that predominated
in one human community or another. In Spain, the eighteenth century saw
an unconscious but bitter conflict between moral legalism and “laxism”.
The former eventually triumphed, but the painter Francisco de Goya was
still recording processions of flagellants in the nineteenth century.

Ecclesiastical disentailments and the collapse of the

infrastructure that sustained the pilgrimages
To resort once again to the word already used, the gradual imposition of
moral puritanism among more educated Catholics was the first item to be
taken into consideration. The second was the indirect effect of the eccle-
siastical disentailments, and consequent confiscations of Church property,
which were often initiated in confessionally Catholic countries when the
relevant Royal Exchequer – including those of absolute monarchs – entered
the recession that occurred in the West in the last decades of the eighteenth
century. The sale of the property of “pious works” – the canonical term for
them – undermined pilgrimage to the same extent that it left the hospitals,
lodgings and hostelries dotted along the pilgrim routes with no income.
On this point, the liberal revolution that began in the Catholic countries
with the French Revolution of 1789 merely continued the practice begun
by the princes of what was called, from then on, the “ancien régime”. But
the ideological and legal justification was different, and so was the scope
of the confiscations. Those undertaken to cope with the bankruptcy of
Royal Exchequers could be – and were – justified by the doctrine of the
subordination of private property to the common good, which was a prin-
ciple staunchly maintained in Catholic morality. In the liberal revolutions,
it was a different matter: it was a property of the “nation”, and therefore
“national”, and as such it was to be administered by the civil authorities,
which consequently proceeded to auction it off.
It is very important to note that this implied the introduction, in Catholic
countries, of a concept of property alien to them: property became
“absolute”; it had no “social mortgage”, to use the term employed much
later by John Paul II; for our purposes here, this meant that the confraterni-
ties were left with no property to generate income, or even saw the churches
that had housed them up till then sold and demolished. Many of them died
of pure starvation, and with them, the activities they organized, including
processions and care for pilgrims.
Let us now consider that we are speaking of a revolution that took con-
siderably more than half a century to prevail in the Catholic countries, and
that in some of them, the confiscations were not decreed until well into the
second half of the nineteenth century, and therefore applying it – selling
that property – took all the rest of the century.
 Catholic Pilgrimages between c. 1500 and c. 2000 25

Conversely – and one can say straight afterwards (although there was no
causal relationship) – the European imperialist expansion into Asia Minor
in the mid-nineteenth century forced open free access to the Holy Land,
which in this new era was no longer merely a place to which people were
led by devotion or penance, but by curiosity and strictly cultural activity.
It was the start of the golden age of Western orientalism, in which we still
find ourselves, though by now it is much debilitated.
In turn, international consideration of the “Roman question” in the
mid-nineteenth century did not halt but did filter pilgrimages to Rome in
the way we shall see.
As regards Santiago de Compostela, Pellistrandi, using the same source
as Provost (the records of the “Hospital Real” of Santiago de Compostela),48
shows that the presence of pilgrims resumed around 1846 and studies it up
to 1900.49 But he establishes that the radius of attraction of pilgrims to
Santiago was gradually reduced to the Iberian Peninsula, while at the same
time – however – the proportion of women was growing. In other words,
this was another case that highlighted the new wave of feminization of
Christianity that was characteristic of the nineteenth century.

1830–2022: the Golden Age of Marian apparitions

The apparitions
It must be added that this whole period was the one that witnessed the
third flowering of Marian apparitions, which were to re-emerge again and
again up to the present day: there had already been some, but the series was
enriched to a remarkable degree from 1830.
I have inserted here a mere incomplete list, grouped into what could be
considered phases of clear intensification. I include only those that are actu-
ally “living” apparitions nowadays and have the acquiescence of ecclesiasti-
cal authority (including those involving an Orthodox or Protestant church).

The Pillar, Zaragoza (AD 40)

The Snow, Rome (358)
Walsingham (1061)
The Rosary (1208)
Mount Carmel (1251)
Guadalupe (1531)
The Buen Suceso (1594)
Šiluva (1608)
Coromoto (1652)

(Continued)
26 José Andrés-Gallego

Laus (1664–1718)
The Miraculous Medal, Paris (1830)
La Salette, France (1846)
Our Lady of Good Help (1859)
Lourdes, France (1858)
Pontmain (1871)
Gietrzwald (1877)
Knock (1879)
Fátima (1917)
Our Lady of Tears (1932)
Beauraing (1932–1933)
Banneux (1933)
Our Lady of Prayer (1947)
Zeitoun (1968)
Akita (1973)
Cuapa (1980)
Kibeho (1981)
Rosario de San Nicolás (1983)
Betania (1984)
Yankalilla, Australia (1994)
Assiut (2000)
Warraq (2009)

There are other apparitions that have not been approved but whose charac-
teristics prevent the matter from being regarded as closed: for example, those
of Garabandal in Spain (1961–1965) and those of Medjugorje in Herzegovina
from 1981 to the present (2022). The first opened a new phase in Marian
apparitions because of the enormous number of visions: four years in which
four girls in an inaccessible Cantabrian village experienced between 2000 and
3000 ecstasies in front of a crowd which gradually grew to the point of fre-
quently bringing together several thousand people, and comfortably exceeded
a million pilgrims over the whole four-year period. In the case of Medjugorje,
both the duration and the influx of people have been much greater still.
From the doctoral thesis that José Luis Saavedra devoted to Garabandal, 50
we can deduce that the official silence on the events is the result of a decision
maintained by all the bishops of the diocese (Santander) over the following
60 years. In the case of Medjugorje, the same opposition is maintained,
with the special circumstance that it is another episode of a lack of “attune-
ment” between the bishop and the Franciscans who work in the diocese. In
both cases, Rome’s silence seems to reflect a desire to respect the initiative
which belongs, canonically, to the diocesan authority.51
The abundance of documentation on these and other Marian appari-
tions makes it possible to explore all aspects in much more depth, including
 Catholic Pilgrimages between c. 1500 and c. 2000 27

those concerning pilgrimages and pilgrims. That and the very quantity of
apparitions in different places, which have become focuses of attraction for
pilgrims, suggest that we are witnessing an important historical change,
which is not easy to sum up.
For the moment, they cannot be said to have eclipsed the pilgrimages
of the past, but they are an additional factor which has become a priority
and which, moreover, arose historically at the same time as the liberal revolu-
tion was being consolidated, and with it, the recognition of all kinds of free-
doms. To a large extent, perhaps without anyone having intended it, they are
a warning on exercising freedom in such a way that the exercise of penance
is forgotten. They are apparitions that have almost always entailed one or
more “messages from the Virgin”, generally related to the need to strengthen
the practice of penance as something due to God, no doubt because of the
penitential fact of the crucifixion of her son.
Non-specialist readers will be surprised on going through the list I
have made because, strictly speaking, there are really just a handful of
internationally famous focuses of Marian devotion after 1830. Lourdes
and Fátima undoubtedly monopolize our attention, but for different rea-
sons. The Lourdes apparitions occurred under the Empire of Napoleon III
and when the development of railways was in full sway. They very soon
reached that hitherto forgotten spot, which was thereby turned from a vil-
lage into a real city. It is difficult to isolate the importance of Lourdes from
France’s cultural predominance in the Catholic and international world
of the nineteenth century. It is not surprising that the cinema has dwelt
particularly on what happened there, in films such as Lourdes by Thierry
Demaizière and Alban Teurlai, which I mention because it is, above all, a
documentary, and therefore a historical source, if not historiographical in
the strict sense. 52
Indeed, discreetly in the background in the hierarchy of attraction they
exert is the apparition that gave rise to the Marian devotion of the so-called
“Miraculous Medal” and that of La Salette, which initiated the insistence
on the need for penitential acts related to the moral and religious degra-
dation of French life. It was 1846 and the Virgin announced a disastrous
sequence of harvests which was indeed to have a severe impact on the grapes
gathered that same year, affected by powdery mildew, a fungus which was
to be followed by others, in such a way that all these germs remained, so to
speak, to this very day. And this too had been forecast; the predictions of
La Salette extended beyond the year 2000.
On the other hand, France’s initial leading role in nineteenth-century
apparitions may or may not have been connected with the political course
much of the country took from 1789, but it cannot be reduced to a primarily
political phenomenon, nor can the involvement of politics be ignored. In
the middle of the century, Paris had begun to be permeated by the move-
ments that can be called “countercultural” or in favour of an “alternative”
28 José Andrés-Gallego

culture, according to preference. I am referring mainly to spiritualism,

theosophy and anarchism, followed by naturism, in both its vegetarian and
nudist facets. They did not always originate in France, but some of their
leading representatives were there: Kardec, in the case of spiritualism, and
Proudhon, in that of anarchism. The wellspring of theosophy was Russian,
but it was the French language that served as the main vehicle for its expan-
sion through Western Europe and America, that was beginning to be called
“Latin”. There was no lack of Spanish mediators and their corresponding
translators who gave rise to the propagation of those systems of ideas in the
Spanish-speaking world.
The insertion of apparitions into the world emerging from liberalism
soon contributed to the “politicizing” of devotions and, even more, per-
haps, the pilgrimages to those new points of attraction. Those of Lourdes
first, and then immediately that of Rome became an opportunity, and
thereby a political problem.
Those of Lourdes undoubtedly resisted better, but they were not left on
the sidelines; the apparitions of 1858 met with rejection from the liberal
authorities of the Second Napoleonic Empire, and that very fact made it
easy for the integralists to present themselves as the foremost defenders of
the consequent Marian devotion. And before long they were organizing
pilgrimages for themselves to Rome in support of Pius IX as soon as he
became “the prisoner in the Vatican”.
Nor did it take long for this to filter down to “national” pilgrimages as
well, first in Europe and then in predominantly Catholic parts of America.
That, to my mind, is what lay behind the pilgrimages of Uruguayan
Catholics to the Virgin of Verdún, which began to be made in 1901, to
quote one example.53
Needless to say, the Russian revolution of 1917 led to the almost total col-
lapse of pilgrimages in the Orthodox churches, which until then had main-
tained journeys, especially to district-level or local shrines. And the scale of
the collapse expanded enormously with the absorption of the surrounding
countries into what became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1933
and was expanded even further westwards after the Second World War
(1945). The cessation of the flow of visitors that the Holy Mount Athos had
been receiving since the eleventh century is a significant example.54
In confessionally Christian political regimes, such as that of Franco in
Spain, the distinction between patriotic pilgrimages and Catholic pilgrimages
vanished when the organizers were people linked to the so-called
“National Movement”, the only party. Pablo Baisotti’s books provide a
comprehensive account of all this. 55
That is where we have to place the pilgrimages to the Pilar in Zaragoza,
which help, however, to qualify what I have just said: they had been going
on for centuries, and yet the defence of Zaragoza in the two sieges to
which Napoleon’s army subjected it in the Peninsular War (1808–1814)
 Catholic Pilgrimages between c. 1500 and c. 2000 29

became famous throughout Europe for the heroism of the residents and of
the people who came from all over Aragon and also from the neighbouring
provinces. The imperial soldiers had to be prevented from occupying
the last bastion of the patriots, which guarded the French border, facing
the Pyrenees. The protection of Our Lady of the Pillar became prover-
bial. It is referred to in the words of a jota – the quintessential Aragonese
song and dance – which still echoes in the memory of many Spaniards:
“The Virgin of the Pillar says/that she doesn’t want to be French;/that
she wants to be captain/of the Aragonese troops”. And the fact is that she
did indeed become a national symbol which was maintained throughout
the nineteenth century and linked up with the Civil War of 1936–1939.
Many of the soldiers who fought in it and their relatives made a vow to go
on a pilgrimage to the Pilar when the war was over if they survived. And
the leaders of the Regime soon understood that it could be turned into a
mass movement if it was properly organized from above. 56 The national
pilgrimages, however, did not supplant those organized in many dioceses
and in many municipalities.
What I have just said about the politicization of the main pilgrimages
must be considered in the light of a Spanish proverb which refers to not
passing judgment until you have listened to the various parties involved
in the case being judged: not only the bell must be heard, but also the
bellringer. On piecing together the life of a nineteenth-century Catalan
Jesuit, Francisco Butiñá (1836–1899), I was surprised by the abundance of
information I found in the periodical press of the province of Tarragona in
relation to the diocesan pilgrimage to the shrine of the Virgin of Remei in
1889. It was to commemorate the conversion of Reccared, the Visigothic
king of Hispania, from Arianism to Roman Catholicism, which the monarch
announced publicly at the Council of Toledo in 589. In spite of this, it
was a religious-political pilgrimage: it was organized by clergy who were
integrists, or at least unconnected with Carlism, and carried out according
to a plan very similar to that of other similar gatherings: the crowd was led
by distinguished members of the Church and it lasted a whole day, which
involved organizing transport to the nearest railway station and the return
journey from there to the place of origin; it included an early mass for those
who wanted to take communion; the pilgrimage proper from that church
to the Remei shrine; the high mass there, followed by the return, which had
to be shortened because the proceedings were falling increasingly behind
schedule. It was a success. The detailed accounts in the press make it possi-
ble to reconstruct not only that, however, but also what the pilgrims were
doing, on the one hand, to protect themselves from the stifling heat and,
on the other, to enjoy the day. Wine and food circulated, and at some point,
the singing revealed that it was not exactly a political demonstration of
religious radicals (the “integrists”) but of Catholics ready to have a good
time.57
30 José Andrés-Gallego

Back to the dialectic between long- and short-distance

pilgrimages
Let us now return to the macro view provided by Nolan and Nolan to see
whether they show us more facets that will enrich the overall picture.58
One of these is the upsurge of ecumenism in the twentieth century and
its effect on flows of pilgrims. Indeed, if, in spite of everything, there were
many shrines in the Germanic world and that of non-Catholic British
denominations between 1976 and 1984, it was because the ecumenical
movement was gaining ground in them and gatherings of this kind were
taking place at many of those sites. This fact is important because it speaks
to us of a little-known dimension of ecumenism, which is precisely that it
managed to move multitudes, large and small.
We should – I suppose – add small primarily Catholic focuses that may
have existed in those territories and some of what is discussed in the chap-
ter of this book by Professor Mentzer, which was the strength of the pil-
grim tradition that still survived among some of the Protestants themselves.
It was simply part of the culture that they had received and that could now
be seen to have transcended the limits resulting from the division and even
confrontation between the various denominations.
Of course, both short- and long-distance Catholic pilgrims were driven
above all by devotion to the Virgin Mary. In 1979, when Nolan and Nolan
had managed to collect references to 4,075 shrines, 64 out of every 100
were Marian, and in 1984, when the sample was expanded, especially in
Germany, the percentage of those devoted to the Virgin Mary remained at
65 per cent.
Apart from this, Nolan and Nolan resolved that on another occasion,
they would make a more detailed study of the case of Spain, and this was
because of the difficulty they had found there in differentiating pilgrimages
in the strict sense from the “travelling” celebrations of the patron saint of
each town or city. They were clearly referring to romerías. And indeed, this
word had been reconceptualized in Spain and in Portugal to differentiate
between the two: a peregrinación or peregrinação was a long-distance jour-
ney, while those to nearby shrines were called romerías o romarias. They
were equivalent to the German Pilgerfahrt and Wallfahrt, respectively. The
distinction in Italian between pilgrims who went to Rome as romei, palmeri
if they were going to the Holy Land and pellegrini if they were heading for
Santiago de Compostela – a lexical distinction that already existed in the
sixteenth century, when my study begins – had ended up being adopted in
the Iberian languages. But in a contradictory manner: a romero was not
someone going to Rome; that was a peregrino. A romero was a pilgrim who
went to a local or district-level shrine.
The interaction between short- and long-distance pilgrimages is cru-
cial when addressing the movement we are discussing and the vitality it
 Catholic Pilgrimages between c. 1500 and c. 2000 31

continues to display. An idea of the importance of the subject can be gleaned

from the fact that Nolan and Nolan calculated that the 6,150 shrines they
studied in 16 Western European countries attracted, in all, more than
100 million people a year. Of these, between 60 and 70 million visited them
for strictly religious reasons. The rests were tourists or people motivated
by some other factor – curiosity, art, or whatever. They also pointed out
the preponderance of 72 shrines which, though very different in the attrac-
tion they exerted, surpassed a regional radius of interest and reached an
international audience, thereby forming a relatively complete network for
Western Europe. The situation changed, however, when the 6,150 shrines
were projected on the same map; in this case, the striking point was the
particular density displayed by Austria and Southern Germany, in much of
which Catholics are in the majority. Nolan and Nolan attributed it to the
political conditions in which German Catholics had been living in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which apparently gave rise to an
unusual proliferation of sanctuaries.
Also striking, in contrast, was the relative similarity between France and
Spain in terms of territory, notwithstanding the fact that France com-
fortably exceeded Spain in its population. In the Iberian Peninsula, the
characteristic increase that existed and exists in the size of population
centres from North to South was evident (as well as the Portuguese accumula-
tion not only of pilgrims but also of shrines around Fátima).
Conversely, the high demographic density of Italy was also perceptible
in comparison to the three countries located to its west. But that distri-
bution changed in several cases when the number of shrines was com-
pared with the registered population in those 16 countries according to the
1981 Catholic Almanac compiled by Felican A. Fay. In the first instance, it
revealed the unexpected vigour of the Catholic minority in Finland (3,000
Catholics per pilgrimage site) and exhibited very notable evidence of the
enormous flowering that had occurred in the territories of the House of
Austria – the Habsburgs – where there was a pilgrimage shrine for every
7,000 Catholics.
The strength of the minority in Denmark (9,000), where there were only
three shrines for their still very sparse 20,000 adherents to the Roman
Church, was still apparent. More regularly distributed were those of
Switzerland (11,000 per shrine), Norway (13,000) and Sweden (17,000).
In other words, with the exception of Austria, religious minorities proved
to be the most vigorous, admittedly in this very cursory approximation
and bearing in mind the statistical distortion produced by the small
numbers. The majority of Catholic countries were being left behind in a
graded series that is still equally revealing: 24,000 Catholics per sanctuary
in the Republic of Ireland (who, strictly speaking, should perhaps be
added to the 46,000 in Northern Ireland), 26,000 in Portugal, 31,000 in
West Germany, and even less in the best-known countries in the religious
32 José Andrés-Gallego

ambit of Rome: 36,000 Catholics per shrine in Spain, 44,000 in France,

46,000 in Italy and as many as 62,000 in Belgium and Luxembourg. In
the last of these cases, they were behind England and Wales, where there
were 52,000.
The average for the whole of Western Europe stood at 34,000 Catholics
per sanctuary, close to the figure for Spain, whose distinctive feature –
already pointed out – of the increase in the size of population centres
towards the South could have distorted the degree of devotion implied by
these figures. In Portugal, however, that feature was also present, albeit to
a lesser degree, and it was well ahead of neighbouring Spain.
In their view of pilgrimages in Western Europe, Nolan and Nolan draw
attention to a singular fact, which is the international attraction which
developed mainly in the last decades of the twentieth century towards places
that had become “sacred” through the faith of ordinary people, without
ecclesiastical backing, and they observed this particularly in the Cantabrian –
Spanish – village of Garabandal. There, in 1981, they described what they
probably saw in person: German pilgrims on their knees, French pilgrims
singing, people in a great international mosaic praying the rosary.
It was an extreme phenomenon in the range of pilgrimage sites, but before
long it was to spill over quantitatively to the distant site of Medjugorje and
thus mark a new era.
That all this had economic consequences was obvious. In the case of
the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, a good many towns revived –
and subsist – economically through lodgings and restaurants for pilgrims.
Nevertheless, at the start of the third millennium, the need to distinguish
between “religious tourism” and “permanent pilgrimages” began to make
itself felt.59

Notes
1 Boutry and Julia, Pèlerins et pèlerinages.
2 Julia, “Pour une géographie”.
3 Julia, Le voyage aux saints.
4 Nolan and Nolan, Christian Pilgrimage.
5 It should be remembered that flos sanctorum denotes a hagiographic sub-
genre developed in the immediately preceding centuries and that at least two
printed compilations of this subgenre were circulating in the Crown of Cas-
tile in 1512: Flos sanctorum con sus ethimologías [Flower of the Saints with
its Etymologies] and the Leyenda de los santos que vulgarmente flos sanc-
torum llaman [Legend of the Saints Popularly Called Flower of the Saints].
Albisson, “El flos sanctorum castellano”.
6 Câmara, Acta Patris Ignatii.
7 Lama, Relatos de viajes.
8 Lama, “La interrupción”.
9 Lama, Urbs Beata Hierusalem; García, Viajes a Tierra Santa.
10 Singul, “Franciscanos en Tierra Santa”.
 Catholic Pilgrimages between c. 1500 and c. 2000 33

11 Thurston, The Stations, 76–95.

12 Eire, War against the idols.
13 Nolan and Nolan, Christian Pilgrimage.
14 Provost, “Les pèlerins”.
15 Mieck, “Le pèlerinage”.
16 AHM/C/c. 21.
17 See especially González, Chávez and Guerrero.
18 Machuca and Calvo, “El Santo Niño de Cebú”.
19 Flores, “Luján como hierópolis”.
20 Kempis, De imitatione Christi, “Peregrinatio animae meae”, III, 21:4.
21 Ibid., I, 23:4.
22 McManus, Redemption Road.
23 Villameriel, Tras la flecha naranja.
24 Pahl, Winding Paths of Life.
25 Tingle, Sacred Journeys, 218–220.
26 Verger, Le Pelerin Moral; Arnoulx, Le Pélerin du Paradis.
27 Tingle, Sacred Journeys, 5.
28 Galiano, “La procesión penitencial”, or López, “La Semana Santa”, for
example.
29 Tingle, Sacred Journeys.
30 Boutry and Julia, Pèlerins et pèlerinages.
31 According to Sánchez, Cartulario de Santo Toribio.
32 Egido, “Breve reflexión histórica”.
33 López, “Años Santos Romanos”; Franco, “Los azabacheros asturianos”.
34 Gutiérrez, Historia.
35 See Morte, “Emblemas”, 329–330.
36 García, “Donaciones españolas”.
37 Dor and Henneau, Femmes et Pèlerinages.
38 Julia, Le voyage aux saints.
39 Andrés-Gallego, “The Politics of Pilgrim Care”.
40 Julia, Le voyage aux saints.
41 Gutiérrez, Historia.
42 Andrés-Gallego, “The Politics of Pilgrim Care”.
43 Jordán and Lozano, “Romerías y peregrinaciones”.
44 Roldán-Clarà, Maldonado-Alcudia and Olmos-Martínez, “Preservación del
patrimonio”.
45 Provost, “Les pèlerins”.
46 Landi, “Il ‘passo regolato dei poveri’”.
47 Andrés-Gallego, “1767”.
48 García, El Hospital Real.
49 Pellistrandi, “Les pèlerins”.
50 Saavedra, Garabandal.
51 García, Medjugorje.
52 Demaizière and Teurlai, Lourdes.
53 Monreal, “Católicos uruguayos”.
54 Gothóni, “Pilgrimages”; Gothóni, “Pilgrimage”.
55 Baisotti, Fiesta, política y religión; Baisotti, ¡Presentes!.
56 The importance of this phenomenon – that of the Pilar – has been studied by
Ramón, “La Virgen del Pilar”.
57 Andrés-Gallego, “Con Manuel Revuelta González”.
58 Nolan and Nolan, Christian Pilgrimage.
59 Cebrián and García, “Del turismo religioso”.
34 José Andrés-Gallego

References
AHM/C/c. 21 = Argentina, Archivo Histórico de Mendoza, Sección Colonial, car-
peta 21.
Albisson, M. “El flos sanctorum castellano, de las compilaciones medievales a los
legendarios postridentinos: evolución de un subgénero hagiográfico entre con-
tinuidad y ruptura”. In Perspectivas actuales del hispanismo mundial: literatura –
cultura – lengua, edited by C. Strosetzki, T. Leuker, W. Matzat, J. Gómez Montero,
B. Teuber, C. Bauer-Funke, W. Floeck, and M. Tietz. Vol. 1, 53–65. Münster:
Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, 2019.
Andrés-Gallego, J. “1767: Por qué los jesuitas?”. In Los jesuitas españoles expulsos:
su imagen y su contribución al saber sobre el mundo hispánico en la Europa del
siglo XVIII, edited by M. Tietz, 77–102. Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt am
Main: Vervuert, 2001.
Andrés-Gallego, J. “Con Manuel Revuelta González en Roma y Alcover (1889–2019)”.
Miscelánea Comillas 78, no. 152 (2020): 445–455.
Andrés-Gallego, J. “¿Hay una idiosincrasia del catolicismo español, tal como ha lle-
gado al día de hoy?”. In Pluralismo y secularización, edited by J. Choza, and J. de
Garay Suárez-Llanos, 189–222. Villaviciosa de Odón (Madrid): Plaza y Valdés,
2009.
Andrés-Gallego, J. “Santiaguistas y teresianos, sedentarios y nómadas, con
Propaganda Fide y China al fondo”. Hispania Sacra 64, no. 130 (2012): 731–753.
Andrés-Gallego, J. “The Politics of Pilgrim Care: A Study of Roncesvalles”. In
Pilgrims and Politics: Rediscovering the Power of the Pilgrimage, edited by Antón
M. Pazos, 119–150. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012.
Arnoulx, F. Le Pélerin du Paradis. Lyon: Pierre Rigaud, 1623.
Baisotti, P. A. Fiesta, política y religión: España (1936–1943). Madrid: Editorial Y,
2017.
Baisotti, P. A. ¡Presentes! Mitificación y culto en la España de Franco, 1933–1943.
Madrid: Editorial Y, 2018.
Barlar, S. H. “Romeras, Rameras, and Royals: Female Pilgrims on the Camino de
Santiago in Medieval and Early Modern Spain”. In Women and Pilgrimage, edited
by E. Moore Quinn, and A. T. Smith, 15–24. Wallingford: CAB International, 2022.
Boutry, P., and D. Julia, eds. Pèlerins et pèlerinages dans l’Europe moderne. Rome:
École française de Rome, 2000.
Câmara, L. Gonçalves da. Acta Patris Ignatii. Translated and edited by D. Fernández
Zapico, C. de Dalmases, and P. Leturia. Vol. 66 of Monumenta historica Societatis
Iesu. Roma: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 1943.
Cebrián Abellán, A., and R. García Marín. “Del turismo religioso a las peregrina-
ciones permanentes: diversificación turística en el sureste español”. CULTUR 8,
no. 2 (2014): 3–30.
Demaizière, T., and Teurlai, A. Lourdes. París: Falabracks, and Mars Films, 2019.
Dor, J., and M.-É. Henneau, eds. Femmes et Pèlerinages/Women and Pilgrimages.
Santiago de Compostela: Compostela Group of Universities, 2007.
Egido, T. “Breve reflexión histórica sobre los jubileos romanos”. Revista de
Espiritualidad 58 (1999): 369–388.
Eire, C. M. N. War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to
Calvin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 Then Dode, his mother and sister began most unconcernedly to
speculate as to what if anything was next to be done with the old
farmer, the while the latter rolled a vacant eye over a scene he was
no longer able to interpret.
 X
MARRIAGE—FOR ONE

W HENEVER I think of love and marriage I think of Wray. That

clerkly figure. That clerkly mind. He was among the first people
I met when I came to New York and, like so many of the millions
seeking to make their way, he was busy about his affairs.
Fortunately, as I saw it, with the limitations of the average man he
had the ambitions of the average man. At that time he was
connected with one of those large commercial agencies which
inquire into the standing of business men, small and large, and
report their findings, for a price, to other business men. He was very
much interested in his work and seemed satisfied that should he
persist in it he was certain to achieve what was perhaps a fair
enough ambition: a managership in some branch of this great
concern, which same would pay him so much as five or six thousand
a year. The thing about him that interested me, apart from a genial
and pleasing disposition, was the fact that with all his wealth of
opportunity before him for studying the human mind, its resources
and resourcefulness, its inhibitions and liberations, its humor,
tragedy, and general shiftiness and changefulness, still he was
largely concerned with the bare facts of the differing enterprises
whose character he was supposed to investigate. Were they
solvent? Could and did they pay their bills? What was their capital
stock? How much cash did they have on hand?... Such was the
nature of the data he needed, and to this he largely confined himself.
Nevertheless, by turns he was amused or astonished or made
angry or self-righteous by the tricks, the secretiveness, the errors
and the downright meanness of spirit of so many he had to deal with.
As for himself, he had the feeling that he was honest,
straightforward, not as limited or worthless as some of these others,
and it was on this score that he was convinced he would succeed, as
he did eventually, within his limitations, of course. What interested
me and now makes me look upon him always as an excellent
illustration of the futility of the dream of exact or even suitable
rewards was his clerkly and highly respectable faith in the same. If a
man did as he should do, if he were industrious and honest and
saving and courteous and a few more of those many things we all
know we ought to be, then in that orderly nature of things which he
assumed to hold one must get along better than some others. What
—an honest, industrious, careful man not do better than one who
was none of these things—a person who flagrantly disregarded
them, say? What nonsense. It must be so. Of course there were
accidents and sickness, and men stole from one another, as he saw
illustrated in his daily round. And banks failed, and there were trusts
and combinations being formed that did not seem to be entirely in
tune with the interests of the average man. But even so, all things
considered, the average man, if he did as above, was likely to fare
much better than the one who did not. In short, there was such a
thing as approximate justice. Good did prevail, in the main, and the
wicked were punished, as they should be.
And in the matter of love and marriage he held definite views also.
Not that he was unduly narrow or was inclined to censure those
whose lives had not worked out as well as he hoped his own would,
but he thought there was a fine line of tact somewhere in this matter
of marriage which led to success there quite as the qualities outlined
above led, or should lead, to success in matters more material or
practical. One had to understand something about women. One had
to be sure that when one went a-courting one selected a woman of
sense as well as of charm, one who came of good stock and hence
would be possessed of good taste and good principles. She need
not be rich; she might even be poor. And one had to be reasonably
sure that one loved her. So many that went a-courting imagined they
loved and were loved when it was nothing more than a silly passing
passion. Wray knew. And so many women were designing, or at
least light and flighty; they could not help a serious man to succeed if
they would. However, in many out-of-the-way corners of the world
were the really sensible and worthy girls, whom it was an honor to
marry, and it was one of these that he was going to choose. Yet even
there it was necessary to exercise care: one might marry a girl who
was too narrow and conventional, one who would not understand the
world and hence be full of prejudices. He was for the intelligent and
practical and liberal girl, if he could find her, one who was his mental
equal.
It was when he had become secretary to a certain somebody that
he encountered in his office a girl who seemed to him to embody
nearly all of the virtues or qualities which he thought necessary. She
was the daughter of very modestly circumstanced parents who dwelt
in the nearby suburb of O——, and a very capable and faithful
stenographer, of course. If you had seen the small and respectable
suburb from which she emanated you would understand. She was
really pretty and appeared to be practical and sensible in many
ways, but still very much in leash to the instructions and orders and
tenets of her home and her church and her family circle, three worlds
as fixed and definite and worthy and respectable in her thought as
even the most enthusiastic of those who seek to maintain the order
and virtue of the world would have wished. According to him, as he
soon informed me—since we exchanged nearly all our affairs
whenever we met, she was opposed to the theatre, dancing, any
form of night dining or visiting in the city on weekdays, as well as
anything that in her religious and home world might be construed as
desecration of the Sabbath. I recall him describing her as narrow “as
yet,” but he hoped to make her more liberal in the course of time. He
also told me with some amusement and the air of a man of the world
that it was impossible for him to win her to so simple an outing as
rowing on the Sabbath on the little river near her home because it
was wrong; on the contrary, he had to go to church with her and her
parents. Although he belonged to no church and was mildly
interested in socialism, he kept these facts from her knowledge. The
theatre could not even be mentioned as a form of amusement and
she could not and would not dance; she looked upon his inclination
for the same as not only worldly but loose and sinful. However, as he
told me, he was very fond of her and was doing his best to influence
and enlighten her. She was too fine and intelligent a girl to stick to
such notions. She would come out of them.
 By very slow degrees (he was about his business of courting her
all of two or three years) he succeeded in bringing her to the place
where she did not object to staying downtown to dinner with him on a
weekday, even went with him to a sacred or musical concert of a
Sunday night, but all unbeknown to her parents or neighbors, of
course. But what he considered his greatest triumph was when he
succeeded in interesting her in books, especially bits of history and
philosophy that he thought very liberal and which no doubt
generated some thin wisps of doubt in her own mind. Also, because
he was intensely fond of the theatre and had always looked upon it
as the chiefest of the sources of his harmless entertainment, he
eventually induced her to attend one performance, and then another
and another. In short, he emancipated her in so far as he could, and
seemed to be delighted with the result.
With their marriage came a new form of life for both of them, but
more especially for her. They took a small apartment in New York, a
city upon which originally she had looked with no little suspicion, and
they began to pick up various friends. It was not long before she had
joined a literary club which was being formed in their vicinity, and
here she met a certain type of restless, pushing, seeking woman for
whom Wray did not care—a Mrs. Drake and a Mrs. Munshaw,
among others, who, from the first, as he afterward told me, he knew
could be of no possible value to any one. But Bessie liked them and
was about with them here, there, and everywhere.
It was about this time that I had my first suspicion of anything
untoward in their hitherto happy relations. I did not see him often
now, but when I did visit them at their small apartment, could not
help seeing that Mrs. Wray was proving almost too apt a pupil in the
realm in which he had interested her. It was plain that she had been
emancipated from quite all of her old notions as to the sinfulness of
the stage, and in regard to reading and living in general. Plainly,
Wray had proved the Prince Charming, who had entered the secret
garden and waked the sleeping princess to a world of things she had
never dreamed of. She had reached the place where she was
criticizing certain popular authors, spoke of a curiously enlightened
history of France she was reading, of certain bits of philosophy and
poetry which her new club were discussing. From the nature of the
conversation being carried on by the three of us I could see that
Wray was beginning to feel that the unsophisticated young girl he
had married a little while before might yet outstrip him in the very
realm in which he had hoped to be her permanent guide. More than
once, as I noticed, she chose to question or contradict him as to a
matter of fact, and I think he was astonished if not irritated by the fact
that she knew more than he about the import of a certain plot or the
relativity of certain dates in history. And with the force and
determination that had caused her to stand by her former
convictions, she now aired and defended her new knowledge. Not
that her manner was superior or irritating exactly; she had a friendly
way of including and consulting him in regard to many things which
indicated that as yet she had no thought of manifesting a superiority
which she did not feel. “That’s not right, dearest. His name is
Bentley. He is the author of a play that was here last year—The
Seven Rings of Manfred—don’t you remember?” And Wray, much
against his will, was compelled to confess that she was right.
Whenever he met me alone after this, however, he would confide
the growing nature of his doubts and perplexities. Bessie was no
more the girl she had been when he first met her than he was like
the boy he had been at ten years of age. A great, a very great
change was coming over her. She was becoming more aggressive
and argumentative and self-centred all the time, more this, more
that. She was reading a great deal, much too much for the kind of life
she was called upon to lead. Of late they had been having long and
unnecessary arguments that were of no consequence however they
were settled, and yet if they were not settled to suite her she was
angry or irritable. She was neglecting her home and running about
all the time with her new-found friends. She did not like the same
plays he did. He wanted a play that was light and amusing, whereas
she wanted one with some serious moral or intellectual twist to it.
She read only serious books now and was attending a course of
lectures, whereas he, as he now confessed, was more or less bored
by serious books. What was the good of them? They only stirred up
thoughts and emotions which were better left unstirred. And she liked
music, or was pretending she did, grand opera, recitals and that sort
of thing, whereas he was not much interested in music. Grand opera
bored him, and he was free to admit it, but if he would not
accompany her she would go with one or both of those two wretched
women he was beginning to detest. Their husbands had a little
money and gave them a free rein in the matter of their social and
artistic aspirations. They had no household duties to speak of and
could come and go as they chose, and Wray now insisted that it was
they who were aiding and abetting Bessie in these various interests
and enthusiasms and stirring her up to go and do and be. What was
he to do? No good could come if things went on as they were going.
They were having frequent quarrels, and more than once lately she
had threatened to leave him and do for herself here in New York, as
he well knew she could. He was doing very well now and they could
be happy together if only these others could be done away with.
It was only a month or two after this that Wray came to see me, in
a very distrait state of mind. After attempting to discuss several other
things quite casually he confessed that his young wife had left him.
She had taken a room somewhere and had resumed work as a
stenographer, and although he met her occasionally in the subway
she would have nothing to do with him. She wanted to end it all. And
would I believe it? She was accusing him of being narrow and
ignorant and stubborn and a number of other things! Only think of it!
And three or four years ago she had thought he was all wrong when
he wanted to go rowing on Sunday or stay downtown to dinner of an
evening. Could such things be possible? And yet he loved her, in
spite of all the things that had come up between them. He couldn’t
help it. He couldn’t help thinking how sweet and innocent and
strange she was when he first met her, how she loved her parents
and respected their wishes. And now see. “I wish to God,” he
suddenly exclaimed in the midst of the “oldtime” picture he was
painting of her, “that I hadn’t been so anxious to change her. She
was all right as she was, if I had only known it. She didn’t know
anything about these new-fangled things then, and I wasn’t satisfied
till I got her interested in them. And now see. She leaves me and
says I’m narrow and stubborn, that I’m trying to hold her back
intellectually. And all because I don’t want to do all the things she
wants to do and am not interested in the things that interest her,
now.”
I shook my head. Of what value was advice in such a situation as
this, especially from one who was satisfied that the mysteries of
temperament of either were not to be unraveled or adjusted save by
nature—the accidents of chance and affinity, or the deadly
opposition which keep apart those unsuited to each other?
Nevertheless, being appealed to for advice, I ventured a silly
suggestion, borrowed from another. He had said that if he could but
win her back he would be willing to modify the pointless opposition
and contention that had driven her away. She might go her
intellectual way as she chose if she would only come back. Seeing
him so tractable and so very wishful, I now suggested a thing that
had been done by another in a somewhat related situation. He was
to win her back by offering her such terms as she would accept, and
then, in order to bind her to him, he was to induce her to have a
child. That would capture her sympathy, very likely, as well as
insinuate an image of himself into her affectionate consideration.
Those who had children rarely separated—or so I said.
The thought appealed to him intensely. It satisfied his practical and
clerkly nature. He left me hopefully and I saw nothing of him for
several months, at the end of which time he came to report that all
was once more well with him. She had come back, and in order to
seal the new pact he had taken a larger apartment in a more
engaging part of the city. Bessie was going on with her club work,
and he was not opposing her in anything. And then within the year
came a child and there followed all those simple, homey, and
seemingly binding and restraining things which go with the rearing
and protection of a young life.
But even during that period, as I was now to learn, all was not as
smooth as I had hoped. Talking to me in Wray’s absence once
Bessie remarked that, delightful as it was to have a child of her own,
she could see herself as little other than a milch cow with an
attendant calf, bound to its service until it should be able to look after
itself. Another time she remarked that mothers were bond-servants,
that even though she adored her little girl she could not help seeing
what a chain and a weight a child was to one who had ambitions
beyond those of motherhood. But Wray, clerkly soul that he was, was
all but lost in rapture. There was a small park nearby, and here he
could be found trundling his infant in a handsome baby-carriage
whenever his duties would permit. He would sit or walk where were
others who had children of about the age of his own so that he might
compare them. He liked to speculate on the charm and innocence of
babyhood and was amused by a hundred things which he had never
noticed in the children of others. Already he was beginning to
formulate plans for little Janet’s future. It was hard for children to be
cooped up in an apartment house in the city. In a year or two, if he
could win Bessie to the idea, they would move to some suburban
town where Janet could have the country air.
They were prospering now and could engage a nursemaid, so
Mrs. Wray resumed her intellectual pursuits and her freedom.
Throughout it all one could see that, respect Wray as she might as a
dutiful and affectionate and methodical man, she could not love or
admire him, and that mainly because of the gap that lay between
them intellectually. Dissemble as he might, there was always the
hiatus that lies between those who think or dream a little and those
who aspire and dream much. Superiority of intellect was not
altogether the point; she was not so much superior as different, as I
saw it. Rather, they were two differing rates of motion, flowing side
by side for the time being only, his the slower, hers the quicker. And
it mattered not that his conformed more to the conventional thought
and emotions of the majority. Hers was the more satisfactory to
herself and constituted an urge which he feared rather than
despised; and his was more satisfactory to himself, compromise as
he would. Observing them together one could see how proud he was
of her and of his relationship to her, how he felt that he had captured
a prize, regardless of the conditions by which it was retained; and on
the other hand one could easily see how little she held him in her
thought and mood. She was forever talking to others about those
things which she knew did not interest him or to which he was
opposed.
 For surcease she plunged into those old activities that had so
troubled him at first, and now he complained that little Janet was
being neglected. She did not love her as she should or she could not
do as she was doing. And what was more and worse, she had now
taken to reading Freud and Kraft-Ebbing and allied thinkers and
authorities, men and works that he considered dreadful and
shameful, even though he scarcely grasped their true significance.
One day he came to me and said: “Do you know of a writer by the
name of Pierre Loti?”
“Yes,” I replied, “I know his works. What about him?”
“What do you think of him?”
“As a writer? Why, I respect him very much. Why?”
“Oh, I know, from an intellectual point of view, as a fine writer,
maybe. But what do you think of his views of life—of his books as
books to be read by the mother of a little girl?”
“Wray,” I replied, “I can’t enter upon a discussion of any man’s
works upon purely moral grounds. He might be good for some
mothers and evil for others. Those who are to be injured by a picture
of life must be injured, or kept from its contaminating influence, and
those who are to be benefited will be benefited. I can’t discuss either
books or life in any other way. I see worthwhile books as truthful
representations of life in some form, nothing more. And it would be
unfair to any one who stood in intellectual need to be restrained from
that which might prove of advantage to him. I speak only for myself,
however.”
It was not long after that I learned there had been a new quarrel
and that Bessie had left him once more, this time, as it proved, for
good. And with her, which was perhaps illegal or unfair, she had
taken the child. I did not know what had brought about this latest
rupture but assumed that it was due to steadily diverging views.
They could not agree on that better understanding of life which at
one time he was so anxious for her to have—his understanding. Now
that she had gone beyond that, and her method of going was
unsatisfactory to him, they could not agree, of course.
 Not hearing from him for a time I called and found him living in the
same large apartment they had taken. Its equipment was better
suited to four than to one, yet after seven or eight months of absence
on her part here he was, living alone, where every single thing must
remind him of her and Janet. As for himself, apart from a solemnity
and reserve which sprang from a wounded and disgruntled spirit, he
pretended an indifference and a satisfaction with his present state
which did not square with his past love for her. She had gone, yes;
but she had made a mistake and would find it out. Life wasn’t as she
thought it was. She had gone with another man—he was sure of
that, although he did not know who the man was. It was all due to
one of those two women she had taken up with, that Mrs. Drake.
They were always interested in things which did not and could not
interest him. After a time he added that he had been to see her
parents. I could not guess why, unless it was because he was lonely
and still very much in love and thought they might help him to
understand the very troublesome problem that was before him.
It was a year and a half before I saw him again, during which time,
as I knew, he continued to live in the apartment they had occupied
together. He had become manager of a department of the agency by
this time and was going methodically to and fro between his home
and office. After living alone and brooding for more than a year, he
came to see me one rainy November night. He looked well enough
materially, quite the careful person who takes care of his clothes, but
thinner, more tense and restless. He seated himself before my fire
and declared that he was doing very well and was thinking of taking
a long vacation to visit some friends in the West. (He had once told
me that he had heard that Bessie had gone to California.) Yes, he
was still living in the old place. I might think it strange, but he had not
thought it worth while to move. He would only have to find another
place to live in; the furniture was hard to pack; he didn’t like hotels.
Then of a sudden, noting that I studied him and wondered, he
grew restless and finally stood up, then walked about looking at
some paintings and examining a shelf of books. His manner was that
of one who is perplexed and undetermined, of one who has stood
out against a silence and loneliness of which he was intensely
weary. Then of a sudden he wheeled and faced me: “I can’t stand it.
That’s what’s the matter. I just can’t stand it any longer. I’ve tried and
tried. I thought the child would make things work out all right, but she
didn’t. She didn’t want a child and never forgave me for persuading
her to have Janet. And then that literary craze—that was really my
own fault, though. I was the one that encouraged her to read and go
to theatres. I used to tell her she wasn’t up-to-date, that she ought to
wake up and find out what was going on in the world, that she ought
to get in with intelligent people. But it wasn’t that either. If she had
been the right sort of woman she couldn’t have done as she did.” He
paused and clenched his hands nervously and dramatically. It was
as though he were denouncing her to her face instead of to me.
“Now, Wray,” I interposed, “how useless to say that. Which of us is
as he should be? Why will you talk so?”
“But let me tell you what she did,” he went on fiercely. “You haven’t
an idea of what I’ve been through, not an idea. She tried to poison
me once so as to get rid of me.” And here followed a brief and sad
recital of the twists and turns and desperation of one who was
intensely desirous of being free of one who was as desirous of
holding her. And then he added: “And she was in love with another
man, only I could never find out who he was.” And his voice fell to a
low, soft level, as though he was even then trying to solve the
mystery of who it was. “And I know she had an operation performed,
though I could never prove it.” And he gave me details of certain
mysterious goings to and fro, of secret pursuits on his part, actions
and evidences and moods and quarrels that pointed all too plainly to
a breach that could never be healed. “And what’s more,” he
exclaimed at last, “she tortured me. You’ll never know. You couldn’t.
But I loved her.... And I love her now.” Once more the tensely
gripped fingers, the white face, the flash of haunted eyes.
“One afternoon I stood outside of a window of an apartment house
when I knew she was inside, and I knew the name of the man who
was supposed to occupy it, only he had re-sublet it, as I found out
afterwards. And she had Janet with her—think of that!—our own little
girl! I saw her come to the window once to look out—I actually saw
her in another man’s rooms. I ran up and hammered at the door—I
tried to break it open. I called to her to come out but she wouldn’t,
and I went to get a policeman to make him open the door. But when I
got back a servant was coming up as though she had been out, and
she unlocked the door and went in. It was all a ruse, and I know it.
They weren’t inside. She had slipped out with Janet. And she had
told me they were going to Westchester for the day.
“And another time I followed her to a restaurant when she said she
was going to visit a friend. I suspected there was a man—the man I
thought she was going with, but it was some one I had never seen
before. When they came out and were getting into a cab I came up
and told them both what I thought of them. I threatened to kill them
both. And she told him to go and then came home with me, but I
couldn’t do anything with her. She wouldn’t talk to me. All she would
say was that if I didn’t like the way she was doing I could let her go.
She wanted me to give her a divorce. And I couldn’t let her go, even
if I had wanted to. I loved her too much. And I love her too much
now. I do. I can’t help it.” He paused. The pain and regret were
moving.
“Another time,” he went on, “I followed her to a hotel—yes, to a
hotel. But when I got inside she was waiting for me; she had seen
me. I even saw a man coming toward her—but not the one I believed
was the one—only when he saw me he turned away and I couldn’t
be sure that he was there to meet her. And when I tried to talk to her
about him she turned away from me and we went back home in
silence. I couldn’t do anything with her. She would sit and read and
ignore me for days—days, I tell you—without ever a word.”
“Yes,” I said, “but the folly of all that. The uselessness, the
hopelessness. How could you?”
“I know, I know,” he exclaimed, “but I couldn’t help it. I can’t now. I
love her. I can’t help that, can I? I’m miserable without her. I see the
folly of it all, but I’m crazy about her. The more she disliked me the
more I loved her. And I love her now, this minute. I can’t help it.
There were days when she tortured me so that I vomited, from sheer
nervousness. I was sick and run down. I have been cold with sweat
in her presence and when she was away and I didn’t know where
she was. I have walked the streets for hours, for whole days at a
time, because I couldn’t eat or sleep and didn’t know what to do. By
God!” Once more the pause and a clenching of the hands. “And all I
could do was think and think and think. And that is all I do now really
—think and think and think. I’ve never been myself since she went
away. I can’t shake it off. I live up there, yes. But why? Because I
think she might come back some day, and because we lived there
together. I wait and wait. I know it’s foolish, but still I wait. Why? God
only knows. And yet I wait. Oh,” he sighed, “and it’s three years now.
Three years!”
He paused and gazed at me and I at him, shaken by a fact that
was without solution by any one. Here he was—the one who had
understood so much about women. But where was she, the one he
had sought to enlighten, to make more up-to-date and liberal? I
wondered where she was, whether she ever thought of him even,
whether she was happy in her new freedom. And then, without more
ado, he slipped on his raincoat, took up his umbrella, and stalked out
into the rain, to walk and think, I presume. And I, closing the door on
him, studied the walls, wondering. The despair, the passion, the
rage, the hopelessness, the love. “Truly,” I thought, “this is love, for
one at least. And this is marriage, for one at least. He is spiritually
wedded to that woman, who despises him, and she may be
spiritually wedded to another man who may despise her. But love
and marriage, for one, at least, I have seen here in this room to-
night, and with mine own eyes.”
 XI
FULFILMENT

H EARING the maid tap lightly on her door for the third or fourth
time, Ulrica uttered a semiconscious “Come.” It was her usual
rising hour but to-day she was more depressed than usual, although
the condition was common enough at all times. The heavy drag of a
troubled mental state was upon her. Was it never to end? Was she
never to be happy again? After several weeks of a decidedly
acceptable loneliness, during which Harry had been in the west
looking after his interminable interests, he was about to return. The
weariness of that, to begin with! And while she could not say that she
really hated or even disliked him deeply (he was too kind and
considerate for that), still his existence, his able and different
personality, constantly forced or persuaded upon her, had come to
be a bore. The trouble was that she did not truly love him and never
could. He might be, as he was, rich, resourceful and generous to a
fault in her case, a man whom the world of commerce respected, but
how did that avail her? He was not her kind of man. Vivian before
him had proved that. And other men had been and would be as glad
to do as much if not more.
Vivian had given all of himself in a different way. Only Harry’s
seeking, begging eyes pleading with her (after Vivian’s death and
when she was so depressed) had preyed upon and finally moved her
to sympathy. Life had not mattered then, (only her mother and
sister), and she had become too weary to pursue any career, even
for them. So Harry with his wealth and anxiety to do for her—
(The maid entered softly, drew back the curtains and
raised the blinds, letting in a flood of sunshine, then
proceeded to arrange the bath.)
It had been, of course, because of the magic of her beauty—how
well she knew the magic of that!—plus an understanding and
sympathy she had for the miseries Harry had endured in his youth,
that had caused him to pursue her with all the pathetic vehemence of
a man of fifty. He was not at all like Vivian, who had been shy and
retiring. Life had seemed to frighten poor Vivian and drive him in
upon himself in an uncomplaining and dignified way. In Harry’s case
it had acted contrariwise. Some men were so, especially the old and
rich, those from whom life was slipping away and for whom youth,
their lost youth, seemed to remain a colored and enthralling
spectacle however wholly gone. The gifts he had lavished upon her,
the cars, the jewels, this apartment, stocks and bonds, even that
house in Seadale for her sister and mother! And all because of a
beauty that meant so little to her now that Vivian was gone, and in
the face of an indifference so marked that it might well have wearied
any man.
How could she go on? (She paused in her thoughts to survey and
follow her maid, who was calling for the second time.) Though he
hung upon her least word or wish and was content to see her at her
pleasure, to run her errands and be ever deferential and worshipful,
still she could not like him, could barely tolerate him. Before her
always now was Vivian with his brooding eyes and elusive, sensitive
smile; Vivian, who had never a penny to bless himself with. She
could see him now striding to and fro in his bare studio, a brush in
one hand, or sitting in his crippled chair meditating before a picture
or talking to her of ways and means which might be employed to
better their state. The pathos!
“I cannot endure that perfume, Olga!”
In part she could understand her acceptance of Harry after Vivian
(only it did not seem understandable always, even to her), for in her
extreme youth her parents had been so very poor. Perhaps because
of her longings and childish fears in those days she had been
marked in some strange way that had eventually led her to the
conviction that wealth was so essential. For her parents were
certainly harassed from her sixth to her thirteenth years, when they
recovered themselves in part. Some bank or concern had failed and
they had been thrown on inadequate resources and made to shift
along in strange ways. She could remember an old brick house with
a funereal air and a weedy garden into which they had moved and
where for a long time they were almost without food. Her mother had
cried more than once as she sat by the open window looking
desolately out, while Ulrica, not quite comprehending what it was all
about, had stared at her from an adjacent corner.
“Will madame have the iris or the Japanese lilac in the
water?”
She recalled going downtown once on an errand and slipping
along shyly because her clothes were not good. And when she saw
some schoolgirls approaching, hid behind a tree so they should not
see her. Another time, passing the Pilkington at dinner-time, the
windows being open and the diners visible, she had wondered what
great persons they must be to be able to bask in so great a world. It
was then perhaps that she had developed the obsession for wealth
which had led to this. If only she could have seen herself as she now
was she would not have longed so. (She paused, looking gloomily
back into the past.) And then had come the recovery of her father in
some way or other. He had managed to get an interest in a small
stove factory and they were no longer so poor—but that was after
her youth had been spoiled, her mind marked in this way.
And to crown it all, at seventeen had come Byram the inefficient.
And because he was “cute” and had a suggestion of a lisp; was of
good family and really insane over her, as nearly every youth was
once she had turned fourteen, she had married him, against her
parents’ wishes, running away with him and lying about her age, as
did he about his. And then had come trying times. Byram was no
money-maker, as she might have known. He was inexperienced, and
being in disfavor with his parents for ignoring them in his hasty
choice of a wife, he was left to his own devices. For two whole years
what had she not endured—petty wants which she had concealed
from her mother, furniture bought on time and dunned for, collectors
with whom she had to plead not to take the stove or the lamp or the
parlor table, and grocery stores and laundries and meat-markets
which had to be avoided because of unpaid bills. There had even
been an ejectment for non-payment of rent, and job after job lost for
one reason and another, until the whole experiment had been
discolored and made impossible even after comfort had been
restored.
“I cannot endure the cries of the children, Olga. You will
have to close that window.”
No; Byram was no money-maker, not even after his parents in far-
distant St. Paul had begun to help him to do better. And anyhow by
then, because she had had time to sense how weak he was, what a
child, she was weary of him, although he was not entirely to blame. It
was life. And besides, during all that time there had been the most
urgent pursuit of her by other men, men of the world and of means,
who had tried to influence her with the thought of how easily her life
could be made more agreeable. Why remain faithful to so young and
poor a man when so much could be done for her. But she had
refused. Despite Byram’s lacks she had small interest in them,
although their money and skill had succeeded in debasing Byram in
her young and untrained imagination, making him seem even
weaker and more ridiculous than he was. But that was all so long
ago now and Vivian had proved so much more important in her life.
While even now she was sorry for Harry and for Byram she could
only think of Vivian, who was irretrievably gone. Byram was
successful now and out of her life, but maybe if life had not been so
unkind and they so foolish——
“You may have Henry serve breakfast and call the car!”
And then after Byram had come Newton, big, successful,
important, a quondam employer of Byram, who had met her on the
street one day when she was looking for work, just when she had
begun to sense how inefficient Byram really was, and he had proved
kind without becoming obnoxious or demanding. While declaring,
and actually proving, that he wished nothing more of her than her
good-will, he had aided her with work, an opportunity to make her
own way. All men were not selfish. He had been the vice-president of
the Dickerson Company and had made a place for her in his office,
saying that what she did not know he would teach her since he
needed a little sunshine there. And all the while her interest in Byram
was waning, so much so that she had persuaded him to seek work
elsewhere so that she might be rid of him, and then she had gone
home to live with her mother. And Newton would have married her if
she had cared, but so grieved was she by the outcome of her first
love and marriage that she would not.
“The sedan, yes. And I will take my furs.”
And then, living with her mother and making her own way, she had
been sought by others. But there had been taking root and growing
in her an ideal which somehow in the course of time had completely
mastered her and would not even let her think of anything else, save
in moments of loneliness and the natural human yearning for life.
This somehow concerned some one man, not any one she knew, not
any one she was sure she would ever meet, but one so wonderful
and ideal that for her there could be no other like him. He was not to
be as young or unsophisticated as Byram, nor as old and practical
as Newton, though possibly as able (though somehow this did not
matter), but wise and delicate, a spirit-mate, some such wondrous
thing as a great musician or artist might be, yet to whom in spite of
his greatness she was to be all in all. She could not have told herself
then how she was to have appealed to him, unless somehow surely,
because of her great desire for him, her beauty and his
understanding of her need. He was to have a fineness of mind and
body, a breadth, a grasp, a tenderness of soul such as she had not
seen except in pictures and dreams. And such as would need her.
“To Thorne and Company’s first, Fred.”
Somewhere she had seen pictures of Lord Byron, of Shelley, Liszt
and Keats, and her soul had yearned over each, the beauty of their
faces, the record of their dreams and seekings, their something
above the common seeking and clayiness (she understood that
now). They were of a world so far above hers. But before Vivian
appeared, how long a journey! Life had never been in any hurry for
her. She had gone on working and seeking and dreaming, the while
other men had come and gone. There had been, for instance, Joyce
with whom, had she been able to tolerate him, she might have found
a life of comfort in so far as material things went. He was, however,
too thin or limited spiritually to interest a stirring mind such as hers, a
material man, and yet he had along with his financial capacity more
humanity than most, a kind of spiritual tenderness and generosity at
times towards some temperaments. But no art, no true romance. He
was a plunger in real estate, a developer of tracts. And he lacked
that stability and worth of temperament which even then she was
beginning to sense as needful to her, whether art was present or not.
He was handsomer than Byram, a gallant of sorts, active and
ebullient, and always he seemed to sense, as might a homing
pigeon, the direction in which lay his own best financial opportunities
and to be able to wing in that direction. But beyond that, what? He
was not brilliant mentally, merely a clever “mixer” and maker of
money, and she was a little weary of men who could think only in
terms of money. How thin some clever men really were!
“I rather like that. I’ll try it on.”
And so it had been with him as it had been with Byram and
Newton, although he sought her eagerly enough! and so it was
afterward with Edward and Young. They were all worthy men in their
way. No doubt some women would be or already had been drawn to
them and now thought them wonderful. Even if she could have
married any one of them it would only have been to have endured a
variation of what she had endured with Byram; with them it would
have been of the mind instead of the purse, which would have been
worse. For poor Byram, inefficient and inexperienced as he was, had
had some little imagination and longings above the commonplace.
But these, as contrasted with her new ideal——
“Yes, the lines of this side are not bad.”
Yes, in those days there had come to her this nameless unrest,
this seeking for something better than anything she had yet known
and which later, without rhyme or reason, had caused her to be so
violently drawn to Vivian. Why had Vivian always grieved so over her
earlier affairs? They were nothing, and she regretted them once she
knew him.
“Yes, you may send me this one, and the little one with
the jade pins.”