enhanced as it shows her physically supporting the body,
so mourning her dead son is a physical torment as well as
a mental one. The English Catholic tradition of the pietà
is best exemplified by the fine work on a church window
at Long Melford, Suffolk.
Pigafetta, Antonio (c. 1491–c. 1526) Italian historian
Raised in Vicenza by his well-to-do family, Pigafetta is
known as the official historian of MAGELLAN’s circumnavi-
gation of the world. His journal of the voyage, first pub-
lished in 1525, is a vivid and detailed account, both flawed
and colored by lengthy accounts of Pigafetta’s personal
feelings and experiences. The work is of great historical
significance and presents particularly valuable accounts of
the discovery and passage of the Magellan Straits. Pigafetta
also claims to have tried to dissuade Magellan from the
battle on Mactan in which Magellan was killed; Pigafetta
himself was wounded. Pigafetta’s reports of the voyage
earned him a reception at the court of FRANCIS Iof France
in 1523, a meeting that inspired Francis to promote
France’s belated entry into the realm of exploration.
pilgrimage and pilgrimage shrines In Renaissance Eu-
rope the survival of the great pilgrimage shrines of the
Middle Ages was closely connected with the degree to
which the Roman Catholic Church was able to withstand
criticism and reform. Relics (items believed to have been
associated with Christ or the Holy Family, such as a splin-
ter from the Cross or the girdle of the Virgin Mary, and the
bodily remains of saints) were the focal points of the me-
dieval pilgrimage shrines that had grown up all over
Christendom. People traveled both locally and over con-
siderable distances to venerate the relics, either as a means
of eliciting supernatural assistance, or as an act of peni-
tence, or to give thanks for benefits received. The Church
linked the practice with the system of INDULGENCES, and
when both indulgences and relics came under attack from
the earliest reformers, pilgrimage too was in the firing
line.
In the Middle Ages enterprising pilgrims could cover
astonishing amounts of ground; even the Saracen capture
of the Holy Land failed to deter the particularly pious and
intrepid. As a young man in 1405–06 the life-long Bur-
gundian traveler Ghillebert de LANNOYmade the first of
his three journeys to the Holy Land, visiting St. Cather-
ine’s monastery in Sinai, and in 1450 he went to Rome for
the jubilee declared that year; his autobiographical Voy-
aiges contains the record of all the indulgences he earned
by visiting the various holy sites. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath
had been to Jerusalem, Santiago de Compostela, and
Rome, before heading for Canterbury, a record matched by
her redoubtable real-life counterpart, Margery Kempe,
who in the early 15th century notched up Jerusalem, Can-
terbury, Walsingham, Compostela, and Wilsnack and
Aachen in Germany. Higher up the social scale, the
pilgrimage of Isabella d’ESTEto visit the relics of St. Mary
Magdalene at St.-Maximin-La-Ste.-Baume, Provence, was
recorded by her secretary, Mario EQUICOLAin De Isabella
Estensis iter in Narbonensem Galliam (c. 1517).
Authors of medieval Holy Land pilgrimage narratives
include: the Tuscans Lionardo Frescobaldi, Giorgio Gucci,
and Simone Sigoli who visited in 1384; several of the in-
ternational band of pilgrims who took ship from Venice in
1458 (accounts by six of them were collected and edited
by Rosamund Mitchell in The Spring Voyage, 1965); Friar
Felix Fabri, who wrote up his 1480–83 pilgrimage for the
benefit of his fellow friars in Germany; and the 67-year-
old Milanese churchman Pietro Casola, who made his pil-
grimage in 1494 and left one of the most detailed
descriptions of the Holy Places. William Wey, one of the
pilgrims in Mitchell’s collection, made the pilgrimage to
Santiago in addition to his two journeys to the east. The
capture of the Holy Land by the Ottoman Turks and the
onset of the Reformation meant that one of the last
recorded Englishmen to make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem
via Venice was Sir Richard Torkington in 1517. Rome re-
mained a major draw for pilgrims, particularly in a so-
called Holy Year, or jubilee, when the pope offered a
special indulgence to those who visited the chief pilgrim
churches of the city. Instituted in 1300, the jubilee wasppiillggrriimmaaggee aanndd ppiillggrriimmaaggee sshhrriinneess 3 37777Pietà Michelangelo’s first (1498–99) Pietà, which stands in
St. Peter’s, Rome. When challenged over the youthfulness of
the Virgin Mary, in whose arms lies the dead Christ,
Michelangelo is said to have replied that chaste women
retain their beauty longer than others.
The Bridgeman Art Library