Love's Pilgrimage: The Holy Journey in English Renaissance Literature. Grace Tiffany . Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006. Pp. 217.

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewLove's Pilgrimage: The Holy Journey in English Renaissance Literature. Grace Tiffany . Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006. Pp. 217.Nabil MatarNabil MatarUniversity of Minnesota Search for more articles by this author University of MinnesotaPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreGrace Tiffany opens her study with an intriguing question: “How did English authors write about pilgrimage after the Protestant Reformation?” (13). The answer emerges from a careful discussion of Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, and a coda on Bunyan. The imagery of pilgrimage, Tiffany argues, continued to be invoked but under other forms of travel and wandering. Where the Catholic pilgrim sought salvation at the end of pilgrimage, the Protestant went on the journey with the full assurance that he had been saved. As she succinctly puts it, “for Bunyan's Christian, redemption is not a result of but a prior condition of the celestial walk.…All Protestant pilgrims begin the true celestial journey ‘already there’” (168).Pilgrimage became part of Christian tradition after Constantine decided to turn Palestine into a Holy Land, making it thereby a focus for all Christians in his empire. Whether Constantine was aware that he was paganizing Christianity by linking the physical with the spiritual is not clear; what followed, however, upon the building by the emperor and his mother of numerous churches on New Testament sites—often sites of pagan temples and caves—was the establishment of the practice of pilgrimages. Pilgrims flocked to Palestine not only as visitors eager to see the geography of Christ's life but as seekers of a sacramental relationship with the land that still bore the imprint of the divine.The Reformation theologians reacted to what, in their view, had become a vulgarization of belief. Actually, as Tiffany observes, criticism had already been growing against pilgrimages even before the denunciations by Luther and Calvin, as can be seen in Chaucer and Langland, who described the journey to shrines as more socially than spiritually significant. Even inside England, pilgrimage to St. Thomas à Becket's Canterbury or to St. Cuthbert's relics (in Durham) had been on the decline by the time King Henry VIII demolished the pilgrimage shrines (1536) and his daughter, Queen Elizabeth I, completely abolished them (1559).But “pilgrimage…did not die out in the English imagination, either in the sixteenth century or the seventeenth. The idea of pilgrimage did, however, undergo a profound transformation during that period” (24). Tiffany gives a detailed description of the various changes of pilgrimage—from religious quest to “tourism” (20), “erotic adventures” (21), travel and “global voyaging” (39), “secular capitalist adventuring” (31), “commercial ‘pilgrimage’” (32), and an interiorized/inward pilgrimage (33). Spenser proves to be the best starting point: his Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), with its medieval evocation, deals with pilgrimage, quest, and visits to shrines, but they are all allegorized in a journey through the Anglican interpretation of the Bible. Still, the Redcrosse Knight on his missionary quest is not too distant from the crusader who combined pilgrimage with holy war. Writing for a queen who was the champion of the Protestant cause, Spenser was not unwilling to envision her leading a pilgrimage against her Catholic and “paynim” adversaries.Shakespeare, Tiffany argues, moved away from pilgrimage to travel, showing his protagonists replacing the veneration of saints and shrines with recognition of English historical heroes. In his romances and comedies, Shakespeare created a new “global” geography, sending his heroes from Tarsus to Venice and from Tyre to Milan. Shakespeare replaced the religious content of pilgrimage with an erotic motif, where lovers go on pilgrimage to their beloveds, seeking not holiness but eros. Donne too enacted an “erotic pilgrimage” in his poems. Examining a select group of poems and sonnets, Tiffany suggests that Donne presented the journey of the Christian lover, spiritual and carnal, as an antipilgrimage. In a fascinating discussion of Milton, she shows how images of “physical travel” figuring “flight from, not approach to, God” (135) point to the new view of pilgrimage—“Godward” at the same time that it was a “fruitless action that bodies forth sinfulness” (136). In Paradise Lost (1667), Milton held in contempt the voyages and, presumably, voyagers of exploration—although those voyages were seen as pilgrimages by the first colonial settlers in New England (163). For him, more important is the pilgrimage toward spiritual truth than far-off discoveries and ventures.Protestant writers rejected the efficacy of pilgrimage to shrines and holy sites. But they remained fascinated by the theme of the pilgrim—and of peregrination. Man was homo viator because wandering was part of the wages of sin. “Wandering is hellish,” writes Tiffany (141). Still, when Bunyan used the title The Pilgrim's Progress (1678), his understanding of pilgrimage was not exactly what the Christian tradition had held it to be: Bunyan sends his pilgrims on a journey not in geography but allegory, not in physical but biblical space. The analogies between Bunyan and Spenser with which Tiffany ends the book provide an appropriate recapitulation of pilgrimage and travel in the golden age of English literature: the Protestant traveler, wanderer, and pilgrim did not seek salvation through pilgrimage; the journey was a movement toward a variety of goals, all of which confirmed the assurance of Christian redemption.Love's Pilgrimage is clearly written and focused in its arguments. Tiffany provides a stimulating reading of some of the major texts of the English Renaissance and ties them together under the changing imagery of pilgrimage. What I missed in the book was some discussion of the English travelers who did go on “pilgrimages” to the Holy Land or wrote about pilgrimages in the manner of Bunyan: How did depictions of the journey by George Sandys (1610) and Henry Maundrell (1697), John Dunton (The Pilgrim's Guide [1684]), Simon Patrick (The Parable of the Pilgrime [1687]), or William Russel (The Pilgrim's Guide [1692]) differ from the pilgrimages of Spenser, Milton, or Bunyan? What influence did they have on the writers who are examined in the book? Perhaps this might be a future project for Tiffany as she continues an important discussion of pilgrimage in early modern English writings. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 108, Number 1August 2010 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/653815 Views: 185Total views on this site © 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 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