ABSTRACT
Maeve Hickey here explores the powerful interaction of people and place at the core of pilgrimage. In the Marian sites at Knock and Lourdes and in Padre Poi's San Giovanni, the sacred personages overpower the natural landscape, and church institutions produce a steady stream of religious objects: exportable versions of the pilgrimage experience. The photographs reveal the importance of pilgrimage to nationalism from Ireland's association with the mountain on which its patron saint, Patrick, spent a Mosaic month battling evil to what we might call the local nationalisms' of Maltese towns people with their joyful devotion to their own saint. The images also reveal the often gendered character of pilgrimages, whether in the preponderance of women and their particular quests in some of the international pilgrimages, or in the intensely performed masculinities of Croagh Patrick mountaineers and white-robed carriers of the Maltese saints.
