Taken together, the writings of William Wey, Bernhard von Breydenbach, Arnold von Harff, and Thomas Larke illustrate simultaneously the diversity and the consistency to be found across national boundaries in the corpus of western European pilgrimage writing in the late Middle Ages. They display the shared religious culture that operated at the centre of Christendom and on its borders, demonstrating both those aspects of the pilgrim experience that had to be consistent – the entry into the conceptual space at the heart of the pilgrimage – and equally the breadth of style, form, experience, and information that can be found within the corpus, understood as a hybrid genre. The variety present across these four works makes their formulaic aspects all the more remarkable. This variety, indeed, can be present even within one text. Wey demonstrates diversity of form in his trialling of genre and text type, and he shows a desire to collect as much information as possible on different Christian topics in order to complement his own repeated pilgrimages, even attempting to harmonise the real and conceptual Jerusalems. Breydenbach uses his text as an opportunity to preach and to attempt to repair the problems he sees in western Christendom, both by means of positive identity formation and by marginalisation of the other. Harff uses his text as an opportunity to witness, virtually, the wonders of the East, and his literal pilgrimage as an opportunity to know and learn about the novelties, secular and religious, which he encounters on the way. Larke, like Wey, seeks to convey religious knowledge and, like Harff, he travels textually as well as literally in the course of his writing. Unlike Harff, however, the travel is exclusively religious, and unlike Wey, the information is all on one theme – he aims to record as many pilgrimage sites as possible. All four texts then come together in style and atmosphere in their encounters with the holy places.

At least some of the variety present in these writings can be traced to their different geographical origins. This is often a matter of the historical circumstances of late-medieval Germany and England. The absence of Jews in contemporary English life affects their textual treatment by English pilgrims. For Wey and for Larke, they are figures mostly consigned to history, and, where they appear in the contemporary world, they are a novelty.