While the form of certain aspects of a pilgrimage account, most significantly the descriptions of the holy places, was non-negotiable, the shape of other features, even those apparently based on shared experiences, could vary in accordance with the intentions of the pilgrim author. This is particularly true of our four pilgrims’ responses to encounters with other religious groups. The importance of religious affiliation as a signifier of ‘communal and personal identity’ in the late-medieval world is undeniable, but it does not therefore follow that medieval encounters with the unfamiliar necessarily need to be understood as ‘other’ in a cultural-theoretical sense. Indeed, there is a spectrum of responses between simple encounters with other religions and, as we shall see, Bernhard von Breydenbach's construction of a monolithic and hostile religious other, and this has an attendant range of implications for the creation or reinforcement of identity.

The Religious Other and Identity Construction

Given that pilgrims to Jerusalem encountered people of other religious identities in a specific geographical context, travelling eastwards out of Europe, it is unsurprising that we encounter attitudes reminiscent of Edward Said's analysis of the ‘European invention’ of the Orient, a type of outlook not confined to post-Enlightenment western imperialism, but with a much longer history. These encounters fall into three categories: Islam (an anachronistic term, as far as the people of the western Middle Ages are concerned), Judaism, and non-Latin Christianity, each of which potentially occupies a different space of constructed otherness.

The otherness of Islam was perceived to be geographically distant and relatively unknown. European comprehension of Islam on a religious or theological level was limited: one popular miscomprehension, which had provided useful crusading propaganda, cast Muhammad as a god of the pagan pantheon, a view that endured despite attempts from the twelfth century onwards to develop a better understanding. In the fourteenth century South English Legendary, for example, St Katherine recommends to the emperor that he forsake Muhammad and honour God above all others. By the late fifteenth century, however, there was more recognition of Muhammad's status as a prophet, rather than as a figure for worship.