"To passe the see in shortt space": mapping the world in the Digby Mary Magdalen

Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Annual, 2006 by D.K. Smith

And because the land's only importance is in the value of what has taken place there, these locations of holy occurrence become virtually interchange-able with the sacred texts that describe them. When she is too pressed for time to describe a place, Egeria simply tells her sisters to look it up in the Old Testament for a proper description. The land itself has nothing to offer that is not already in the spiritual history and therefore accessible, more easily, through the scriptures. In this way, a pilgrim's journey is as much an act of reading as it is an act of travel, and reading about the Holy Land would have provided as satisfying an experience as seeing it.

Even in later accounts this blurring of firsthand and secondhand experience is central to the nature of pilgrimage. In the fifteenth century, Brother Felix Fabri embarked on two separate trips to Jerusalem. As he suggests after returning from his first voyage, the experience of journeying to the Holy Land was less permanent and made less of an impact on him than simply reading about it.

  So after I had returned to Ulm and began to think about the most holy
  sepulchre of our Lord, and the manger wherein He lay, and the holy
  city of Jerusalem and the mountains which are round about it, the
  appearance, shape, and arrangements of these and of other holy places
  escaped from my mind, and the Holy Land and Jerusalem with its holy
  places appeared to me shrouded in a dark mist, as though I had beheld
  them in a dream; and I seemed to myself to know less about all the
  holy places than I did before I visited them, whence it happened that
  when I was questioned about the holy places I could given no distinct
  answers, nor could I write a clear description of my journey.
  Wherefore I was grieved beyond measure that I had undergone such
  suffering, toils, and perils, and had spent such great sums of money
  and so much time, without receiving any fruit, consolation, or
  knowledge. (48-49)

In this light, it stands as one of the risks of pilgrimage that the fruits of the journey are not so much the experience and memory of the physical places, as the spiritual associations. And these associations are as available to those who read the Bible at home as they are to those who travel. Despite the dangers, discomforts, and difficulties of a voyage to the Holy Land--and these were considerable--its benefits were evanescent and its knowledge of the world ephemeral.

But, if reading provided as complete a sense of the Holy Land as the journey itself, then a pilgrimage account may be seen not primarily as an emblem of travel, but as a replacement for it--one that permits

"stay-at-home Christians imaginative entrance to the places and events of the Holy Land on which their thoughts so often fastened" (Campbell 34). And if the places themselves are not important, but only the events they evoke, then the physical organization of those sites and distant lands is equally without value.

This fundamentally ungeographic nature of pilgrimage reaches its apotheosis in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, in the era just preceding the Digby play. Turning their backs on "presumptuous world-bound knowledge," some theologians suggested a purely spiritual journey, claiming that, "Men do better to search for God along the itinerarium mentis than on the road to Rome" (Zacher 57). There were several means available. On the mosaic floors of some Gothic cathedrals there were mazes through which a pilgrim could crawl on his knees: a pilgrimage in miniature. These were unicursal mazes, with many twists and turns but no blind alleys, so the pilgrim had no choices to make. He or she could crawl unhesitatingly toward the goal at the center, a goal explicitly labeled heaven or Jerusalem. (4) And as late as 1500 an eminent theologian, Johann Geiler von Kaiserberg, refined the process still further. Geiler considered the plight of a prisoner who could not make the pilgrimage to Rome. Estimating that it took twenty one days to travel to Rome, seven days to visit all the churches, and twenty-one more days to journey home, the prisoner could pace the length of his cell seven miles a day for seven weeks, thus accomplishing his pilgrimage and obtaining his spiritual reward (Lieberman 160). In such a context, the physical reach of countries, rivers, and seas--with all their attendant breadth and complexity--becomes unnecessary. In the journey for spiritual grace, there is no need for geography because there is ultimately no need for the world at all.