The Jerusalem pilgrimage was no small undertaking in the fifteenth century. Pilgrims could spend the best part of a year or more travelling, and yet not even manage two weeks in the Holy Land. They faced dangers to their pocket – the Jerusalem pilgrimage could cost them more than a year's wages – and to their bodies – death was a constant risk, and pilgrims routinely made their wills before departing. Thousands, though, were drawn to make the journey each year. Although only a minority of these travellers chose to document their pilgrimages in writing, textual representations of pilgrimage increased sharply in the second half of the fifteenth century. It is therefore worth considering these representations as a literary phenomenon and, more importantly, an international literary phenomenon, drawing on a shared international religious culture about to undergo earth-shattering change. While late-medieval pilgrim authors were writing in an essentially pre-national world, we see an emerging understanding of what might now be termed national difference, and certainly a growing awareness of cultural differences between and amongst western pilgrims themselves, even as they frequently sought to define themselves against an external other. This book therefore looks at four pilgrimages created in writing at the close of the Middle Ages by two writers from each of two cultural sub-contexts that would now be regarded as separate nations, but which were, in their own time, part of a continent-spanning culture: two Englishmen – William Wey and Thomas Larke – and two Germans – Bernhard von Breydenbach and Arnold von Harff. The journeys undertaken by our writers provide them with an opportunity to attempt to define that shared culture, frequently by encountering what it is not. Meanwhile, the cracks indicating the impending Reformation are well established. Between Wey's account in around 1470 and Larke's in 1511, the horizons of the known world expanded dramatically; the new technology of print – familiar to both Breydenbach and Harff – also became established in England, if somewhat later than in Germany; and the potential audience for written accounts of pilgrimage was greatly increased. It is true, as we shall see, that the writing of pilgrimage was influenced at least as much by how other pilgrims described their travels as by any one pilgrim's actual experience.