ABSTRACT
T he Book's image is of a woman making the supreme Christian journeys to the holiest of sites - Jerusalem, the Holy Land and Rome, and, in between visits to them, passing through Venice, unique as a Christian city in its combination of awesome cults and worldly splendour. True to its nature and purpose, in these sublime contexts The Book focuses on its subject’s feelings, in contrast to some other fifteenthcentury narratives, whose fuller observations about places, peoples and customs can be used to counterpoint its more haphazard evidence, underscoring the accuracy of its cursory references and expanding on their significance. Indeed, these feelings are particularly valuable, in that they provide unusual evidence; the reactions of a woman to the great pilgrimages and to Venetian gorgeousness, and their impact on her pious mentality. Moreover, in order to sustain her credibility, the im pressions her amanuensis recorded had to accord with the stereotypes embraced by the clerical and secular elites of Lynn. We have in The Book striking fragments of evidence for established views in a northern Euro pean port about cities and places in the Mediterranean whose profiles were among the highest in Western Christendom.
