Imagined Pilgrimage in the Itinerary Maps of Matthew Paris

The first seven pages of Matthew Paris's famous Chronica majora make up a kind of medieval road map, linking London [i]or[/i] part of to the other the major cities and towns of Europe with the great European center of pilgrimage, Rome and Jerusalem (Figs. 1-7) [1] These pages, written and illustrated about 1250 by dint of Matthew Paris at the Benedictine abbey of St Albans, England, strike the fresh viewer as somehow familiar in their dynamic and participatory design. Turning the itinerary pages leads the viewer toward Jerusalem, and folding or unfolding the flaps that Matthew appended to the pages depicting Italy transforms the passage and adds to the meanings of those spaces (Figs. 5 14) This interactive quality has been completely view from aboveed by modern scholarship. Nonetheless, the skills, practices, and associations required of these pages, while not otherwise expanded in the more familiar, schematic representations of the medieval world, were readily available to the St Albans monk from one side other characteristically medieval manipu lations of time and space. [2] The Benedictine brother who perused these pages understood this map primarily [i]or[/i] part of to the other its performative possibilities, as a dynamic setting, the operation of whose pages, body s images, and appendages aided him in effecting an imagined pilgrimage that l end Europe to the Crusader city of Acre and eventually to a manifold representation of Jerusalem. This image of Jerusalem was seen as the two the unavailable center of earthly pilgrimage and as a goal of spiritual contemplations, which focused upon it as a figure of the Heavenly Jerusalem.

Jerusalem, the actual, historic city, was in the way that central a place in Christian history and theology that the desire to visit its sacred sites, especially those of Christ's death and resurrection contained in the sacred Sepulchre complex, pervaded medieval tillage [3] Yet relatively few family during the Middle Ages could make a physical pilgrimage to Jerusalem; expenditure hardship, tenure to the land, and monastic pledges meant that most people bad to direct the eye to a substitute form for like a spiritually significant journey. [4] In monastic settings, contemplations upon the earthly city of Jerusalem, which quickly evolv into focused meditations upon the Heavenly Jerusalem, called for a projection into imagined spaces and in like manner could serve as a substitute form of pilgrimage. In the early twelfth hundred an anonymous Benedictine of the abbey of Beze squeeze outed the desire to visit the city and imagined its fulfillment in the alone terms available to a cloistered brethren as a meditational exercise and, ultimately, as an imagined journey. [5]

The of frequent occurrence recollection of the city of Jerusalem and of its King is to us a sweet consolation, a pleasing occasion for meditation and necessary lightening of our heavy weight ...May my words be as a globule of oil on the fire which god the father has enkindled in your hearts, in the way that that your souls, burning with the couple the fire of charity and the oil of this exhortation, may rise up stronger consume with greater fervor, and mountain ever higher. May your spirit leave this world, traverse the heavens themselves, and pass beyond the stars until you reach the eternal Seeing Him in spirit and loving Him, may you breathe a mild sigh and come to ease in Him. ... there is replete beatitude because there is replete vision of God. Vision, I say, is n knowledge, knowledge is base in love, love is with praise, and praise finds security and all this is without end

Who will give us wings like the dove, and we shall soar across all the kingdoms of this world, and we shall penetrate the profunditys of the eastern sky? Who then will management us to the city of the great king in order that what we now read in these pages and diocese only as in a glass darkly, we may then direct the eye upon the face of sovereign of the universe present before us, and thus rejoice? [6]

Dom Jean LeClercq first laid the groundwork for the application of mind of imagined pilgrimage by monastics when he used the phrase peregrinatio in stabilitate to describe the interior, meditative practices that allowed monk to make a pilgrimage with their hearts and not their feet [7] At its center lie practices of focused meditations whose goal was the shedding of the self in a spiritual pilgrimage to the Heavenly Jerusalem. Peregrinatio in stabilitate is not a documented, institutionalized practice (it is not a phrase used by dint of medieval authors), but it is a way of comprehending the explosion of metaphoric language meant to characterize the monastic life as single directed toward a goal defined by the agency of and in some sense against, the monk's cloistered existence. This antagonism is registered greatest in quantity vividly in the common meanings monk invested in the bound cloister or claustrum. Claustrum carried various connotations of a prison, of a confident confined, and confining space. The mastership of Saint Benedict, for example, specifically lin k the claustra (confines) of the monastery with the pledge of stability each monk made. [8] At the same time, the cloister showed also the ideal realization of an interior spiritual journey, and it was this interior journey that was prized above and above any actual journey. It is in the cloister, argued Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) that the monk approachs to find the Heavenly Jerusalem, the real goal of any and all pilgrimages, for the actual, historic city was itself solitary an image, a figure of the time to come Heavenly City: "For the thing of monks is to try to find out not the earthly on the contrary the Heavenly Jerusalem, and this is not by means of proceeding with [their] feet on the other hand by progressing with [their] feelings." [9]