Pilgrimage

Although it is a field not yet investigated, it is now known that there is a controversialist tradition that was hostile toward the pilgrimage, ever since the early Middle Ages. Less well known is that this kind of criticism found justification in the judicial pilgrimage, a practice spreads in West since the late antiquity. None positive aura surrounded this vagatio imposed by ecclesiastic authorities (afterwards also by civil institutions) and, admitting to believe the good intentions of the penitents, does not change the fact that the pilgrims were not always good people. Who put himself in this kind of pilgrimage was guilty of murder or serious sexual offenses, so that Cyrille Vogel, that studied the phenomenon, did not hesitate to define it as ‟pilgrimage of criminal clerics”. Although studies on the subject are mostly related to the French practices there were also Italian destinations for penitential pilgrimage. This article presents a Flemish document of the late XVIth century containing a list of the places where the tribunals were usual to send the convicts to pilgrimage. Among others there are also some Italian places whom, among many shrines, were considered most important for effectiveness of the penitence.

Anche se gli studi sull'argomento sono per lo più relativi all'area francese non mancano pellegrinaggi penitenziali italiani. Esiste un documento fiammingo del tardo Cinquecento contenente una lista dei luoghi in cui si era soliti mandare i condannati al pellegrinaggio giudiziale. Tra gli altri ve ne sono indicati alcuni italiani: quelli che tra i molti santuari venivano ritenuti più importanti per la penitenza.

ABSTRACT Several scholars have argued that New Age spirituality is best understood as a form of ‘self-spirituality’ and as an expression of the consumer capitalist tendency to commodify all things, in the process converting religion into a ‘spiritual marketplace’. This article examines the phenomenon of New Age pilgrimage, especially pilgrimage to natural ‘power places’, with a focus on New Age practices at Sedona, Arizona, USA. The author assesses New Age notions of sacred space, nature, and the self, and compares pilgrim practices and sensorial interactions with Sedona’s red rock landscape to forms of tourist practice and com- modification more prevalent in Sedona. He argues that New Age pilgrimage, in theory and sometimes in practice, rejects the consumerist impulse, and that the New Age ‘self’ is both more open-ended and ‘postmodern’, and less central to New Age practice, than is suggested by the characterisation of New Age as ‘self-spirituality’.