Table Of ContentIntroductionPart I: Coming to Terms: The Subject of Pilgrimage [Renaissance dialogues, guides to pilgrimage, arguments against it]Part II: Being There: The Experience of Pilgrimage [narratives of pilgrimage]Part III: Forms of Return: The Afterlife of Pilgrimage [Columbus and others; pilgrims' fantasies and fears, professional pilgrims]ConclusionBibliographyIndex
SynopsisThis is the first full-length study of the place and meaning of pilgrimage in European Renaissance culture. It makes new material available and also provides fresh perspectives on canonical writers such as Rabelais, Montaigne, Margurite de Navarre, Erasmus, Petrarch, Augustine, and Gregory of Nyssa. Wes Williams undertakes a bold exploration of various interlinking themes in Renaissance pilgrimage: the location, representation, and politics of the sacred, togetherwith the experience of the everyday, the extraordinary, the religious, and the represented. Williams also examines the literary formation of the subjective narrative voice in his texts, and itsrelationship to the rituals and practices he reviews. This wide-ranging and timely new work aims both to gain a sense of the shapes of pilgrim experience in the Renaissance and to question the ways in which recent theoretical and historical research in the area has determined the differences between fictional worlds and the real., This is the first full-length study of the place and meaning of pilgrimage in European Renaissance culture. It makes new material available and also provides fresh perspectives on canonical writers such as Montaigne, Erasmus, Petrarch, Augustine, and Gregory of Nyssa. This wide-ranging and timely new work aims to question the ways in which recent theoretical and historical research in the area has determined the differences between fictional worlds and the real., This is the first full-length analysis of the place and meaning of pilgrimage in European Renaissance culture. Far from being simply a medieval practice, pilgrimage still mattered to readers, writers, and travellers in the Renaissance. Focusing on French literary texts, this is at once a piercing study in genre and a wide-ranging exploration of the politics of literature, experience, and popular culture., This is the first full-length analysis of the place and meaning of pilgrimage in European Renaissance culture.