Medievalish 4.7
Read like a Pilgrim
Dear friend,
I hope you are knee-deep in summer right now, in bicycle rides and pulling weeds in the garden and margaritas outside with friends and some plan for watery adventure. I hope you have a fun, easy book for summer, the kind which compels you to stay up way too late even though you know you will regret it tomorrow when the toddler is up at 5.
I would like to suggest that you also read an old book.
Admittedly, reading old books is hard and kind of flies against the beach read summer vibe. I have had the benefit of many years of schooling to get me to a place of regularly reading old books and actually enjoying them even when (or occasionally, when I’m lucky, especially when) they are difficult. No shame in them being hard. It’s simply a reality.
There are many reasons for their difficulty: cultural and historical contexts, ancient and challenging vocabulary, different forms. But one reason it can be hard to read old books, less discussed and less immediately apparent, is because we, good postmodern capitalists, are used to being consumers as readers. We like to binge, gobble, acquire as we read. The less resistance, the easier, like those professional eaters in hot dog eating contests who drink a lot of water to get the dry buns down. I love reading like this sometimes, I do not think it is always a bad thing! But if we are used to reading only this way, when we can’t immediately understand something, or when we are forced to go more slowly, we can lose interest, or we fall into ways of interpreting that impede us in full communion with the books of the past. We look for what we understand; we ignore what we don’t, intentionally or accidentally.
If you follow me on Instagram, you might have seen an incredibly dorky post of me reciting the Canterbury Tales General Prologue in front of Canterbury Cathedral in May.1 Pilgrimage has been on my mind. Summer is a traditional season for it, too.
Undertaken as penance, in fulfillment of promises, or out of love, pilgrimages were completed by many different members of society. Imagine a blend of modern-day wanderlust, of vows and promises, and of the rather unfamiliar medieval sentiment, felt strongly, that you, earthworm that you are, are now holier simply because you are in a particular patch of dirt. Chaucer writes of a motley company of twenty-nine who set out for the martyr St. Thomas a Becket’s grave at Canterbury, telling stories all along the way to pass the time. When spring pricks at the brooding breasts of birds, and the west wind grows softer and sweeter on the skin, then
…longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes.”
…Folk long to go on pilgrimages,
And pilgrims to seek strange shores
To faraway hallowed places, known in many lands.
Reading old books is not unlike visiting those strange shores and faraway hallows. L.P. Hartley’s note that “The Past is a foreign country; they do things differently there” is nearly a cliché now, but like many a cliché, its truth stubbornly clings. When we read books from the past, we can perform a sort of time travel. But readers can travel in very different ways. One can travel like a tourist, wearing flashy shirts and searching for where someone can find a godforsaken burger in this country. One can be looking for rest and ease, ready to collapse into an all-inclusive resort and escape from the infernal demands of email, news, social media, and other accoutrements of postmodernity.
Take Julian of Norwich, well-known and well-beloved by readers of spiritual classics. T.S. Eliot launched her into the public consciousness by quoting one of her greatest lines in one of his greatest poems: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” It is glorious in Little Gidding. Yet one great temptation in reading her—or reading any book of the past—is to read like a tourist, to slurp up the familiar comestibles, the “all shall be wells,” and reject the skimpy medieval pickings served up in the anchorite cell.
But pilgrims travel to be formed by both their travel and destination. They travel to a particular place because of that place’s particularity, not because they want to lovingly find themselves there as in a mirror. Perhaps they will find themselves there, but that is not the point. The point is to be present in that place, in all its particularity. It doesn’t even mean you have to like it.
In fact, for medieval pilgrims the journey was often rather difficult. For every Margery Kempe, the great fifteenth-century pilgrim and mystic roaring her way to Rome and Jerusalem and Norwich and back to her home in King’s Lynn, there was a Lady Beatrice Roos, benefactress of anchorites, whose husband, son, and brother-in-law each died on various pilgrimages during Julian’s lifetime.2
I hope your reading will not resemble the unfortunate ends of the male relatives of Lady Beatrice. However, acknowledging the difficulty, the uniqueness of each book, and letting it shape and form you and invite you into newness rather than trying to manage it is one of the great gifts of old books. They are as as worthwhile and particular, as long-hallowed as Compostela or Jerusalem or Canterbury.
Happy summer reading! (And happy summer traveling, if you are!).
What I’ve been up to this month:
Writing!
Last month, I finished recording the audiobook for Ask of Old Paths: Medieval Virtues & Vices for a Whole and Holy Life. It was a blast! Stay tuned for new book updates here!
About to return from my social media summer break next week. See you all for book launch season 😍📚 and in prep for a whole new season of Old Books with Grace.
What I’ve been reading this month:
Nonfiction: Tiya Miles’ Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People
Fiction: Not much these days, alas, but I did read part of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang over my son’s shoulder… did you know Ian Fleming of James Bond fame wrote it?!
Medieval/Medieval-adjacent: Loads of Richard Rolle & Walter Hilton these days
Article: “Why do So Many People Think Trump is Good?” an ode to philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre by David Brooks at The Atlantic
A Prayer from the Past
This month’s prayer is from the great St. John Henry Newman (1801-1890), Roman Catholic theologian and cardinal. I have excerpted it from a longer prayer to Jesus, the Hidden God:
O my God, Thou dost over-abound in mercy! To live by faith is my necessity, from my present state of being and from my sin; but Thou hast pronounced a blessing on it. Thou hast said that I am more blessed if I believe on Thee, than if I saw Thee. Give me to share that blessedness, give it to me in its fulness. Enable me to believe as if I saw; let me have Thee always before me as if Thou wert always bodily and sensibly present. Let me ever hold communion with Thee, my hidden, but my living God. Thou art in my innermost heart. Thou art the life of my life. Every breath I breathe, every thought of my mind, every good desire of my heart, is from the presence within me of the unseen God. By nature and by grace Thou art in me. I see Thee not in the material world except dimly, but I recognise Thy voice in my own intimate consciousness. I turn round and say Rabboni. O be ever thus with me; and if I am tempted to leave Thee, do not Thou, O my God, leave me!
Amen.
Peace for your July,
Grace
P.S. Medievalish is free, and I’d be delighted if you shared it with a friend!
P.P.S. I do not do paid subscriptions any more, but if you’d like to put money in the tip jar, I can promise you it will go straight to books that fuel this newsletter, podcast, and any future books I write.
(Cue Miranda Priestly voice: florals for spring? Chaucer in Canterbury? groundbreaking).
Ann K. Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons in Medieval England (University of California Press, 1985), 197.
Great analogy! I have been pondering how I might encourage some of my readers to engage with hard books. I think most of them do, but I have some friends who subscribe whom I would like to inspire!
Thank you for sharing the Brooks piece. It is helpful! I am generally avoiding news sources at the moment, so I had missed it.
It definitely resonates with me to think of the way we typically read books is in order to "consume" them. Thanks for this invitation to immerse myself in an old book this summer. Having studied medieval history in college, I vividly remember that feeling of reading those old books. Once you get past the old vocabulary, you really do travel to a different place. On a side note, reading The Wife of Bath made me want to major in medieval history ❤️