PILGRIMAGE AND TRAVEL WRITING IN EARLY SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND: THE PILGRIMAGE ACCOUNTS OF THOMAS LARKE AND ROBERT LANGTON

By 1500 more than 500 written accounts of the Jerusalem pilgrimage alone had been produced in the West, and yet such works continued to be written and, increasingly, printed. How did these works retain their popularity, who was writing them, and why? To address these questions, this article compares two early sixteenth-century English printed pilgrim guidebooks. It examines their distinctive features, charts their authors' careers and social and professional networks, and identifies, for the first time, the author of The Pylgrymage of Sir Richarde Guylforde, printed by Richard Pynson in 1511. It reveals the different ways in which two educated and eminently well-connected clerics adapted a conventional literary genre to address shared concerns and interests. Both works demonstrate how humanist learning, religious reformism, heresy, and new ideas about the nature and purpose of travel were reshaping religiously orthodox conceptions of pilgrimage before the Reformation.