Pilgrims’ Texts

This chapter explores reading and writing on the move, through the transnational medium of pilgrims’ books. It considers literary writing about pilgrimage by the likes of William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer; a printed indulgence sold to pilgrims the shrine of St Cornelius in St Margaret’s Church at Westminster; and the routes taken, books read, and texts produced by particular medieval pilgrims, including Henry Bolingbroke, later Henry IV of England. The chapter examines the ways in which pilgrimage was a stimulus to writing as well as to reading, and was a process that put the material facets of textual production into a variety of dynamic and often surprising relations with communities of readers and writers.