This book charts the eccentric career of William Palmer of Magdalen, the only member of the Oxford Movement to take a serious interest in the Orthodox Church. Ordained an Anglican deacon, Palmer was destined for a conventional life as a classics don at Oxford, but in 1840 and 1842 he travelled to Russia to seek communion from the Russian Orthodox Church, on the basis that the Anglican Church was part of the Catholic and Apostolic Church world-wide. Despite their personal regard for him, the Russians remained unconvinced by his arguments, not least because of the actions of the Anglican hierarchy in forming alliances with other Protestant bodies. Palmer for his part exposed the logical inconsistencies in the claim of the Orthodox to be the one true church. Increasingly disillusioned with the Church of England, and finding himself without support from the Scottish Episcopal Church, Palmer was urged by his Russian friends such as Mouravieff and Khomiakoff to convert to Orthodoxy. However, he baulked at making the cultural leap from West to East, and could not accept the Orthodox inconsistency over rebaptism and chrismation. After some years in ecclesiastical limbo, he followed the example of his Oxford friends such as Newman, and was received into the Roman Catholic Church in Rome in 1855. He lived in Rome as a Catholic layman until his death in 1879.

This is a fully annotated edition of all the poems which are now generally regarded as Shakespeare's, excluding The Sonnets. It contains Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, The Phoenix and the Turtle, The Passionate Pilgrim, and A Lover's Complaint. The introduction to the two long narrative poems examines their place within the classical and Renaissance European traditions, an issue which also applies to The Phoenix and the Turtle. The Passionate Pilgrim is a miscellany of twenty sonnets and lyrics, containing only five poems which are certain to be Shakespeare's. John Roe analyses the conditions in which the collection was produced, and weighs the evidence for and against Shakespeare's authorship of A Lover's Complaint and the much-debated question of its genre. He demonstrates how in his management of formal tropes Shakespeare, like the best Elizabethans, fashions a living language out of handbook oratory.

The Wayward Pilgrim is an account of the desultory pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain made by a professor of Spanish on Sabbatical leave from the Salisbury University in Maryland. The professor undertakes the pilgrimage not as a religious experience but as an attempt to better understand the history and culture of Spain. In the book, he combines an account of the Medieval pilgrimage with the diversions often taken by the modem pilgrim. In the end, the professor comes to realize the hardships, the endurance and the hardy and devote spirit of the true pilgrim. In addition to the account of the pilgrimage, the book also contains vignettes of great moments and great historical figures that changed the world forever.

Julia Bolton Holloway's The Pilgrim and the Book: A Study of Dante, Langland and Chaucer investigates major fourteenth-century texts, the Commedia, Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales, in the light of the medieval theory and practice of pilgrimage, especially concentrating on Emmaus and Exodus paradigms. Holloway's analysis draws extensively on iconography, musicology, typology and anthropology. The concluding chapter explains why each poet places himself within his poem - in his own image - as a pilgrim.

This book seeks to address the journeying context of pilgrimage within the landscapes of Medieval Britain. Using four case studies, an interdisciplinary methodology developed by the author is applied to four different geographical and cultural areas of Britain to investigate the practicalities of travel along the Medieval road network.

From the Great Panathenaea of ancient Greece to the hajj of today, people of all religions and cultures have made sacred journeys to confirm their faith and their part in a larger identity. This book is a fascinating guide through the vast and varied cultural territory such pilgrimages have covered across the ages. The first book to look at the phenomenon and experience of pilgrimage through the multiple lenses of history, religion, sociology, anthropology, and art history, this sumptuously illustrated volume explores the full richness and range of sacred travel as it maps the cultural imagination. The authors consider pilgrimage as a physical journey through time and space, but also as a metaphorical passage resonant with meaning on many levels. It may entail a ritual transformation of the pilgrim's inner state or outer status; it may be a quest for a transcendent goal; it may involve the healing of a physical or spiritual ailment. Through folktales, narratives of the crusades, and the firsthand accounts of those who have made these journeys; through descriptions and pictures of the rituals, holy objects, and sacred architecture they have encountered, as well as the relics and talismans they have carried home, Pilgrimage evokes the physical and spiritual landscape these seekers have traveled. In its structure, the book broadly moves from those religions--Judaism, Christianity, and Islam--that cohere around a single canonical text to those with a multiplicity of sacred scriptures, like Hinduism and Buddhism. Juxtaposing the different practices and experiences of pilgrimage in these contexts, this book reveals the common structures and singular features of sacred travel from ancient times to our own.