What do we mean when we use the term ‘pilgrimage account’? In its broadest sense, it refers, obviously enough, to a text that records the events of a pilgrimage, but what else should we expect from a text to which this label has been attached? In that broadest sense, the term encompasses an enormous variety of works, written across a huge chronological span, and in numerous different languages, about many different sites around the world, but ‘pilgrimage account’, as used here, refers to its late-medieval western European incarnation. Our four primary texts – the writings of William Wey, Bernhard von Breydenbach, Arnold von Harff, and Thomas Larke – treat the same subject and the same locations. They were composed within around forty years of one another (c.1470–1511) by relatively privileged western European men, operating within similar social spheres, and with access to many of the same materials, and yet they diverge from one another in countless ways. Nonetheless, by analysing pilgrimage accounts within a generic framework, it is possible to outline a horizon of expectations for such texts as belonging to an identifiable hybrid genre, a constructively imprecise way to delineate a group of texts that, despite crossing and subsuming other established generic categories and demonstrating a variety of form, structure, transmission, and function, can be most fruitfully understood together. Identification of this hybrid genre then enables us to draw conclusions about the purpose and audience of the works associated with it.

Approaching Genre

The reason for investigating genre is therefore not as a system of classification but as a means of understanding texts, and thus of understanding both composition and (anticipated) reception. These are key issues for pilgrimage writing – what were our pilgrim writers trying to achieve? How did they go about it? How did their audience use the texts? In attempting to answer these questions, it is best to begin with the Itineraries of William Wey, since of our four texts here it is the most generically complex, containing a high level of hybridity, and presenting the same experience in multiple forms. This variety of presentation raises the question of how to conceptualise Wey's book: is it really one text, or is it better understood as a miscellany?