Narrative authority and truth claims in late medieval and early modern accounts of travel to Jerusalem

Abstract

This thesis explores continuity and change in the construction of authority and truth claims in accounts of travel to Jerusalem from 1432 to 1632. It takes as its main materials manuscript or printed narratives written by Englishmen or published in England which describe a completed experience of travel to Palestine. The project as a whole contests simple dichotomies between late medieval and early modern ways of writing about travel to Jerusalem. Late medieval narratives have often been represented as credulous and uncritically imitative. By contrast, early modern travel writing, according to many accounts, is characterised by absolute rejection of pilgrimage and emotional or devotional investment in "holy places" in favour of historical, ethnographical or mercantile interests. The thesis acknowledges and explores the profound changes that look place in this writing over the period in question, focusing on the consequences of this for constructions of narrative authority and truth claims. In complement to such exploration, it demonstrates that the relationship between pre-Reformation pilgrimage writing and post-Reformation travel accounts of Jerusalem in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is not one of absolute disjunction. There is substantial formal stability in the patterns of pilgrimage over the period in question. Authority, authenticity and the relationships among text, material practices of pilgrimage and memory preoccupy the authors of pre-Reformation narratives as well as post-Reformation accounts. This thesis demonstrates this fact, while taking account of the changing ways in which pilgrims or travellers respond to these preoccupations in their narratives.