Matthew Paris' Itinerary and Imaginary Pilgrimages

There are many debates over what the purpose of Matthew Paris' itinerary map was used for. One major argument on the reason for Paris to create his itinerary was to give his fellow cloistered monks a chance to attend pilgrimages to holy places that they could not physically go on. The itinerary illustrates the route that a person on pilgrimage would take from London to Rome. This is not a traditional map, but uses graphics and illustrations in a vertical justification to guide the “pilgrims” through the various towns and landwards along the way. In actuality this itinerary was not meant to act a a map for a physical journey. It was essentially a tool for monks in St. Albans to use for imagined pilgrimages to Rome. This illustrated itinerary helped the cloistered monastic communities to use their hearts and not the their feet to makes pilgrimages. Each illustration allowed them to visualize each location along the route. The monks were ultimately able to achieve their goal of “Attaining vision of God, moving the soul from this world to the Heavens begin with the texts (and images) inscribed in the physical and material world of the manuscript page.”¹

The organization of the itinerary is in a vertical or “strip-map” justification. This allows for the paths from London and Italy to be easily visible. Each page was organized into two columns, and as Suzanne Lewis describes they are, separated by bands lightly tinted in blue, pink, pale rose, and green, and each segment is read from the lower left corner from bottom to top. This wide range of colours appears to be very common in Paris' illustrations, especially blue. One reason for such colourful maps could be to help differentiate between different locales, help divide regions, or to help guide the reader along a specific path. Additionally, the distance between each locale is depicted on a vertical line and for the most part is a day's journey (jurnee).² Moreover, the representation of the various towns and villages along the journey were visible evident, for as explained by Lewis, “(e)ach town is captioned and marked by an architectural vignette comprising crenellated walls, towers, and churches.”³ The importance of these visual representations are that they give the monks a very specific image in order to fully conceptualize their pilgrimage with as much detail as possible.

Furthermore, the itinerary, along with Paris' other maps present their readers with locales that many not be to scale or actually exist, but as Lewis argues, “it expresses a typical medieval conception of the map's real function...to emphasize the most interesting or significant localities.”⁴ This organizational structure of the cities and roads, makes them appear to “occupy an ambiguous space, at once charged with the concreteness of their labels and limited topography and abstracted from their surrounding geogra-phy by their ambivalent relationship to their frames.”⁵ Thus, it can be argued that because the monks were not actually completing this pilgrimage in reality, they were most concerned with particular locales being represented within the itinerary, and less on having them presented on a precise and accurate scale or be on a direct path to their final destination.

Additionally, the way in which Paris organizes and presents his itinerary to his audience is representative to his view of history, which is very teleologic. It is Paris' belief (along with other Catholics of this time) that they are working within a “Divine Plan” being instructed by God. This explains why all of his maps and geography are pointing towards regions of great religious importance and are based around religious pilgrimages. These places are holy sites, which may contain various important relics that would familiar to the Benedictine monks who would go on this “pilgrimage.”

Overall Paris' itinerary, presents his audience with a very dynamic and interactive representation of a specific journey, but also symbolizes their life journey as Catholics. Essentially, this maps keep his audience in motion. It keeps them constantly moving forward toward their final destination, which in this case is a real holy city. However, this can figuratively correlate with both their personal “final destination” of heaven, or the Catholic “final destination” as told in the Book of Revelations.

1 Daniel K. Connolly, "Imagined Pilgrimage in the Itinerary Maps of Matthew Paris," The Art Bulletin 81, no. 4 (1999): pp., 599.

2 Suzanne Lewis The Art of Matthew Paris (Berkley: University of California Press, 1987), 323.

3 Lewis, 323.

4 Lewis, 322.

5 Connolly, 606.