Shannon McMillan

The aim of my project is to use pilgrimage as a lens through which to study the religiosity of Christian women in the Late Antique era, underscoring the extent to which gender and class discourses shape the representation and experience of the pilgrimage journey. Drawing on a wide range of textual (including travelogues, miracle reports and hagiography, sermons, and ecclesiastical histories, letters and treatises), papyrological and material evidence (including pilgrimage flasks and other souvenirs and architectural plans and associated architectonics), I will compile a database of evidence for female pilgrims and explore how broader societal discourses relate to this data. Although my work will engage with the journeys of ‘elite’ female pilgrims such as Egeria, the two Melanias, and Paula, it will be shown that the representations of these highly rarefied journeys are so deeply entangled with issues of genre and theological debates on the mind, body, and gender that they cannot be treated as accurate depictions of pilgrimage experience. Instead, turning to the journeys of ‘ordinary’ women, I will demonstrate that not only was non-elite pilgrimage a common phenomenon, but that female mobility of this kind allowed women to assert control over their religious expression and rendered them active agents in the construction of religious and gender norms. However, pilgrimage did not, as many scholars assert, ‘liberate’ travelers from social status or gender. This project will show that religious travel was indelibly marked by class and gender.