The Pilgrimage Journey as a Symbol of Female Quest in Unquiet Women
The Pilgrimage Journey: A Literal and Symbolic Passage
In Unquiet Women, the pilgrimage journey operates as a concrete, recurring motif that links women separated by centuries and continents. At its most literal, the pilgrimage is a physical voyage—a hard, dangerous, and exhausting trek across land and sea toward a sacred destination. Egeria, a fourth-century Gaulish nun, undertakes a three-thousand-mile journey from the Atlantic coast to Jerusalem, where she spends three years touring Egypt, Sinai, and Asia Minor. A millennium later, Margery Kempe, a middle-class mother of fourteen from King’s Lynn, retraces a similar route, visiting Venice, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Rome. Between them, the Icelandic explorer Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir sails across the North Atlantic to give birth to a child on American soil. These are not metaphorical voyages—they involve real ships, roads, deserts, mountains, and imperial escort posts—but they consistently function as more than simple travel. The pilgrimage becomes a vehicle for female knowledge-seeking, spiritual affirmation, and a hard-won autonomy unavailable within the domestic sphere.
The symbol works by merging outward geography with inward transformation. When Egeria climbs Mount Sinai, she carries the Bible as her guidebook and the landscape as revelation of its literal truth. Her physical ascent mirrors a spiritual and intellectual climb: she records the precise height, the number of peaks, the vegetable gardens cultivated by monks, and the emotional texture of Easter liturgy at the Anastasis. The journey is simultaneously an act of devotion, an archaeological survey, and a personal adventure. Max Adams notes that her writings are a unique record of a woman’s “restless thirst for adventure and hunger to affirm her faith by the physical experience of immersion in the lands of the Bible.” The pilgrimage, for Egeria, validates her faith through sensory experience—the smell of censers, the blaze of lamps, the taste of mountain fruits offered by ascetic monks.
Recurring Footprints from the Holy Land to the Atlantic
The motif repeats with striking consistency across the book’s fifteen-century span. Egeria’s fourth-century travels establish a template that later women consciously or unconsciously follow. The author explicitly positions her as a founding canon for those “unquenchably curious women like Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, Margery Kempe and Celia Fiennes, for whom the thrill and risk of travel are irresistible.” This lineage is deliberate. Each woman’s journey echoes earlier ones while adapting the pilgrimage form to her own era and needs.
Margery Kempe, traveling around 1413, visits the same Jerusalem sites Egeria described, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which appears in the book’s Plate Section specifically to anchor the textual accounts in tangible geography. Where Egeria’s account of the Holy Sepulchre is rich in liturgical detail—the gold, jewels, silk, and “sheer weight of the candles”—Margery’s response is intensely kinaesthetic and emotional. She falls down with her candle, as if she would die for sorrow, then rises with weeping and sobbing. Her pilgrimage is less an observational tour than a physical convulsion of spiritual empathy, but it operates within the same symbolic framework: the female body moving through sacred space, experiencing grace directly rather than receiving it through male ecclesiastical mediation.
Gudrid’s Atlantic voyages extend the symbol beyond the Holy Land. Her journey is not a traditional pilgrimage to Jerusalem but a traversal of the known world’s edge that carries a comparable spiritual and existential weight. She gives birth to the first European child on American soil, turning exploration into a generative act. The book presents her alongside Egeria in the introductory chapter as one of four representative figures, suggesting that the sea journey to Vinland functions as a pilgrimage of its own kind—equally demanding, equally transformative, and equally driven by a questing female spirit.
Celia Fiennes, riding through late-seventeenth-century England, secularizes the pilgrimage further without breaking the symbolic chain. She travels not to sacred sites but to country houses, manufacturing towns, and inns, yet Adams places her on “the same trail of wanderlust and unquiet curiosity” as her pilgrim forebears. She relies not on God’s protection alone but on a good horse, common sense, and a full purse. Her pilgrimage becomes social geography—the first by an English woman—and her curiosity about linen manufactories and beer quality marks the evolving shape of the motif as it shifts from purely spiritual quest toward empirical observation of the world.
Changing Meanings Across Eras
The pilgrimage journey’s meaning shifts alongside the women who undertake it, reflecting broad changes in female opportunity, religious culture, and travel infrastructure. For Egeria, writing in the late fourth century when the Roman Empire’s arm was still long, the journey represents a surprisingly accessible form of female mobility. She travels with companions, meets bishops, receives military escorts between forts, and moves confidently through Egypt, Sinai, and Asia Minor. Adams remarks on the apparent paradox: a nun from the Atlantic West could undertake this extensive tour without getting into trouble. The pilgrimage symbolizes a window of possibility—a woman operating within a protected Christian network that temporarily suspends normal restrictions. Her voice in the surviving manuscript is enthusiastic, slightly waspish, and wholly unapologetic about her curiosity.
By Margery Kempe’s era, the pilgrimage carries heavier social penalties. Her travels are repeatedly interrupted by conflict: traveling companions find her unbearable, she is expelled from fellowships, arrested, tried before clergy, accused of Lollardy and heresy. The physical journey remains possible, but the female pilgrim now navigates suspicion and hostility. Her crying fits—fourteen in one day, by her own count—alienate observers who diagnose drunkenness, sickness, or demonic vexation. The pilgrimage becomes a double-edged symbol: it grants Margery direct access to sacred sites and mystical experience, but it also marks her as transgressive. Unlike Egeria, who fits comfortably into an established network of monastic hospitality, Margery constantly disrupts the communities she enters. Her white robes—worn despite having borne fourteen children—are “thought offensively hypocritical,” and her outpourings provoke the wish that she were “in the harbour.”
Gudrid offers yet another variation. Her pilgrimage across the North Atlantic lacks institutional Christian framing; it is exploration, settlement, and motherhood braided together. The symbolic meaning expands to encompass geographical discovery and cultural encounter. The female journey here produces something tangible: a child born on a new continent, a European presence in North America, a lineage. The risk is existential rather than social—survival against the sea and an unfamiliar land.
Celia Fiennes’s late-seventeenth-century travels shift the symbol from sacred to secular terrain. She lays an inspirational trail for future women travel writers, but Adams notes that she pursues adventure “for its own sake, and for her own pleasure.” The pilgrimage no longer requires a divine destination; the act of curious, independent movement itself becomes the point. This evolution traces a gradual emancipation of the motif from explicitly religious contexts toward a more generalized female autonomy rooted in observation and self-direction.
Connections to Character and Theme
The pilgrimage journey intersects with several of the book’s major themes and characters. The theme of Recovery of Women’s History is directly served by the survival of pilgrimage accounts. Egeria’s manuscript, unearthed in Arezzo in 1884, was almost completely unknown to historians before the late nineteenth century. Margery Kempe’s Book, recognized only in 1934, is now regarded as the first English autobiography. These journey narratives are accidental survivors—fragments of parchment that preserve female voices that male historical record-keeping systematically ignored. The pilgrimage symbol becomes an archival structure: the physical journey creates a written record, and the record becomes evidence for the recovery project.
The theme of Religious Life as Dual-Edged Tool appears powerfully in the pilgrimage motif. Egeria draws authority from the ecclesiastical network—she meets bishops, stays in monastic cells, participates in liturgy—and her travel is enabled by the very institution that might otherwise confine her. Margery experiences the sharper edge: the same church that provides the sacred sites she visits also tries her for heresy and condemns her preaching. The pilgrimage grants her visionary intimacy with Christ while exposing her to official censure. The journey symbolizes both the freedom religious devotion can offer women and the institutional boundaries it polices.
Character connections multiply. Egeria serves as the archetype, her energy and optimism setting a standard that echoes through later figures. Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir extends the journey into geographical extremity. Margery Kempe—though not given her own dedicated character page in the provided internal links—anchors the medieval iteration with her raw, confessional autobiography. Celia Fiennes culminates the sequence, riding her good horse into a recognizable modernity. The pilgrimage binds these figures across the book’s kaleidoscopic structure, demonstrating continuity in female mobility and curiosity from the dusk of the Roman Empire to the dawn of the Enlightenment.
The theme of Women’s Agency Through Material Culture surfaces in the physical details pilgrims record. Egeria catalogs lamps, silk, gold, jewels, and mountain fruits. Celia Fiennes notes the mechanics of cider-making and linen manufacturing. The journey produces observation of the material world, and that observation becomes a form of female expertise—knowledge gathered firsthand, without male intermediaries. The pilgrim’s eye for detail translates physical experience into authoritative testimony.
Study Questions and Answers
1. How does Egeria’s pilgrimage differ from Margery Kempe’s in its relationship to ecclesiastical authority, and what does this difference reveal about the changing position of the female traveler?
Egeria moves within a supportive ecclesiastical network: monks receive her hospitably, a presbyter guides her up Sinai, bishops offer blessings, and soldiers escort her caravan. She records these interactions with calm confidence, noting that a bishop is “a holy man, a true man of God”—a colleague in faith rather than a potential adversary. Margery Kempe, by contrast, faces repeated ecclesiastical hostility. She is arrested, tried for heresy, condemned for preaching, and expelled from pilgrim fellowships. The difference reflects a millennium of institutional tightening around female speech and mobility. Egeria’s fourth-century world, for all its dangers, allowed a nun under imperial protection unusual latitude. By Margery’s fifteenth-century England, the church had codified prohibitions against female preaching and scrutinized lay spirituality for heretical deviation. The pilgrimage remains possible for both women, but the symbolic cost has risen sharply.
2. Why might Max Adams include Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir in the same pilgrimage tradition as Egeria, even though Gudrid’s journey was not to the Holy Land?
Adams frames the pilgrimage tradition around curiosity, risk, and physical immersion in new worlds rather than strictly around Jerusalem. Gudrid’s Atlantic crossing demands comparable endurance, courage, and departure from domestic constraints. She sails beyond the known map, gives birth on American soil, and participates in an act of geographical creation that parallels Egeria’s spiritual discovery of biblical landscapes. The inclusion broadens the symbol to encompass any female journey that transforms the traveler and expands human knowledge—whether sacred or secular, eastward or westward. It also allows the book to trace female mobility outside purely Christian frameworks, showing Viking-age women undertaking journeys of equivalent symbolic weight.
3. How does the pilgrimage journey function as a tool for the recovery of women’s history in this book?
Female pilgrimage narratives survive as rare first-person testimonies in an archival landscape dominated by male-generated documents. Egeria’s account preserves a woman’s voice from the 380s—enthusiastic, observant, occasionally sharp—that would otherwise be entirely lost. Margery Kempe’s Book represents the first autobiography in English, dictated to a scribe (possibly her son) in Middle English rather than clerical Latin. These texts are accidents of preservation, but Adams treats them as deliberate counterweights to the gendered exclusion Mary Astell diagnosed in her 1705 epigraph. The physical journey generates a written record; the written record becomes evidence for the recovery project. Without the pilgrimage, these women’s lives would remain invisible. The symbol works doubly: it represents both the historical reality of female travel and the archival mechanism by which that travel becomes known to us.
4. In what ways does Celia Fiennes secularize the pilgrimage motif while remaining recognizable within the tradition Adams traces?
Celia Fiennes rides through England noting cider presses, linen manufactories, and the quality of inn beer rather than venerating relics or attending Easter liturgy. Her destinations are country houses and market towns, not sacred sites. Yet Adams explicitly connects her to the pilgrim tradition, describing her as pursuing adventure along “the same trail of wanderlust and unquiet curiosity.” The secularization lies in motivation and object: she travels for pleasure and empirical observation rather than salvation. But the underlying structure—a woman moving independently through space, recording her own experience, trusting her own powers of observation—remains constant. She relies on a good horse rather than divine protection, but the horse serves the same symbolic function as Egeria’s faith: it enables female mobility. By the late seventeenth century, the pilgrimage has evolved from sacred duty into autonomous exploration, but the female traveler’s curiosity and courage form an unbroken thread back to the nun climbing Sinai in the 380s.