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Article

French

ID: <

10.4000/medievales.6140

>

·

DOI: <

10.4000/medievales.6140

>

Where these data come from
Living a metaphor: Anglo-Saxon records of the voyage at sea in the 8th century

Abstract

While re-examining the questions of the origins of pilgrimage, recent publications suggested that contemporary observers considered the earliest religious travels more as another form of monasticism than as a religious practice characterized by a cluster of definite rituals and a network of distinct holy places. In this essay, using Ian Wood’s work on missionary hagiography, we will argue that Anglo-Saxon religious travellers from the seventh and eighth centuries still considered the peregrinatio pro Deo as the pursuit of withdrawal from the material world through physical movement. In order to justify this particular kind of religious devotion, which was, to many extents, too close to the kind of wandering monasticism denounced by the Benedictine Rule, authors used and developed the literary theme of travel by water, which could discourage criticism of the corrupting way of life lived by wandering monks within the secular world. The matching of the sea travel theme with the metaphor of the Christian as a traveller added to a “missionary” conception of the gens Anglorum’s history in establishing initial maritime journey as a necessary pre-condition of what could be properly considered as a peregrinatio by contemporary authors. The topic of water travel was comparatively neglected by continental authors of later missionary Lives. Nonetheless, it stamped its mark on early medieval Britain’s historiography, and also, maybe, on its literature.

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