This response, recorded in 2014 by a visitor to Canterbury Cathedral, confessing himself almost overwhelmed by the combined impact of architecture, setting, and a sense of history evoking eternity, is testament to the continuing power of cathedrals and other sacred sites to elicit profound responses. Initially self-identifying as âno religionâ, this 32-year-old respondent struggled to define his identity and motivation for himselfâand for the cathedral admission criteria. Was he a heritage visitor? In part. Had he come to pray? Not really. Was he a pilgrim? Partly, but perhaps not. In the end he refused to define himself by any one of these categories but nevertheless announced that he was adopting the idea of pilgrimage as a framing device for his life.
Around 850 years earlier Reginald, a monk of Durham, recorded the cathedral preparing for one of its major annual feasts:
At the time when Pentecost was approaching many people resolved to come from all around to the church of St Cuthbert ⊠The monks had therefore decorated the walls with various beautiful ornaments, and had embellished the ceremonial of their services with suitable arrangements. Then the largest bells, which were at the church doors, were made to sound according to the custom of the great festival. So the young men, with those older and younger, rushed to that place and because the weight of the bells was too much for the combined strength of many men, gathered together a great crowd. Those who had been born in Durham had more experience and skill knowledge of bell-ringing because practice and training in the work produced experience and a thorough knowledge of this skill. So the officers of the church preferred a few of them to very many of the others and put forward the young men of Durham City for the task of ringing the bells. So when the office of prime had to be sung in the church, a large group of young men from the City of Durham came up to perform the task of ringing and to make those bells sound out. As they rang the bells they competed with one another using all their might and for some long time dedicated themselves to this burdensome task and charmed the ears of the crowd with pleasant sweetnessâŠ1
Here we are provided with a valuable glimpse into the relationship between the resident cathedral community and the series of communities that surrounded and interacted with it. The cathedral and St Cuthbert, its resident saint, drew crowds on major feast days from the city and the wider region of its diocese and beyond. The monks and servants of the cathedral were attentive to the need to present the church appropriately. The citizens are shown as skilled bell ringers, who took their role in creating the appropriate sensorily pleasing soundscape for the festival very seriously and enthusiastically, but were chosen and trained by the cathedral authorities. We cannot retrieve their experience, but we can note even in this short description the complexities of the lay relationship with the medieval cathedral. The story goes on to relate that one of the bell ringers was fatally struck by the bellâs heavy clapper and his life only saved by the intercession of St Cuthbert, thus further modifying his relationship with the saint and the building and ensuring that all who had come to the cathedral at Pentecost were witnesses to a miracle. We can thus identify a range of modulating devotional behaviours and meanings around the cathedral on this important feast day.
These accounts affirm the enduring ability of cathedrals to surprise and engage. They are huge presences in their landscapes, they inspire feelings of belonging, and they have formed and continue to form a key part of local, regional, and even national identity. For many centuries they have offered some of the fullest sensory and devotional experiences available. However, they also problematise our understanding of, and ability to define, pilgrimage.
The Purpose of This Volume
The area of pilgrimage studies has grown and diversified considerably over the last three decades and now embraces a very wide range of disciplines, each with its own preoccupations, methodologies, and definitions. This volume seeks to contribute to cross-disciplinary conversations about pilgrims and pilgrimage, past and present, through interrogating the meanings of these terms within a particular geographical context (England) and with reference to a distinctive group of holy places (cathedrals). It draws its inspiration from a three-year Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded research project,2 which employed a combination of methodologies drawn from history, art history, archaeology, theology, religious studies, the social sciences, and digital humanities, to identify and analyse the core dynamics of pilgrimage and cathedrals in England from the eleventh to the twenty-first centuries, to assess the renewed significance of English cathedrals as sacred/heritage sites today, and to use historical perspectives to inform future management of these iconic buildings. This book therefore brings together work by historians, social scientists, theologians, religious studies scholars, and cathedral practitioners, employing cathedrals as the lens through which to study pilgrimage, and pilgrimage as the lens through which to study the cathedral experience.
Alongside the now relatively well-established field of pilgrimage studies, this volume also looks to the more nascent area of âcathedral studiesâ. To date this has largely been embodied in two main approaches. Traditional cathedral historiography has tended to focus on institutional or art and architectural aspects. On the other hand, recent work in social science and religious studies has sought to âevaluate the impact of cathedrals as key points of growthâ in the modern Church and build on the idea that cathedrals represent both âsacred spaceâ and âcommon groundâ,3 functioning as sites which have historically been shaped by one faith but are now seeking to offer spaces of shared exploration and significance to those of all faiths and none.4
In line with the approach of Simon Coleman and John Elsner that the âlandscape of pilgrimageâ, the setting within which pilgrimage takes place, is instrumental in shaping the pilgrim experience, this volume provides in-depth historical studies of the âlandscapeâ of Englandâs cathedrals and a new framework for analysing past and present visitor experiences.5 The central analytical chapters combine thorough historical research focusing on a discrete set of case studies to provide a solid basis for analytical interpretation, and each chapter offers a number of analytical frameworks for historians to interrogate and understand the past in new ways. By bringing these two approaches together, this volume offers a more experiential view of cathedral history than previous studies have offered. This has the potential to integrate previously fragmented evidence and perspectives and thus enrich each discipline.
English cathedrals provide a unique âlaboratoryâ in which to observe and analyse a wide range of pilgrim behaviours through time. Pilgrimage was highly important to the development and status of many English cathedrals in the early and later Middle Ages. Although most shrines were destroyed at the Reformation, a number of the great churches and monasteries which housed them remain as cathedrals today, literally shaped by their pilgrim past and retaining a strong pilgrimage legacy. There are marked parallels and connections between the decline and revival of pilgrimage in England and the very similar pattern evident in the history of cathedrals. Suppressed in England at the Reformation, pilgrimage began to re-emerge in the nineteenth century, and place-focused activity, including visits to sacred sites and the creation of wayside shrines, is now of considerable, and still-growing, significance. The history of cathedrals follows a similar trajectory. Cathedrals lost shrines at the Reformation, experienced abolition (and threats of demolition) under the Puritans and suffered decline in the long eighteenth century, only beginning to recover purpose and identity in the nineteenth century. Today English cathedrals function as both sacred and heritage sites where national and local history and identity, material culture, and traditional and emerging religious practice can be encountered in unique combination. Anglican cathedrals, visited by over ten million people each year,6 are increasingly refocusing on and reinstating shrines, reflecting an international multi-faith phenomenon in which an estimated 200 million people across the world engage in pilgrimage and religious tourism annually. 7
However, it is also important to recognise that cathedrals have always been far more than the shrines they may have housed. As Simon Coleman and Marion Bowman note, by contrast with more rural pilgrimage sites cathedrals are largely urban and highly multifunctional spaces. Pilgrimage is only one of a number of parall...