The Pilgrim's Guide To Santiago de Compostela

William Melczer ISBN: 0-934977-25-9

Italica Press - Paperback 368pp $17.50

First English Translation, with Introduction, Commentaries, Notes

This Edition presents the first complete English translation of Book Five of the Liber Sancti Jacobi or Codex Calixtinus. Book Five, known as the Pilgrim's Guide, is a twelfth-century guidebook for the route from southern France to Santiago de Compostela.

The Cult of Relics and the pilgrimages that were made for their sake helped shape the life and mind of the medieval world. Of the three major pilgrimage sites of the Christian world --- Jerusalem, Rome, and Santiago de Compostela --- the latter was, between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, by far the most popular. Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims came year after year through France and across the Pyrenees to Santiago de Compostela near the Atlantic shores of Galicia in far western Spain.

For centuries the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela was the once-in-a-lifetime human adventure that fulfilled devotional zeal, responded to expectations of miracles, provided a militant notion of personal duty and penance, and satisfied an innate sense of curiosity concerning the marvels of the world. Little wonder, therefore, that the pilgrimage route rapidly became a major thoroughfare of commercial enterprises, social exchanges, religious fervor, and intellectual creativity.

In his study of the pilgrimage road to Santiago, Professor Melczer discusses:

• Relics and pilgrimages
• The origin of the cult of St. James
• Myth and historical reality in the tradition of St. James
• The Iter Sancti Jacobi
• The Liber Sancti Jacobi
• Pilgrimage without ideology
• The iconography of the pilgrim and of St. James.

The book also includes extensive commentaries and notes that highlight historical, geographical, art-historical, hagiographic, and general cultural matters along the route traced by the Guide.

"Professor Melczer's achievement here is to bring experience that is remote from and even alien to the modern temper vividly to life.... For both the scholar and the general reader, it is a very pleasant surprise that will involve, instruct, intrigue and, perhaps, inspire."
Small Press

Illustrated, introduction, gazetteer, hagiographical register, bibliography. index.