Writers And Pilgrims

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1980.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1980.

The debut by the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Eat Pray Love, Big Magic and City of Girls; a PEN/Hemingway Award finalist and New York Times Notable Book When it appeared in 1997, Elizabeth Gilbert’s story collection, Pilgrims, immediately announced her compelling voice, her comic touch, and her amazing ear for dialogue. “The heroes of Pilgrims . . . are everyday seekers” (Harper’s Bazaar)—brave and unforgettable, they are sure to strike a chord with fans old and new.

Illuminates both the well- and lesser-known literary figures of New Mexico, whose collaborative efforts created enduring literary colonies. This book also discusses fifteen writers and concludes with walking and driving tours of Santa Fe and Taos.

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? Two Germans, residents of the Holy Roman Empire, and two Englishmen, just as the western horizons of the known world were beginning to expand. These four men - William Wey, Bernhard von Breydenbach, Arnold von Harff, and Thomas Larke - are amongst the thousands of western Christians who undertook the arduous journey to the Holy Land in the decades immediately before the Reformation. More importantly, they are members of a much more select group: those who left written accounts of their travels, for the journey to Jerusalem in the late Middle Ages took place not only in the physical world, but also in the mind and on the page. Pilgrim authors contended in different ways with the collision between fifteenth-century reality and the static textual Jerusalem, as they encountered the genuinely multi-religious Middle East. This book examines the international literary phenomenon of the Jerusalem pilgrimage through the prism of these four writers. It explores the process of collective and individual identity construction, as pilgrims came into contact with members of other religious traditions in the course of the expression of their own; engages with the uneasy relationship between curiosity and pilgrimage; and investigates both the relevance of genre and the advent of print to the development of pilgrimage writing. Ultimately pilgrimage is revealed as a conceptual space with a near-liturgical status, unrestricted by geographical boundaries and accessible both literally and virtually.

Like the migrating animals that our ancient ancestors once followed, we have been making planned long-distance journeys for millennia. What was first a matter of survival in time became a celebration of seasonal abundance--even today, many pilgrim festivals remain tied to the solar-lunar cycle that guided small bands of hunter-gatherers to come together at special times and places. The era when we were all nomads is long gone, but the impulse to undertake a ritual journey remains: each year, 200 million of us embark on a pilgrimage of some kind. These journeys of purpose may involve great hardship, great danger, or half a lifetime of waiting just to begin. Ranging from the Stone Age pilgrims of Anatolia to the New Age pilgrims of California, We Are Pilgrims is a quest to understand what drives this rich and varied human behaviour, unbounded by time or space, faith or identity. Victoria Preston discovers that, whether we set forth in search of comfort or liberation, as an expression of gratitude or devotion, journeys of meaning and purpose are always a powerful reminder that we are each part of something much greater than ourselves.

Research on pilgrimage has traditionally fallen across a series of academic disciplines - anthropology, archaeology, art history, geography, history and theology. To date, relatively little work has been devoted to the issue of pilgrimage as writing and specifically as a form of travel-writing. The aim of the interdisciplinary essays gathered here is to examine the relations of Christian pilgrimage to the numerous narratives, which it generates and upon which it depends. Authors reveal not only the tensions between oral and written accounts but also the frequent ambiguities of journeys - the possibilities of shifts between secular and sacred forms and accounts of travel. Above all, the papers reveal the self-generating and multiple-authored characteristics of pilgrimage narrative: stories of past pilgrimage experience generate future stories and even future journeys. Simon Coleman moved to Sussex University in 2004, having spent 11 years at Durham University as Lecturer and then Reader in Anthropology, and Deputy Dean for the Faculty of Social Sciences and Health. John Elsner is Senior Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.