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• Historia

PAÍS DE ORIGEN
Toronto, Canadá

The great archives and museums of the world contain a priceless treasury of visual history -prints, engravings, old maps, early photographs, cartoons, manuscript illuminations, posters, woodcuts, and a thousand and one other pictorial sources. The aim of Pictorial Sources Series is to provide an extended and scholarly choice of the best of these, grouped about main themes and topics in world history. Many pictures are reproduced here for the first time. Each title is prepared under the direction of a Volume Editor who is an academic specialist in his field. The pictures are linked together and interpreted by a continuing text, and concise ‘linking passages’ between each picture chapter.

Christian pilgrimage in the Middle Ages was not just an example of piety; it was deeply bound up with pre-Reformation man’s main concern -the salvation of his soul. For this reason the pilgrimage to Compostela has been described as a key to the literary, artistic and cultural understanding of the Middle Ages. Everyone went on pilgrimage, from kings and bishops to monks and millers, and for over a thousand years an endless succession of priests, visionaries and cynics denounced the practice.

The introduction to this book examines pilgrimages in the context of medieval Christianity, to find out why people went on them, who went on them, and where they went, from the fourth century to about 1500. A section is then devoted to miracles, relics and indulgences. In the body of the book the pilgrimage itself is recreated, drawing on diaries, chronicles, letters, state papers, references in contemporary literature and surviving archives from hospices and religious foundations, some available for the first time in English. Individual subsections are devoted to preparations for the voyage, the routes followed and hazards encountered on the journey, practical matters of organisation, accommodation, arrival at the shrine and, finally, departure. Four later sections then deal with each of the major places of pilgrimage in the Middle Ages.

A valuable addition to the Putnam Documentary History Series, this book is illustrated with many woodcuts, manuscript iluminations and other pictures drawn from contemporary sources.