McSheffrey, Shannon

English

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Susan Signe Morrison, Women Pilgrims in Medieval England: Private PietyasPublicPerformance. Routledge Research in Medieval Studies 3. London and New York:Routledge, 2000. Pp. xii, 194. $85.00.Susan Signe Morrison opens her new book on women pilgrims by describing herfrustration, as a scholar and teacher of Chaucer and The Book ofMargery Kempe, atthe dearth of scholarship on the subject of women and pilgrimage in the lateMiddle Ages. By deciding to fill the lacuna herself Morrison has done manyscholars of late medieval history, literature, and culture a great favor. Historiansof medieval pilgrimage like Jonathan Sumption and Ronald Finucane havetantalizingly speculated that women were active as pilgrims and may even havebeen preponderant among the clients of particular kinds of shrines, but up to thispoint no one has systematically examined pilgrimage using gender as theprimary analytical lens. Morrison's book provides not only a thoroughconsideration of the late medieval woman pilgrim, both real and imagined, butalso some new conceptual frameworks with which to look more broadly at howlate medieval lay women practiced their religion.Throughout the book, Morrison shows that pilgrimage was far from astraightforward act of piety; as a complex construct it contained within it manydifferent and sometimes contested meanings. A pilgrimage was a demonstrationof personal piety in a public place; Morrison usefully reviews a range of theoreticalliterature in order to examine the multifaceted relationship between pilgrimageand space. She rejects the easy profane/sacred binary for a more nuancedunderstanding of the pilgrimage route as a space in which sacred and profanecontinually interpenetrated (as seen, for instance, in stained glass representationsof pilgrimage that juxtaposed standard imagery of the holy with lewd scenes).Contemporaries both revered and feared the figure of the pilgrim. While thepilgrimage was a standard element of late medieval religious writing, as MargeryKempe and St. Brigid exemplify, in secular literature in post-Black Death Englandthe pilgrim, especially in female form, was customarily associated with deceit,disorder, and, above all, sexual impropriety. The most famous of late medievalfictional religious tourists, the Wife of Bath, fits squarely into this tradition of satireof women pilgrims. Morrison further examines how the author of the Book ofMargery Kempe uses both secular and religious topoi regarding women pilgrims inher work. The incompatibility of these two representations of women pilgrims is asymptom of late medieval people's complex and ultimately unresolvedunderstanding of the phenomenon of pilgrimage.Morrison's study is based both on the full range of secondary scholarship (in manydisciplines and across time periods) and on a wide variety of primary sources,almost all published. A particular strength of the book is the integration ofevidence from the physical remains of the pilgrimage routes and sites themselveswith secular and religious literary depictions of pilgrims and documentary recordsthat touch on pilgrimage (many of the latter being gathered together frompublished records such as the Calendars of Close and Patent Rolls into anliDappendix at the end of the book). I have one quibble about the use of publishedprimary sources: Morrison tends to take material somewhat uncritically whereverit is found, which both results in some inconsistency in the form that quotationsfrom the same work can take (sometimes in the original language, sometimes intranslation) and raises questions about the use of standard editions. The Pastonletters, for instance, are quoted both in Middle English and in modern translation(e.g. pp. 18,48), in neither case from Norman Davis's standard edition of the letters(The Paston Letters, 2 vols. [Oxford, 1971]).Similarly two consecutive quotations(pp. 63-64)from a sermon of fifteenth-century Lollard William Thorpe are takenfrom two different sources, and each provides a different style of translation (onein late sixteenth-century English, the other in modern English). Apart from theanomaly of the two translations, especially when placed side by side, one mightexpect in any case that Morrison would use instead the modern edition ofThorpe's sermon (in Anne Hudson's Two Wycliffite Texts, Early English TextSociety, 1993).These small objections should not detract, however, from the overall success ofMorrison's volume. No doubt each reader will find a different aspect of thisinteresting book most illuminating; for me, it was Morrison's discussion of the howpilgrimage fit into the lives of real (rather than fictional) medieval lay women. Inachapter entitled "The Milky Way: women pilgrims and visual art," Morrisonexamines the experience of women pilgrims on the road to the shrine of the Virginat Walsingham, one of England's most popular shrines during the late Middle Agesand, as Morrison argues, one particularly patronized by women. The Walsinghamroute - known as the Milky Way - abounded with rood screens and other mediadepicting images associated with maternity and especially lactation; the shrine ofthe Virgin itself that was the pilgrims' goal had Mary's breast milk as one of itsprincipal relics. Women's relationship to pilgrimage, as Morrison demonstrates,was dominated by their reproductive lives, their ability to conceive, nourish, andcare for their offspring. Ingoing on pilgrimage to pray for conception or the healthof their sick children, women were not only practicing their own interiorizedreligious beliefs, but also representing their family's health and continuity. Awoman's body, as Morrison puts it, was"a metonymy for a healthy functioningfamily;" her inability to conceive or lactate was "never the private business of thewoman suffering it" but a larger familial problem (3).Morrison's discussion hereprovides us with tools not only to understand women's pilgrimages but also tounderstand more broadly the ways in which lay women - the overwhelmingmajority of whom married and had children - were able to use, and indeedarguably to shape, medieval religious categories and practices. As almost all of thescholarship on medieval women and religion has focused on nuns, beguines, andmystics, women who by definition lived extraordinary lives, Morrison'scontribution is an especially useful one. It is unfortunate that a book that belongs onmany scholars' shelves should have been published at such a prohibitive price; it isto be hoped that Routledge will soon issue an affordable paperback.Shannon McSheffreyConcordia University, Montreal

Susan Signe Morrison, Women Pilgrims in Medieval England: Private Piety as Public Performance. Routledge Research in Medieval Studies, 3. Routledge, 2000

https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1278&context=mff

Susan Signe Morrison, Women Pilgrims in Medieval England: Private Piety as Public Performance. Routledge Research in Medieval Studies, 3. Routledge, 2000

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