‘Travel’ of the Soul via Religiosity: Imaginary and Actual Pilgrimages

This chapter explores real and imagined pilgrimages, beginning with the fictional journeys of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, and moving to the journeys– both actual – and ‘pilgrimages of the soul’ undertaken by Margery Kempe in her book. The reasons for the Wife of Bath’s association with repeated pilgrimage are introduced to speak to a salacious Western clerical culture of denigrating pilgrim wives, as a context to Margery Kempe’s own accounts of repeatedly facing abuse when on the road, and particularly from male religious. With the sanctions and obstacles facing female pilgrims, the chapter suggests that for most pious women, spiritual travel via texts such as pseudo-Bonaventure’s Meditiationes vitae Christi was the only viable way to reach the holiest sites in the Christian world, and especially those of Christ’s ministry and Passion.