Medieval Welsh Pilgrimage, c.1100–1500 examines one of the most popular expressions of religious belief in medieval Europe—from the promotion of particular sites for political, religious, and financial reasons to the experience of pilgrims and their impact on the Welsh landscape. Addressing a major gap in Welsh Studies, Kathryn Hurlock peels back the historical and religious layers of these holy pilgrimage sites to explore what motivated pilgrims to visit these particular sites, how family and locality drove the development of certain destinations, what pilgrims expected from their experience, how they engaged with pilgrimage in person or virtually, and what they saw, smelled, heard, and did when they reached their ultimate goal.

What do the bursar of Eton College, a canon of Mainz Cathedral, a young knight from near Cologne, and a Kentish nobleman's chaplain have in common? Two Germans, residents of the Holy Roman Empire, and two Englishmen, just as the western horizons of the known world were beginning to expand. These four men - William Wey, Bernhard von Breydenbach, Arnold von Harff, and Thomas Larke - are amongst the thousands of western Christians who undertook the arduous journey to the Holy Land in the decades immediately before the Reformation. More importantly, they are members of a much more select group: those who left written accounts of their travels, for the journey to Jerusalem in the late Middle Ages took place not only in the physical world, but also in the mind and on the page. Pilgrim authors contended in different ways with the collision between fifteenth-century reality and the static textual Jerusalem, as they encountered the genuinely multi-religious Middle East. This book examines the international literary phenomenon of the Jerusalem pilgrimage through the prism of these four writers. It explores the process of collective and individual identity construction, as pilgrims came into contact with members of other religious traditions in the course of the expression of their own; engages with the uneasy relationship between curiosity and pilgrimage; and investigates both the relevance of genre and the advent of print to the development of pilgrimage writing. Ultimately pilgrimage is revealed as a conceptual space with a near-liturgical status, unrestricted by geographical boundaries and accessible both literally and virtually.

Christianity, in its Catholic, Protestant and Nonconformist forms, has played an enormous role in the history of Wales and in the defining and shaping of Welsh identity over the past two thousand years. Biblical place names, an urban and rural landscape littered with churches, chapels, crosses and sacred sites, a bardic and literary tradition deeply imbued with Christian themes in both the Welsh and English languages, and the songs sung by tens of thousands of rugby supporters at the national stadium in Cardiff, all hint at a Christian presence that was once universal. Yet for many in contemporary Wales, the story of the development of Christianity in their country remains little known. While the history of Christianity in Wales has been a subject of perennial interest for Welsh historians, much of their work has been highly specialised and not always accessible to a general audience. Standing on the shoulders of some of Wales’s finest historians, this is the first single-volume history of Welsh Christianity from its origins in Roman Britain to the present day. Drawing on the expertise of four leading historians of the Welsh Christian tradition, this volume is specifically designed for the general reader, and those beginning their exploration of Wales’s Christian past.

Discover the rich history of Britain's millennia-old network of pathways, and it will be impossible to take an unremarkable walk again . . . 'A rallying cry to reclaim lost routes and preserve this precious resource for future generations' Walk Magazine ___________ Hundreds of thousands of miles of paths reach into, and connect, communities across England and Wales. But by 2026, 10,000 miles of undiscovered footpaths around Britain stand to be lost. Jack Cornish has dedicated the last five years of his life to walking these forgotten routes. Now, in The Lost Paths, he will show you just how special these forgotten rights of way are, and how embedded each path is in the history of Britain. Footpaths, tracks, country lanes and urban streets illuminate how our ancestors interacted with and shaped their landscapes in the pursuit of commerce, salvation, escape, war, and leisure. Paths are an often-overlooked part of our everyday life and our country's history, crucial to understanding the cultural and environmental history of us, as a nation, in our landscape. This is a celebration of an ancient network and a rallying cry to reclaim what has been lost and preserve it for future generations.

The first in-depth study of Arthurian places in late medieval and early modern England and Wales. Places have the power to suspend disbelief, even concerning unbelievable subjects. The many locations associated with King Arthur show this to be true, from Tintagel in Cornwall to Caerleon in Wales. But how and why did Arthurian sites come to proliferate across the English and Welsh landscape? What role did the medieval custodians of Arthurian abbeys, churches, cathedrals, and castles play in "placing" Arthur? How did visitors experience Arthur in situ, and how did their experiences permeate into wider Arthurian tradition? And why, in history and even today, have particular places proven so powerful in defending the impression of Arthur's reality? This book, the first in-depth study of Arthurian places in late medieval and early modern England and Wales, provides an answer to these questions. Beginning with an examination of on-site experiences of Arthur, at locations including Glastonbury, York, Dover, and Cirencester, it traces the impact that they had on visitors, among them John Hardyng, John Leland, William Camden, who subsequently used them as justification for the existence of Arthur in their writings. It shows how the local Arthur was manifested through textual and material culture: in chronicles, notebooks, and antiquarian works; in stained glass windows, earthworks, and display tablets. Via a careful piecing together of the evidence, the volume argues that a new history of Arthur begins to emerge: a local history.

Medieval Welsh literature is rich in hagiographical lore and numerous Welsh versions of the Lives of saints are extant, recording the legends of both native and universal saints. Although the cult of St Ursula and the 11,000 virgins is well known internationally, this is the first time that a scholarly edition of her Welsh legend has been published in its entirety. Hystoria Gweryddon yr Almaen was adapted into Welsh by Sir Huw Pennant and it survives in a unique manuscript – Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Peniarth MS 182 (c. 1509–1514). The edition is accompanied by a full glossary, as well as detailed textual and linguistic notes, and information on the development and transmission of the legend. The peculiarities of the Welsh text are considered in the introduction as well as the similarities it shares with other versions. The volume also considers the wider cultural context of the legend and discusses the Welsh cult of St Ursula and her companions. Welsh tradition claims that Ursula was Welsh and she became associated with the church at Llangwyryfon in Ceredigion and other minor Welsh chapels.

A ground-breaking study of the lawbooks which were created in the changing social and political climate of post-conquest Wales.

The book shows how the Franciscans in Jerusalem in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries wrote works which standardized the cultural memory of the Holy Land. The experience of the late medieval Holy Land was deeply connected to the presence of the Franciscans of the Convent of Mount Zion in Jerusalem, who welcomed and guided pilgrims. This book analyses this construction of a shared memory based on the continuous availability of these texts in the Franciscan library of Mount Zion, where they were copied and adapted to respond to new historical contexts. This book shows how the Franciscans developed a representation of the Holy Land by elaborating on its history and describing its religious groups and the geography of the region. This representation circulated among pilgrims and influenced how contemporaries imagined the Holy Land

This book provides a new perspective on book history, with essays from leading scholars showing how communities of writers, publishers and readers across early modern Europe shaped the consumption of print.