Pilgrimage

Seen in San Antonio, New Mexico on Maundy Thursday

I love that I live in a place where people still go on pilgrimages, and where the highway department has pilgrimage signs on hand. I asked about this one and learned that the pilgrimage would be taking place on the following day, on Good Friday; and that the people would be walking from their church in San Antonio to another church in Socorro, almost 11 miles away. 


I first learned about pilgrimages when I took my undergraduate class on Chaucer at Dominican College for Women, where the nuns were still dressed in very medieval-looking habits. In Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, his people were going on pilgrimages in April, too. 

Whan that Aprile with his shoures soote

The droughte of March hath perced to the roote

And bathed every veyne en swich licour

Of which vertu engendred is the flour...

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.

If you would like to hear a reading (in the Middle English, the way I learned it) from the opening portion of the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales, click here; and to see a modern English translation side by side with the Middle English text, click here.