ABSTRACT
The complex functions of pilgrimage and the different ways in which it was understood in the Late Antique world are the focus of this final section of papers. Noel Lenski examines the political and religious dimensions of pilgrimage to the Holy Land as they were created by a series of out-of-favor Empresses who constructed new spaces in Palestine in which to exercise their power and built the shrines that were to make pilgrimage to this part of the Mediterranean world a central feature of Christian piety from that day to this. Maribel Dietz analyzes the close connection between monastic asceticism and early Christian pilgrimage, arguing that it often took the form of an open-ended 'itinerant spirituality' that considered the journey itself, and not the arrival at a holy site or person, as the heart of the matter. She thereby warns us against an anachronistic conceptualization of pilgrimage based on its later medieval form. Like Lenski, she emphasizes the central role that women played in the early development of this type of Christian piety. Daniel Caner takes us in another direction as he shows how the distinctive cultural and physical geography of pilgrimage to Mount Sinai, when shaped by the conventions of the classic Greek romance, could be constructed imaginatively and used as a basis for re-examining a timeless theological conundrum~why do the innocent suffer and the evil prosper? Finally, Gillian Clark, like Maribel Dietz, warns us against overly simple and anachronistic assumptions about the conceptualization of pilgrimage in the Late Antique world. She shows us that Augustine of Hippo, that seminal figure in the formation of Latin Christianity, understood pilgrimage and the pilgrim in the classical philosophical sense of a 'foreigner ... who want[s] to go home'.
