Susan Signe Morrison

The story of the founding of the shrine at Walsingham tells of Richeldis de Faveraches, who in 1061 had a vision of Our Lady three times. The Virgin Mary led Richeldis "in spirit" to Nazareth where Gabriel greeted her in the House of the Annunciation. Richeldis then rebuilt the house she encountered in this vision.

Almost every monarch visited Walsingham beginning with Henry III. Women's devotion specifically to Walsingham can be seen in wills in which women leave money and goods to the shrine, such as rings, images and gowns. One of the two most popular English shrines along with Canterbury, Walsingham claimed to possess some of the Virgin Mary's milk, a drop of which she supposedly dropped while suckling the Christ child in a cave near Bethlehem hiding during the Massacre of the innocents. This milk was reputed to help women having problems with fertility or lactation. Milk signified not only femaleness, but motherhood, symbolic and literal. The significance of this relic of the Virgin Mary for women helps us to understand the motivations for their pilgrimaging which might have been might be milk-related -- lactatation difficulties, infertility, and childbirth anxiety. The depiction of mother saints in a public forum, a church on an important pilgrimage route, reinforces the perceived power of such saints and the women who identified with them. For many women pilgrims the route to Walsingham was, symbolically and literally, the Milky Way.

Women pilgrims in secular pilgrimage literature were invariably characterized as wandering women, most famously in the Wife of Bath, "wandrynge by the weye." Male pilgrims in secular pilgrimage literature were suspected of misbehavior, sometimes in terms of sexuality, while the suspicion towards fictional women pilgrims was virtually always concerned sexuality. Chaucer's Wife of Bath, on pilgrimage in The Canterbury Tales, is not the only ficticious woman figured as literally and figuratively wayward. The fifteenth-century poet John Lydgate, in a satirical poem warning young men against marriage, suggests that women go on pilgrimage to see and be seen. In one Middle English lyric a young woman, made pregnant by her dalliance with a clerk, decides to tell everyone she's been on pilgrimage -- as though that would explain her predicament. But not all women pilgrims were depicted as morally lax. Lydgate in different poem, this one dedicated to the Virgin Mary, refers to the immaculate conception of Christ as her first pilgrimage. This rich variety of fictional representations suggests that women's association with pilgrimage was a controversial subject in late medieval England.

'No doubt each reader will find a different aspect of this interesting book most illuminating…The scholarship on medieval women and religion has focused on ... women who by definition lived extraordinary lives, Morrison's contribution is an especially useful one.' - Shannon McGeffery, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

'Women Pilgrims in Late Medieval England will be a valuable aid to the study of late-medieval religious studies.' - Medium Aevum

'This is an exhaustively researched and necessary study in the wider field of pilgrimage, providing new insights into the place of women pilgrims in medieval society.' - Journeys