My Pilgrims Need Wine

I’ll level with you. I decided to write this blog post because I thought of the title. But the reason I thought of the title is that wine is a real pilgrim priority. I’m talking here about practical concerns, rather than the allegorical and scriptural dimensions to wine which can also feature in this type …

Publication: Writing the Jerusalem Pilgrimage in the Late Middle Ages

I'm very excited that my monograph, Writing the Jerusalem Pilgrimage in the Late Middle Ages has been published by DS Brewer. It's available in hard copy and as an ebook.  What do the bursar of Eton College, a canon of Mainz Cathedral, a young knight from near Cologne, and a Kentish nobleman's chaplain have in common? …

No Novelty Here: Virtual Pilgrimage

As an increasing proportion of the world is stuck at home, and particularly as Holy Week approaches – this year coinciding with Passover and, almost, Ramadan – a rash of stories about going on a ‘virtual pilgrimage’ have appeared in various media outlets. At this, the (virtual) ears of academics in medieval pilgrimage studies pricked …

Whose Words? Blog for Pilgrim Libraries

I've recently written a post for the Birkbeck Pilgrim Libraries Network, which you can read over at their website. Here's an extract from the introduction: The co-opting, or re-presenting, of other pilgrimage or travel texts is an integral aspect of pilgrimage writing. This doesn’t mean that pilgrim writings are simply generic – in fact this essential …

Aachen Cathedral (and associated thoughts)

Two weeks ago I moved to Berlin with my husband. We are planning to be here until August, while I work on a project part-funded by the DAAD, during which time I will be a postdoctoral researcher at the Großbritannien-Zentrum, part of the Humboldt University. We decided to drive from Oxford to Berlin, stopping in …