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REVIEW BY GEORGIA FRANK
This rich collection of essays explores the behaviour, experiences, and memories of travellers who visited shrines and sacred centres around the Mediterranean in antiquity. Looking beyond literate travellers’ descriptions of sacred places, these essays also attend to material evidence (including inscriptions and souvenirs) and mobility to situate pilgrimage within a broader range of travel activities.
As sociologists of mobility such as John Urry note, involuntary mobilities may still bear some relevance for sacred activities like pilgrimage. Thus places take on new meanings through motion, both at and beyond the place. David Frankfurter pleads to retire the category of ‘pilgrimage’, arguing that it has lost any heuristic value for studying ancient religion. Too often, historians of ancient pilgrimage tend to privilege literate and long-distance religious travellers at the expense of the things that countless unnamed people do and say at nearby shrines. Frankfurter prefers to replace pilgrimage with the term ‘shrine visitation’, which highlights abundant site-specific material evidence over scant writings by pilgrims. Another methodological essay, by Ian Rutherford, approaches religious travel as a mirror reflecting broader cultural differences in antiquity, as he calls attention to similarities between travel to Near Eastern and Greek sanctuaries.
The remainder of the volume consists of case studies, each expanding the concept of pilgrimage beyond conventional understandings of intentional, transformative, and unidirectional movement. Unlikely pilgrims figure prominently in this collection: thieves act as pilgrims during the relocation of stolen relics, according to Isabel Köster. Misbehaving pilgrims who require policing are the subject of Matthew Dillon’s close reading of an inscription about security personnel at the oracular Thessalian sanctuary of Apollo. Mariners are also unlikely pilgrims, as Amelia Brown argues, in an especially rich survey of evidence for sea-travellers’ religious activities at shrines along sea routes and material evidence for pilgrims’ souvenirs such as ampullae and amulets found in shipwrecks. Even the apostle Paul, intending to carry the financial contributions of his congregations in the diaspora back to Jerusalem’s poor, is enacting a pilgrimage anticipated by prophets describing the end of time, according to Matthew R Anderson. Homesick soldiers stationed in Britain may be understood as reversed pilgrims, too, building a sanctuary abroad in order to feel closer to home, as demonstrated by Anna Collar. In the eyes of some Roman historians and statesmen, even an emperor’s statue might function as a pilgrim destination, insofar as it provided refuge and protection in an ever-expanding empire, according to Panayiotis Christoforou. Another unlikely pilgrim is what Rebecca Sweetman calls the ‘happenstance’ traveller, who might visit several shrines scattered across the Cycladic islands. Small objects distributed at these sites reveal a robust diversity of religious identities, even after the advent of Christianity in the region.
Crossroads and convergences are another important thematic thread in this volume. The final three case studies focus on crossroads of memory. Naomi Koltun-Fromm analyses a medieval travelogue by a Muslim Persian pilgrim called Naser-e Khosraw, highlighting how this 11th-century Ismaili ‘mytho-theologised’ the natural features of Jerusalem and its enduring draw as a site of atonement, an idea also found in earlier rabbinic texts. Attentive to resonances between Jewish, Christian, and Muslim sensibilities, Koltun-Fromm emphasises convergence over contestation. Another form of ‘travel writing’ is the pilgrim’s graffito, the subject of Yana Tchekhavonets’ essay on Armenian and Georgian pilgrims to biblical sites in late antiquity, and the invention of ‘New Jerusalems’. Such crossroads are at the centre of ethnographer Sarah Midford’s essay on the Dardanelles, too, not just a major battle site in Homer’s Trojan epic, but also a destination for Australia and New Zealand’s First World War commemorations in recent generations.
The volume closes with helpful responses. Simon Coleman, a leading anthropologist of pilgrimage, nimbly connects various essays by attending to how pilgrimage is entangled in wider networks of travel, trade, and empire, both near and far, while Elisa Uusimäki highlights the role of pilgrimage as a counterpoint to lived daily realities. Although some readers might wish contributors had engaged with one another’s insights, the volume provides fruitful new directions for exploring the intersection of pilgrimage and mobility studies.
Pilgrims in Place, Pilgrims in Motion: Sacred Travel in the Ancient Mediterranean
Anna Collar and Troels Myrup Kristensen (eds)
Aarhus University Press, £37.26
ISBN 978-8771845433
