VIATOR Medieval and Renaissance Studies VOLUME 48, No. 3
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VIATOR Medieval and Renaissance Studies VOLUME 48, No. 3 © BREPOLS PUBLISHERS THIS DOCUMENT MAY BE PRINTED FOR PRIVATE USE ONLY. IT MAY NOT BE DISTRIBUTED WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER. VIATOR MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES Volume 48, No. 3 (2017) PUBLISHED UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE CENTER FOR MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES FH VIATOR MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES Founded by Lynn White, jr. (1907–1987) EDITOR Henry Ansgar Kelly (University of California, Los Angeles) ASSOCIATE EDITOR Blair Sullivan (University of California, Los Angeles) EDITORIAL BOARD Courtney M. Booker (University of British Columbia) Michael Borgolte (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) Jean-Claude Carron (University of California, Los Angeles) Albrecht Diem (Syracuse University) Matthew Fisher (University of California, Los Angeles) Patrick J. Geary (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and University of California, Los Angeles) Sharon Gerstel (University of California, Los Angeles) Chris Jones (University of Canterbury, Christchurch) Katherine McLoone (California State University, Long Beach) Fabrizio Meroi (Università di Trento) Constant Mews (Monash University) Andrea Moudarres (University of California, Los Angeles) Cary J. Nederman (Texas A&M University) Thomas O’Donnell (Fordham University) Kristen Lee Over (Northeastern Illinois University) Eric Palazzo (Université de Poitiers) Walter Pohl (Institut für Mittelalterforschung, Wien) Richard M. Pollard (University of British Columbia) Helmut Reimitz (Princeton University) Richard H. Rouse (University of California, Los Angeles) Kristine Tanton (Pomona College) Manuscripts should be sent as e-mail attachments to Heather Sottong, [email protected]. Intercultural and interdisciplinary articles are of particular interest. © 2017, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium ISSN: 0083 -5897 ISBN: 978-2-503-57250-5 D/2017/0095/310 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy- ing, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Card Number 71-111417 © BREPOLS PUBLISHERS THIS DOCUMENT MAY BE PRINTED FOR PRIVATE USE ONLY. IT MAY NOT BE DISTRIBUTED WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER. CONTENTS Ideas of Empire: A Comparative Study in Anglo-Saxon and Spanish Political Thought (from the Eighth to the Twelfth Century) CHRISTOPH MAUNTEL 1 Arctic Frontiers: Rethinking Norse-Sámi Relations in the Old Norse Sagas ELEANOR ROSAMUND BARRACLOUGH 27 The Black Rood of Scotland: A Social and Political Life JULIANNA GRIGG 53 Public Debate, Propaganda, and Public Opinion in the Becket Controversy LEIDULF MELVE 79 Why are there Two Medieval Copies of the Holy Sepulcher in Pisa? A Comparative Analysis of San Sepolcro and the Baptistery NETA B. BODNER 103 William Longbeard: A Rebel Holy Man of Twelfth-Century England DOMINIC ALEXANDER 125 Despair and Presumption in Late Twelfth- and Early Thirteenth-Century Pastoral Care PHILIPPA BYRNE 151 Themata sermonum in Skálholt: AM 241b Iα fol. and Uppsala UB C 301 ASTRID MARNER 169 Adaptation and Assemblage: The Fourteenth-Century Antichrist Compilation as a Courtly Manual for Salvation KARLYN GRIFFITH 191 The Elaboration and Transmission of Historical Knowledge in Fourteenth-Century Venice: Andrea Dandolo’s Chronica Brevis as a Catalyst of History Writing MIIKA KUHA 233 Transformations in Wood: Between Sculpture and Painting in Late Medieval Devotional Objects ASSAF PINKUS 263 Aristotele nel chiostro: un episodio inedito della ricezione umanistica fiorentina dell’Etica Nicomachea LEONARDO GIORGETTI 293 Pilgrimage and Travel Writing in Early Sixteenth-Century England: The Pilgrimage Accounts of Thomas Larke and Robert Langton ROB LUTTON 333 © BREPOLS PUBLISHERS THIS DOCUMENT MAY BE PRINTED FOR PRIVATE USE ONLY. IT MAY NOT BE DISTRIBUTED WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER. PILGRIMAGE AND TRAVEL WRITING IN EARLY SIXTEENTH- CENTURY ENGLAND: THE PILGRIMAGE ACCOUNTS OF THOMAS LARKE AND ROBERT LANGTON Rob Lutton Abstract: By 1500 more than 500 written accounts of the Jerusalem pilgrimage alone had been produced in the West, and yet such works continued to be written and, increasingly, printed. How did these works retain their popularity, who was writing them, and why? To address these questions, this article compares two early sixteenth-century English printed pilgrim guidebooks. It examines their distinctive features, charts their authors’ careers and social and professional networks, and identifies, for the first time, the author of The Pylgrymage of Sir Richarde Guylforde, printed by Richard Pynson in 1511. It reveals the different ways in which two educated and eminently well-connected clerics adapted a conventional literary genre to address shared concerns and interests. Both works demonstrate how humanist learning, religious reformism, heresy, and new ideas about the nature and purpose of travel were reshaping religiously orthodox conceptions of pilgrimage before the Reformation. Keywords: England, pilgrimage, travel, humanism, writing, reading, printing, orthodoxy, heresy, reformism. The middle-ranking English ecclesiast Robert Langton was licensed to go on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella, Rome, and other destinations in October 1511. He probably departed soon afterwards.1 His extensive travels in France, Spain, Italy, and Germany are documented in The pylgrimage of Master Robert Langton clerke to saynt James in Compostell and in other holy places of Crystendome, printed by Robert Copland in 1522.2 An introduction explains how the work sets out the towns that Langton visited followed by a gloss “declarynge many thynges conteyned in the same townes.” It then makes this statement about the Jerusalem pilgrimage: And as for the way with pylgrymage and knowledge of the same to Jerusalem and places of the holy lande I remyt you to mayster Larkes boke made of the same, wherin he comprehendeth all thinges concernynge that holy pylgrymage, in so muche that ye redynge the same shall seme rather to se it then rede it. And to me and other englysshe pylgrymes that went this yere it was grete light guyde and conducte by the which we knewe many thinges that by the freres there we sholde not haue knowen. And though in yt werke he putteth not his name I trust it is put in libro vite for that blyssed and good dede.3 Department of History, University of Nottingham, Lenton Grove, University Park Campus, Nottingham, UK, NG7 2RD, [email protected]. I would like to thank Anthony Bale, Kathryne Beebe, Gwilym Dodd, Alison McHardy, Thorlac Turville-Petre, colleagues at the University of Nottingham’s Department of History Research Seminar, and the anonymous readers from Viator for their many helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. 1 Henry Summerson, “Langton, Robert (1470–1524),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [Hereafter ODNB]. 2 English Short Title Catalogue [Hereafter ESTC], 2nd ed. 15206. A single copy survives in Lincoln Cathedral Library and a facsimile edition can be found in Two Pilgrim Itineraries of the Later Middle Ages, ed. Robert Brian Tate and Thorlac Turville-Petre (Santiago 1995) which supersedes The Pilgrimage of Robert Langton, ed. E.M. Blackie (Cambridge, Mass. 1924). 3 Two Pilgrim Itineraries (n. 2 above) fol. 2a (p. 95). Langton’s text does not date his travels, but the phrase “…that went this yere…” implies that he visited Jerusalem on the same trip, that is at some point between leaving England in 1511 or, more likely, 1512 and his return in 1514. Langton’s arms in the surviving stained glass from his antechapel at the Queen’s college Oxford include emblems that reference St Anthony of Egypt and St Catharine of Sinai which suggest he also reached these destinations: ibid. 153–156 and plates 2 and 3. See also, R.B. Tate, “Robert Langton, Pilgrim (1470–1524),” Nottingham Medieval Studies, 39 (1995) 182–191, at 189–190. Viator 48 No. 3 (2017) 333–357. 10.1484/J.VIATOR.5.116358 334 ROB LUTTON Until now the identity of “mayster Larkes boke,” which Langton and his fellow pilgrims found so useful, has remained a mystery. The present article makes a case for the identification of both the book and its author and assesses the implications of these findings for the changing nature of English pilgrimage and travel writing in the early sixteenth century. In so doing it joins other recent contributions to the field of medieval pilgrimage and travel writing that attend to the historical specificity and significance of particular works that were part of a very large genre. Whereas scholarship has rightly drawn attention to the conventional and derivative nature of the pilgrimage literature of the later Middle Ages, not least because of its heavy intertextual borrowing, more recent work has emphasized its variety, and the ways in which individual authors worked within established conventions to assert their own interests and aims; what F. Thomas Noonan terms “variation within sameness.”4 By 1500 more than 500 written accounts of the Jerusalem pilgrimage had been produced in the West.5 Perhaps the most well-known, Sir John Mandeville’s Book of Marvels and Travels, was enormously popular across Europe as a whole, and in England retained its place as the standard reference work on the sacred sites of the Holy Land. This was in large part owing to its artful blend of alleged first-hand experience and wide range of written sources. At least