SpokenWeb Podcast

Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.

[Music fades]

My name is Hannah McGregor, and–

Each month, we’ll bring you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history created by scholars, poets, students, and artists across Canada.

Drawing on the expertise of Dr. Michael Van Dussen, professor of English Literature at McGill University, and Dr. Simon Coleman, professor of Anthropology and Religion at the University of Toronto, Ella and Lindsay explore the relationship between medieval and modern pilgrimages before inviting us, the listeners, to take part in our own mediated spiritual journey through their sonic reconstruction of a medieval soundscape.

I just activated the challenge on the app, and voila.

Pilgrimage complete.

Look, it says “Camino de Santiago, start this expedition and hike 784 km by tracking your daily steps.”

Cool, right?

Virtual pilgrimage was a legitimate workaround for those who couldn’t make the trek.

I’m just wondering about things.

Like is a virtual pilgrimage less valuable or respected than an in-person one?

I mean, it’s an interesting point to consider. Think about Benjamin, right? What’s his first name?

Walter…Walter…

And his concept of the “aura” that an artistic object has.

Like the Mona Lisa, for example. It’s more meaningful to actually have the real Mona Lisa. Even if you had a high-resolution print or a near-indistinguishable replica, it wouldn’t give you the same feature feeling as being in the presence of the painting created by Da Vinci.

And in the case of pilgrimage, it’s more concrete. Like, will this experience actually heal me? Will it actually bring me closer to God? And, will this pilgrimage actually have my prayers answered?

Well, there’s another reason I’m interested in talking about pilgrimage with you today. The Garmin Watch was merely a brilliant lead-in for my big reveal.

And my, you know, clearly, very obviously Portuguese last name.

Tell me more.

Or if no homes were able to take them in, they’d sleep on the floor of a local church.

Like everyone is going on pilgrimage these days, or I guess those days in the 14th century, and suddenly you aren’t sure if people are going because they really want to connect with God or just because they want to look good.

I have so many questions, but we need more background information, more learned input, and more context.

Now it’s time for “What’s up, Prof?” The part of the podcast where we interview experts in the field to learn about important medieval-ly things so we can become not just smart scholars but also smarmy Scholars.

Dr. Van Dussen speaks to us about the material culture of pilgrimage in the Middle Ages. He introduces us to objects such as pilgrimage badges and itineraries and discusses the cultural conception of travel.

The site contains a variety of historical and modern shrines to Our Lady of Walsingham, an apparition of Mary in that area. Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and non-religious pilgrims gather in the village throughout the spring and summer to venerate the saint and reconnect with England’s medieval past.

I’m a professor of the Anthropology of Religion based in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto.

And my latest book on pilgrimage is called Powers of Pilgrimage Religion in a World of Movement that was published about a year ago. And it really tries to take us through different ways in which anthropologists and others have tried to analyze the significance of pilgrimage in the contemporary world.

Yeah. So I mean, people are traveling for a number of different reasons, but the idea of “curiosity-based” travel, where you’re just going around to see the sights and that’s an end in itself.

That’s the reason for doing it. That’s not really a culturally held value in the later Middle Ages. I mean it’s coming to be one sort of. But people are apologetic about it or people are maybe doing something out of curiosity, but they are also doing something for a more traditionally legitimate reason as well.

So that could be a pilgrimage. So, it’s something that’s infused with theological, devotional, and especially significant aspects. Or it could be trade, but trade is always iffy sometimes. But it’s a legitimate reason to travel or diplomacy. So, political travel is traveling for political reasons. But one of the things that are interesting is that what I’m going to call pilgrimage sort of loosely finds its way into all of this kind of travel.

Those are people who are very, very keen on getting the historical facts right. And, you know, Walsingham is more than just a place where there are numerous shrines. Walsingham also has numerous archives. I hope to look at the archives again in a few months.

A well and some artifacts were discovered in the area when the Anglican shrine was constructed. And, you know, Hope Patton at one point was thinking, okay, well, actually, look, God has actually brought us to the original place, you know, by providence, and gradually decided, you know, it’s not clear how long he kept that view.

I’m here to look at the shrines, people said to me, oh, I hope you’re going to actually discover a real place where the original shrine was.

So even the archaeology of the 1960s had not quite settled this sense of where people felt that the shrine should be for religious and theological reasons. And so there’s always this kind of. There may be slight tension. Not always, but it’s often this slight tension.

That’s there, but there isn’t much else. Of course, that means that people can insert their own imaginations into the site. They can reclose a relatively blank space with their ideas of what the medieval shrine should be for them as pilgrims.

And then he starts being interested in what he’s describing England. He describes stuff in other places, too, but he’s really kind of. His curiosity, you can just come back to that word, is piqued.

Sometimes, if they’re a little more wealthy, they might have a secretary traveling with them who writes things for them.

We don’t know who wrote this, but I have found evidence of people going through England and other places with multiple secretaries writing their itineraries.

So that’s another layer.

This many miles use different units of measurement. And you get a sense that his recording stops along the way, about as far as he could go in a day’s ride on a horse, probably with some other people.

It’s interesting when we find material evidence of what a shrine looked like because we don’t have that anymore in most cases. So, he describes this shrine of Thomas Becket. It’s golden and beautiful. He doesn’t give a lot of information. He goes to London, to Westminster Abbey, where the queen is crowned and everything.

These still are…You could go to Westminster today and still see what he’s describing. And he describes them. Some of them are saints, some of them are just, you know, kings and queens who died. He’s impressed by these tombs. They’re imposing tombs. And he does the same in St.Paul’s Cathedral. He describes tombs.

That’s hilarious—the steep. Like, wait a minute, how’s he doing this? Appropriate. It’s nuts. Is he going around with a sword? But then, how’s he getting up to the very top of this? But then I found. He’s not. He’s not.

It tells you where those measurements are written. They’re written down. They’re written on posted texts. Say, this is St.Paul’s Cathedral. This is how big it is, this is how many swords wide it is, or whatever width it is, it’s how tall it is. These are the different tombs. This is who’s buried there.

As I said, I first studied waiting in the 1990s, and sure, we had, you know, we could have email and so on, but it feels like it’s a kind of world apart.

So, you had to separate people physically from each other as they went through. So, how could the shrines respond to that?

Well, as I guess must have been true for many other parts of the Christian and wider religious world, they discovered or were kind of forced into thinking about the role of technology. So rather than simply saying the shrines are closed and nobody can come, they realized that they could actually use cameras in the shrines, Facebook, and other ways of linking with pilgrims.

And now, you started to get daily masses broadcast from the shrines—sorry, both shrines. Of course, this linked the shrines with people who would normally have been at Walsingham but couldn’t make it. But it also started to link them with even wider constituencies.

We actually increased our connections through COVID-19 in a curious way. And there’s one point when there’s a big, you know, celebration that takes place in the Anakin shrine. And it’s one on the national level. It’s one of the national days, and it crashes. I think this.

I forget whether it’s the Anakin or the Roman Catholics, but, you know, the shrine crashes, the link crashes because there are so many people actually trying to get on or that’s certainly one possible explanation. But there’s a wider aesthetic sense here, which is that it’s not just that the linkages are made with a wider constituency.

But there’s a wider sense in which the use of cameras actually means that images from the shrines are used in such a way that it allows the viewer to get much closer to, say, statues or other parts of the shrine’s material culture.

And so effectively you might actually have an image of a statue of, say that of Our lady of Walsingham from the Slipper Chapel. And there’s an image that’ll be on the video, and nothing happens for half an hour.

And then, of course, as has happened in other pilgrimage sites, you know, people do them in their local areas so that you recreate the sense of going on pilgrimage. But you can’t do it physically in Norfolk, but you can do it in your local area, possibly with walking with other people, if you’re allowed to.

And so it’s not. You don’t just think about Walsingham when you’re going on pilgrimage.

You might actually come together, have a Mass, and celebrate Our Lady. You’ll gather under the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham in your local parish church. And so, the statue itself—the statue of Our Lady might be taken from either shrine and might be taken around the country. And so you might be visited by Our Lady of Walsingham.

She might come to see you in your local church. Very famously, for instance, the Roman Catholic statue of Our Lady was taken to Wembley Stadium, a big sports stadium in London, in the 1980s, when the Pope, Pope John II, John Paul II, came to England. He celebrated Mass in Wembley Stadium, and on the altar was our statue of Our Lady of Walsingham. So she is mobile.

It can be separate from a Mass or part of a Mass, and sometimes physically walk around the church. It’s inside the church but around the walls. And there’ll be 14. You know, all the stations that represent the stages of the Passion of Christ. And they are located in, you know, Jerusalem. But it’s a meditative experience. And sometimes, it’s sort of a pilgrimage within the church.

This still happens every year today, but I’m mentioning that because these stations of Jerusalem or stations of Rome proceed in similar ways—not identical, but similar. So they’re very meditative and prayerful.

It’s hard to lose sight of the idea that the emphasis is spiritual and not just sort of like, “Oh, and then there’s this great place.”

You’ve got to go to this one bar. It’s not right near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Sorry, that sounds blasphemous. One of the things I have heard people talk about is that you know, of course, physically going. Going to the place does more than just put you in. Touch with a place that may differ greatly from your local experience in your everyday experience.

You are seeing fellow parishioners in a new way. And a lot of people talk about this idea of when you kind of get towards Walsingham, you feel as though there’s this. Suddenly, this bubble appears. It’s a bubble that surrounds the village. And you go through that bubble, and you’re in a Norfolk.

But you. Maybe you. You may come from industrial Manchester, okay? And that’s where you are most of the year. And maybe you haven’t. You only travel a little. And then suddenly you find yourself, Reg. You know, you. Once a year, you find yourself in this Norfolk rural village. And you’re seeing people who you may know very well. You’re seeing them in a new way. You’re not just that, but you come, and the clergy at the shrine recognize you. And some clergy are brilliant at this. They may see you once a year, but they say, oh, hello, Simon, how lovely to see you again. You know, hello, Lindsay, how. Hello, Ella. It was lovely to see you again. You know, I remember last year. Oh, have you come with your friend?

People talk about it, and it allows you to have a particular kind of focus when you actually get there.

We need. When we think about that experience, it’s not just a question of looking at what happens actually in shrines or liturgically.

It’s also looking at what happens on one side of the official worship experiences: that you talk to people and engage in spaces adjacent to shrines but somehow significant.

They may not be obviously religious, but I call them lateral spaces rather than liminal spaces and times, kind of penumbral spaces, where you’re temporarily and spatially in the environment of a site, but you’re not necessarily celebrating a Mass at any given moment, but you are somehow orientated towards a pilgrimage experience.

It’s those fuzzier spaces that are also very important. You don’t get them when, effectively, you’ve looked at the shrine through your screen, switched the laptop off, and that’s it. And all of a sudden, you’re back into your everyday.

In a new kind of way.

[Background chatter in Middle English]

It that will not…

A fool I…

Wish is overcome…

But first in and…

Eke to bring and weave as in sweet farm Thou mayest have not of…

Another thing a brother of who hath no way he eats no kukiwal but e say natural…

The morning in the morning in the morning, in the morning…