Knowing like a pilgrim

Abstract

This article opens a special issue on ”Pilgrim Knowledge” with a programmatic argument for knowledge-gathering practices as an intrinsic part of pilgrimage in the early modern Mediterranean. It addresses the history of travel, on the one hand, and the history of science and knowledge, on the other. The article then suggests that Christian pilgrimage set a special value on bodily experience, which in turn demanded practices of witnessing, collecting, comparing, codifying, and authenticating, here worked out through a range of examples. Matters of faith were also matters of fact.