Compassio: Participation in the passion and late medieval Jerusalem pilgrimage

While Margery Kempe's experience in Jerusalem has received wide attention, the broader pattern of late medieval pilgrims weeping, wailing, and lying prostrate on the ground in Jerusalem during the later Middle Ages has not previously been explored. This dissertation argues that the explanation of these practices is found through a deeper understanding of the contemporary experience of participation in the passion. Compassio, or participation in Christ's suffering, was central to the religious culture of late medieval Europe. The Franciscans, who served as pilgrim guides in Jerusalem, actively promoted compassio through visual and written devotional material in Europe. The effort to suffer with Christ was believed to provide individuals with an experiential knowledge of Christ's redemptive suffering and to give them access to the merits of that suffering.;To clarify the means through which the Franciscan ideology of compassio affected the practice of pilgrimage, this dissertation makes use of Ludwig Wittgenstein's concept of language games. This approach treats the beliefs and practices associated with the desire to participate in Christ's sufferings as a language that is learned. Through a descriptive analysis of the use of the language of compassio, this dissertation develops an outline of its “grammar,” clarifying its internal logic and the significance it had for those who shared that language.;In addition to clarifying the important role of the Franciscans in developing the grammar of compassio, the dissertation outlines the pedagogy and practice of the language of compassio by drawing on visual and literary models of compassio and living exemplars of its practice. The Book of Margery Kempe is a particularly important text in connecting Jerusalem experience to broader patterns of passion piety. Additional evidence for the importance of compassio to late medieval pilgrimage can be found in the late medieval rise of pilgrimage equivalents such as imaginary or spiritual pilgrimage, the Stations of the Cross, the practice of the Sacro Monte, and certain aspects of flagellant processions. These substitute practices were all believed to convey indulgences equivalent to Jerusalem pilgrimage and in each case this equivalence occurs through the reproduction of the experience of compassio.