George D. Greenia

Being a Pilgrim: Art and Ritual on the Medieval Routes to Santiago (review)

When I was invited to write this review, I was gently advised that Being a Pilgrim looked like a coffee-table book, and it does. The Lund Humphries division of Ashgate, a respected name in medieval studies, embraces handsomely illustrated art books as well as more studious, probably less coffee-table friendly works, such as Contemporary Issues Shaping China’s Civil Aviation Policy. Kathleen Ashley and Marilyn Deegan, the authors of Being a Pilgrim, enjoy established reputations in their individual domains of medieval studies (Ashley and Patricia Sheingorn, Interpreting Cultural Symbols and Writing Faith; Deegan and Simon Tanner, Digital Futures) with the added advantage that Marilyn Deegan is an able photographer, demonstrated in the vast majority of more than 250 images in this book. Additional photos were contributed by medievalists Theresa Coletti of the University of Maryland, who has written perceptively on Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, and Hazel Gardiner, a noted collaborator on the Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi, who apparently pointed the way toward the fine Jacobean images from the windows of Bourges and Rabastens. Some four thousand photos were sorted for this volume’s selection, many of which are more evocative than documentary in nature, although even veteran scholars of pilgrimage will find fresh images from France rarely seen.