Meditation and pilgrimage in late medieval England: In search of the historical Jesus

My dissertation project challenges the long-established distinction between the two devotional practices of meditation and pilgrimage. We may be too quick to draw a contrast between the ascetic hermit and the garrulous traveler. Through the framework of medieval English imaginative literature, I explore the surprising moments where meditation takes its practitioner on a journey, whether in the mind or in the world. Ironically, the meditation that is designed to lift one out of daily life and into immobile calm with God in heaven can also precipitate its follower into a pilgrimage or a wandering dream vision, into an unfolding drama of historical difference and national identity. In the case of Margery Kempe, active meditations experienced at home in England did not make her more content to be still and in one place, but stirred her desire to travel to the Holy Land. Like many pilgrims before her, she longed for an even greater communion with the real, historical Christ, and hoped that by making a geographical crossing she would experience a temporal collapsing of the distance between the time of Christ and her own time. Piers Plowman, too, is similarly permeated by the idea of pilgrimage. The enigmatic plowman vows to be a pilgrim, yet the dream-vision narrative circles around itself as Will tries to determine whether it is best to be at rest or in motion. Towards the end of his text, Will finally manages a temporal leap into biblical history. In contrast, the drama might be thought of as a reverse pilgrimage, bringing the biblical past into the medieval present, Jerusalem to England, on pageant carts. The N-Town plays in particular suggest that this inversion was a critical step in the embodiment of English community, a sanctification of English time and place. All three texts aid in understanding how late medieval English popular culture approached the stories of Christ's life and death, and how they understood and attempted to interact with the past more generally.