Olivia Strittmatter - Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture
Blog Post 7 - Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture
This post is going to be about chapter five of Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. In this chapter the authors write about the locality and universality in medieval pilgrimages.
The first pilgrimage that is discussed is the Walsingham pilgrimage. This pilgrimage used to be famous because a lady called Richeldis had a vision of Mary with measurements and instructions to build a Holy House. It became famous, and is sometimes called the Nazareth of England. People would remove their shoes at the Slipper Chapel and make confessions before they walked to the shrine of Our Lady; but it fell into disarray and was used as a barn for a while. Then in the 1930s it was restored so that it could be used because the Catholics revived this particular pilgrimage. When the Walsingham pilgrimage was revived it now focused on the Slipper Chapel as the main building, and the shrine of Our Lady was a secondary aspect of it rather than how it had been previously.
I thought that this was interesting to read about because typically, at least in other religions/history classes I’ve taken, we don’t talk about pilgrimages dying and then being revived. We usually only talk about the ones that are currently being taken. I also thought that it was interesting how the main focus had switched from being on the shrine of Our Lady to the Slipper Chapel when it was revived, even though the shrine was the original central focus.
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