ABSTRACT
The songs of pilgrims passing to Jerusalem, Rome, and Santiago de Compostela narrated the histories of a Europe, whose boundaries, toward which they were marching, formed final borderposts at the end of the world and encompassed what they understood of worldliness. The pilgrim's song is never separable from the place in which it is performed or the movement that signifies the journey itself, that is the context for the path toward the final borderpost at the sacred site. Moving along and across boundaries, pilgrims symbolically cross from one world to the next, with their arrival at the sacred site of the final borderpost marking the arrival at the boundary between the physical and sacred worlds. The metaphysical nature of the pilgrim's recognition of the boundary subverts the other conditions that define the boundary. The sacred community that musical performance brings about further breaks down national borders as multilingual texts accrue to the resistant strategies of the song itself.
