Diana Webb, Senior lecturer in medieval history at King's College, London has recently published a couple of books on this subject, namely Pilgrimage in Medieval England (London, 2000) and Medieval European Pilgrimage (Basingstoke, 2002), so the book announced here can be considered a sort of finger-exercise. This book is an anthology of texts concerning several aspects of medieval pilgrimages. The book is divided into four parts: pilgrimage down to the Twelfth Century; European pilgrimage ca. 1100-ca.1500 (the most extended part, with a remarkable portion about pilgrimages in the Tuscan town of Pistoia, famous on behalf of the cult of Santiago de Compostela); pilgrimage in one country, England; and verdicts on pilgrimage (with only two references to Erasmus). The texts are arranged in 12 chapters, each of them devoted to a theme, introduced by the author. In her own texts and in her choice of documents the author displays her exceptional scolarship on the subject, which in my opinion shows only one weakness, namely her treatment of penitential pilgrimages. There is a lot of material about pilgrimages imposed, above all by the lay town magistracies in the Southern and Northern Netherlands, but the author has limited herself to publishing only a list of tariffs from the city of Oudenarde. In short: a very stimulating book which offers a lot of possibilities in teaching the subject.
02.09.09, Webb, Pilgrims and Pilgrimage in the Medieval West
