Sacred Journeys in the Counter-Reformation

Long-Distance Pilgrimage in Northwest Europe

Elizabeth C. Tingle

• Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501514135
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Sacred Journeys in the Counter-Reformation examines long-distance pilgrimages to ancient, international shrines in northwestern Europe in the two centuries after Luther. In this region in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, saints' cults and pilgrimage were frequently contested, more so than in the Mediterranean world. France, the Low Countries and the British Isles were places of disputation and hostility between Protestant and Catholic; sacred landscapes and journeys came under attack and in some regions, were outlawed by the state. Taking as case studies hugely popular medieval shrines such as Compostela, the Mont Saint-Michel and Lough Derg, the impact of Protestant criticism and Catholic revival on shrines, pilgrims' motives and experiences is examined through life writings, devotional works and institutional records. The central focus is that of agency in religious change: what drove spiritual reform and what were its consequences for the 'ordinary' Catholic? This is explored through concepts of the religious self, holy materiality, and sacred space.

Chapter 1 Introduction: Long-Distance Pilgrimage in Early Modern Europe

I thought the age of pilgrimages had been at an end in all European nations, and that devotion contented itself with venerating its saints at home—but will you believe it, when I assure you, the number of pilgrims who come annually to pay their vows to Saint Michael at this Mount, are between 8 and 10,000? They are mostly peasants and men of mean occupations; but even among the noblesse there are … those who are induced to make this journey from principles of piety.¹

When the English traveler William Wraxall visited the Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy in 1775, its status as a popular pilgrimage site was apparent even if visitors were fewer than at the beginning of the eighteenth century. He was witness to the final phase of a great upsurge in Counter-Reformation pilgrimage activity that occurred across Catholic Europe. Much of this pilgrimage was to local and regional shrines, often newly created.² Another great destination was Rome, particularly during its Holy Years. Much less well known is the post-Reformation survival and refashioning of ancient, long-distance pilgrimages to shrines dedicated to early evangelists and confessor saints in northwestern Europe, such as Santiago de Compostela, the Mont Saint-Michel, and Lough Derg in Ireland. The focus of this book is on the revival of religious journeying to distant shrines dedicated to early medieval saints’ cults in the eastern Atlantic regions, that is, northern Spain, northern France, and the British Isles. The evolution of these spiritual journeys over time, the experiences of individual pilgrims, the relationship of pilgrimage to the formation of religious identity, and the role played by “heroic voyages” in reformed Catholicism, are central to this work.

Pilgrimage—a journey to a sacred place as an act of religious devotion—was one of the great traditions of medieval Christianity.³ Pilgrims ranging from King Louis IX of France and St. Francis of Assisi, to Margery Kempe the housewife from Norfolk, traveled to the holy places of Christendom for physical healing, spiritual salve, and simple curiosity.⁴ Historians of the Middle Ages such as Diana Webb, Denise Péricard-Méa, Jean Chelini, André Vauchez, and Robert Bartlett among many others have provided detailed studies of saints’ cults, the motives of pilgrims, and the developed infrastructure of local and distant shrines.⁵ Less has been written about traditional, long-distance pilgrimages to saints’ shrines outside of Rome and the larger Marian shrines after the Middle Ages, partly because they were assumed to have diminished greatly after the Reformation. In reality, whilst the practice did decline across Europe in the first half of the sixteenth century, thereafter it expanded greatly along with local and regional forms of pilgrimage, seen in the historiographical record for southern Germany, Burgundy, and for the Mediterranean regions of France, Spain, and Italy.

In this book we turn northwards, to examine the post-Reformation development of long-distance pilgrimage to ancient saints’ shrines in a part of Europe that was far from the center of spiritual authority in Rome. From the early Middle Ages, local and then apostolic saints’ cults had arisen, which attracted long-distance pilgrimage. The sites of internationally important early medieval cults were often still frequented in 1500, although their fortunes varied: St. James at Compostela, St. Michael at the Mont Saint-Michel, St. Martin at Tours, and St. Patrick at Lough Derg in the northwest of Ireland, for example. Regionally important cult centers of the earlier Middle Ages had shrunk in scope, although there was still long-distance movement at least at some times of the year: St. Hubert in the Ardennnes, St. Reine in Burgundy, St. Fiacre in Brie, and St. Méen near to Rennes, St. Olaf at Nidaros, and St. Columba or Columcille on Iona off the Scottish west coast, are just some examples. There were many such saints in northwest Europe.

The Reformation affected these shrines far more directly than it did those of the Mediterranean world. It was in northern Europe that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, saints’ cults and pilgrimage were frequently contested. France, the Low Countries, and the British Isles were places of disputation and hostility between Protestant and Catholic; sacred landscapes and journeys came under attack and in some regions were outlawed by the state. The main question of investigation of this work is therefore what happened to the tradition of international pilgrimage in the Atlantic regions of Europe, so visible in the later Middle Ages, in this period of religious contestation? How did ancient, geographically remote religious shines reinvent themselves in the early modern period to attract pilgrims; how did they make themselves relevant to the changing priorities of post-Tridentine Catholicism and assist in its dissemination? The study is one of agency: what did such sites offer the pilgrim that local religious traditions did not, and how did this evolve over time?

In this study, focus is on ancient shrines which first emerged in the early or central Middle Ages and which persisted across the Reformation era. The cult centers examined here were all dedicated to saints other than to the Virgin Mary—the patron of the most prominent Counter-Reformation shrines after Rome—in order to consider the importance of traditional saints in changing confessional practices. Three major shrines are examined, St. James of Compostela in northern Spain, the Mont Saint-Michel in France, and St. Patrick’s Purgatory at Lough Derg in Ireland. In addition, a number of smaller-scale shrines are considered as comparisons, where evidence allows: of St. Méen in Brittany, St. Martin of Tours, St. Hubert in the Ardennes, and others from northern France and the Low Countries. To investigate the role of such institutions in lived practices, the central methodological enquiry of this work is the experience of pilgrims visiting these shrines, individually and in groups. Pilgrims originating mainly from France and the British Isles will be the center of the study, inhabitants of regions where pilgrimage was contested but where the practice re-emerged as a visible statement of confessional identity in the later sixteenth century. In addition, the experiences of pilgrims to these shrines from Spain, Italy, the Low Countries, and the German territories will be considered where there is evidence, choices of emphasis dictated largely by the survival of documentary sources, which has a French bias. Through an examination of religious journeys, the book offers new perspectives on the role of long-distance pilgrimage in northwest Europe in the establishment of Counter-Reformation spirituality in regions of religious conflict, as well as the role played by “ordinary” devotees in the perpetuation and popularity of new forms of piety.

Pilgrimage after Luther: The Fall and Rise of Sacred Journeying in Catholic Europe

An historiography of post-Reformation pilgrimage in Europe has emerged in recent years, largely through studies of individual shrines or as part of histories of cities and bishoprics where such cult centers lay.⁶ From these, it is possible to identify a number of common themes. The clearest of these is the chronology of post-Reformation pilgrimage. It was apparent to contemporaries that from the early sixteenth century there was a great decline in the practice of pilgrimage in northern and western Europe. This was a result of criticism by evangelical reformers, abolition by Protestant regimes, and because of wars and instability in many regions. Disapproval of pilgrimage was not novel, it was found even in the early Church for “it was difficult to reconcile sacrally charged space with the universality and spirituality of Jesus’s teachings and Pauline doctrine,” and “a thin line of principled objection” ran through the Middle Ages, from Gregory of Nyssa to Bernard of Clairvaux.⁷ But this was not a commonplace contemporary viewpoint and the majority of western Christians supported pilgrimage. By the turn of the sixteenth century, however, humanist criticism became prominent and more widespread. In the Devotio moderna tradition, devotion was increasingly focused on the eucharist and the interior life of the Christian was a pilgrimage towards eternal life, preferred to setting out physically on the road.⁸ Erasmus exemplified this viewpoint with his 1526 colloquy “The Religious Pilgrimage” in which Ogygius travels to Compostela “for the sake of religion” and returns home “full of superstition.”⁹ Discretion and interiority were advocated rather than the outward manifestations of piety.

Protestant reformers were even more critical of pilgrimage. They denied the efficacy of saintly intercession, the existence of sacred space, and the need for good works to achieve salvation. The Word of Scripture rather than bodily presence in a physical space, brought contact with God through the intermediary of the Holy Spirit.¹⁰ Martin Luther’s To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation of 1520 attacked pilgrimages and called for their elimination, for they provided many opportunities for sin and they involved useless expenditure of resources which could be better used at home.¹¹ Luther even criticized the pilgrimage to Compostela directly. In a sermon on the Pentateuch in November 1528, he asked his audience to reflect on whether a vow to visit St. James was in contravention of the First Commandment, and reminded them that God was nearer to them at home than at Santiago, for to believe that a vow to a saint could help when God could not, was wrong.¹² For John Calvin, saints’ cults, relics, and images on which pilgrimage was based led to idolatry and therefore came from the devil.¹³ Reformed Protestants responded to the veneration of saints with iconoclasm: in France and the Netherlands, in the 1560s, violence was directed at major shrines such as St. Martin of Tours, Notre Dame of Rocamadour, Notre Dame of Liesse, and in the Beeldenstorm or “statue storm” of 1566 in the Low Countries, many churches suffered losses.¹⁴ Where Protestant regimes took power, as in England, Scotland, and Ireland, shrines were closed and destroyed, such as Canterbury, Walsingham, and Iona. Across France, the Low Countries, and the British Isles, political censure, warfare, brigandage, and piracy further reduced travel to holy sites both local and distant.

Protestant attacks on saints and their rejection of intercession also seems to have reduced Catholic confidence in holy people and places. There were few canonizations in the sixteenth century; between 1523 and 1588, there were none at all.¹⁵ Numbers visiting shrines fell. Yet from the 1570s onwards, pilgrimage revived, slowly at first then more rapidly after 1600. The work of Dominique Julia, Philippe Boutry, Philippe Martin, and others have shown that the period between 1650 and 1750 was, perhaps, the apogee of pre-modern movements.¹⁶ This was a result of the Council of Trent’s confirmation of the validity of saints’ cults and relics in 1563, the great Roman jubilee of 1575, and the re-adoption of traditional devotional activities by an increasingly confident and militant Catholic Church eager to revive the faith and to thwart Protestantism.

In Session XXV of December 3 – 4, 1563, the Council of Trent ruled “On Invocation, Veneration, and Relics of Saints, and on Sacred Images” and stated that while “Christ is our sole redeemer and savior,” it was good and useful to invoke the saints and to honor their relics because they had been “living members of Christ and temples of the Holy Spirit”; images also required respect, because of the sanctity of what they portrayed.¹⁷ This confirmation of the veneration of relics and images and of the role of indulgences in soteriology, animated a new interest in pilgrimages and jubilees. At the same time, an important part of the resurgent cult of the saints was its authentication through new tests and proofs of sainthood. Joseph Bergin argues that the attempt to reorient the cult of the saints meant that some were more suited than others for the purpose, such that some were promoted and others, neglected.¹⁸ A concern with potential abuses also led the ecclesiastical authorities to be alert to superstitions in the veneration of saints and relics. But the Church was enthusiastic about veneration, provided it was appropriately reverent and properly supervised.

Resurgent Catholicism’s concern with traditional saints’ devotions favored a renewal of pilgrimage. Shrines contributed to the building of confessional identity in regions where religious conflict occurred.¹⁹ In the German territories in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Catholic leaders, bishops, and members of religious orders promoted pilgrimage as an anti-Protestant act. F...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1 Introduction: Long-Distance Pilgrimage in Early Modern Europe
• Chapter 2 Pilgrims and Their Purposes: The Motives of Holy Travelers
• Chapter 3 The Journey: Landscapes and Travel to Shrines
• Chapter 4 The Shrine: Experience of Sacred Time and Space
• Chapter 5 The Life-Long Pilgrim: Continuing the Journey at Home
• Chapter 6 Conclusions
• Index