Road to Santiago

Walter Starkie’s The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James is both an erudite cultural history and an ethnographically alert travel narrative of Europe’s most consequential medieval pilgrimage. Framing the Camino as a “double journey” through space and time, Starkie reconstructs the institutional and imaginative worlds that accrued after the ninth-century “discovery” of the Apostle’s tomb: Cluniac liturgical reform and its trans-Pyrenean networks; the *Codex Calixtinus* and Aimeric Picaud’s guidebook; and the legal, charitable, and architectural infrastructures—hospitals, confraternities, markets—that naturalized mobility. He reads the road as a corridor of aesthetic exchange, synthesizing Emile Mâle and Kingsley Porter to show how Islamic ornament, Romanesque programs, and urban façades from Cluny to Paris inscribe the epic of Santiago. Starkie’s archive ranges across chansons de geste and chronicles, royal itineraries and monastic records, miracle collections, and popular song, yielding a social history of devotion that encompasses Moor and Christian minstrels, Alfonso X’s courtly tolerance, and the martial mythography of *Santiago Matamoros*. Attentive to practice as well as myth, he recovers material cultures of travel (from barrels and frypans to scallop shells) and the performative pedagogy of mendicancy, music, and ritual.

Interleaving these sources with field diaries from four twentieth-century pilgrimages (1924–1954), Starkie stages a reflexive dialogue between medieval prescription and modern experience. He retraces Picaud’s route to assess continuity and rupture in liturgy, landscape, hospitality, and popular religiosity, while juxtaposing clerical reformers, elite tourists, and “raggle-taggle” jongleurs with figures like Andrew Boorde, Montaigne, and George Borrow. The result is a methodologically plural account—part philology, part folklore, part performance studies—that treats the Camino as a laboratory for studying European connectivity, confessional politics, vernacular poetics, and memory. Specialists in medieval studies, Iberian history, and pilgrimage studies will value Starkie’s capacious sourcing and his argument that the Camino’s enduring appeal lies in its capacity to bind institutional Christianity, intercultural exchange, and the ordinary technologies of travel into a durable moral and aesthetic economy.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1957.