JUNE
Introducing
JUNE 2025
June, the month when the yellow ‘Pilgrim’ Rose blooms.
June’s STS has pilgrimage as its theme. The late Pope Francis designated ‘Hope’ as the theme for this, his 2025 pilgrimage Holy Year. Among his many wise words were, ‘The reality is that the pilgrim carries within him his own history and faith and the lights and shadows of his own life. Each person carries within his or her heart a special wish and a particular prayer.’
He also said, ‘I would wish for you always to be people on the move, people who yearn to keep moving forward in life.’
Read on to explore diverse aspects of pilgrimage, yearning and moving forward.
In ART OF THE MONTH Romanesque stone carving is introduced, leading into the Master Mateo’s carving of Saint James the Great at the entrance to the hallowed Christian pilgrim destination of Santiago de Compostela.
A different Saint James, the Lesser, has his feast day on 4 June.
On 20 June it’s World Refugee Day, dedicated to those whose journeys are not made of choice, a reminder of the plight of the 3 million people (UNHCR 2025 estimate) across the globe in flight from war, violence, conflict or persecution who have crossed an international border in search of safety. Our wish for them in their need is an equitable world order, one providing for their safe, legal onward migration and a satisfactory place of settlement and stability.
From 5-9 June, once the new crescent moon’s sighted, it’ll be time for this year’s great Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. Nearly two million Muslims will take part in Hajj rites and, during for many a once-in-a-lifetime event, may walk up to 15 kms a day travelling between sacred locations: a test of patience and temperament, a spiritual, emotional, and physical (currently undergone in extreme heat) challenge.
Under LITERATURE, turn your mind to the Middle Ages and read a review of the recent biography Marion Taylor wrote about Geoffrey Chaucer’s most notorious – and probably best-beloved – pilgrim from his Canterbury Tales, Alison, The Wife of Bath.
PEOPLE will bring you to 1950s Ireland when self-taught rural lad Patrick Kavanagh announced his poetic intentions by leaving his hometown in Ulster to walk on foot the fifty miles to Dublin to pursue encouragement for his verse. Kavanagh’s poetry and journalism describing three of Ireland’s time-honoured annual pilgrimages formed just one part of this eccentric character’s eclectic body of work.
Under PLACE we return to Santiago. I give you my Santiago, my days spent there when in October 2019 it became a place of wondrous song, transformed by a Martin Randall Travel Musical Festival. Listen to an extract, and see my playlist should you plan to take your listening further.
Concluding, there’s an INSPIRATIONS section, showcasing two artefacts drawing on the pilgrim experience, interpreting its symbolism in dazzlingly creative ways.
The selection of quotations for this month’s NOTES&JOTTINGS hints at the uneasy interface between anticipation, dread of risk, and exhilaration that might underpin pilgrimage planning.
EXTRA! EXTRA!
Throughout June on view in Rome is an exhibition of twentyfour canvasses spanning the career of the artist Caravaggio.
(CARAVAGGIO 2025 is at the Palazzo Barberini until July 6.)
And if in Rome for this, or for any other reason, do not fail to visit the Basilica of the Augustinians, a church recently come to new prominence due to its being one of the order to which Pope Leo belongs.
At the Basilica you will find a Caravaggio work on permanent display entitled ‘The Pilgrims’ Madonna.’ The work is a large oil, depicting close up a ragged barefoot pilgrim couple as they kneel before an apparition of the Virgin Mary. Mary, also barefoot, holding the baby Jesus, is shown leaning casually against the door frame of the entry way where the couple’s pilgrim staves have been laid to rest.
As NBC News describes this painting dating from the early 1600s, ‘It’s a far cry from the usual otherworldly, genteel depictions of .. Madonnas. That makes it even more poignant within Augustinian spirituality, because it illustrates the encounter between man’s nature and God’s mercy, God showing himself willing to accompany the poor in their search to hallow the sacred.’
The painting’s title of ‘Pilgrims’ Madonna’ has, in fact, a double significance, referring both to the two figures in the foreground who have travelled to kneel before Mary, and to the fact that here at this Basilica since the end of the C13th Augustinians have welcomed pilgrims on the very last stage of their journey from howsoever far to reach at last the Vatican now just a short distance away.
ART OF THE MONTH
SAINT JAMES THE GREAT in the PORTICO OF GLORY by MASTER MATEO
The context:
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the term Romanesque denotes a medieval synthesis of Roman architectural and artistic heritage with regional influences as diverse as Teutonic, Scandinavian, Byzantine, and Muslim.
Romanesque style evolved and flowered in the C11th and 12th, an era when government across Western Europe was fragmented and unstable and in these fractured times it was the establishment and maintenance of medieval monasteries, virtual islands of civilization scattered about western Europe, that provided the impetus – and the patronage – for this major cultural revival.
It was sculptural decoration that was to embody the aesthetic spirit of these new monastic buildings. As the Romanesque style expanded and was introduced on to doorways and pillars and capitals of cloisters, the challenge for sculptors was to learn anew the techniques of carving and rendering the human figure in stone.
As massive forms were required to accommodate this sculptural output in the C11th construction began of tympanums, great semicircular relief compositions over church portals. The best craftsmen were deployed on this architectural decoration, with the most important of their figure work surviving on portals.
Romanesque architecture’s style could be described as ‘confining’ but master sculptors such as Gislebertus and Benedetto Antelami yet achieved astonishing variety whilst retaining many of the forms and characteristics of Classical antiquity. In France the results can be seen in the tympanums of Burgundy, such as the spectral Last Judgment at Autun, or the Pentecost at Vézelay, or at Saint-Trophime in Arles.
The sculpture:
Pictured above is the work of Master Mateo, a carving of Saint James the Great, holding his pilgrim stave.
It is on the central mullion of the Portico of Glory at the entrance to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, north west Spain. The Cathedral, overtopping the town was begun under King Alfonso VI in 1075.
We owe the Portico of Glory (1168-88) with its wondrous carved triple-arched gateway to King Ferdinand II of Leon, who was inspired to commission the design of a fine porch and portal to be constructed opposite the Cathedral’s main altar.
The three large arches of the exquisite polychromed entrance, considered one of Europe’s most important Romanesque sculptures, weave together biblical stories from the Creation via the expulsion from Eden of Adam and Eve to the Final Judgement. The two hundred figures make the architectural composition as a whole extremely distinctive, and stand as a clear demonstration of how the Romanesque was evolving into the beginning of the Gothic style at this time.
The background:
In the Catholic tradition, Saint James, the third elected of Jesus’ twelve apostles, author of an eponymous Gospel, is the patron saint of Spain. Executed in the Holy Land by King Herod, James is the only apostle whose martyrdom is recorded in the New Testament. In the King James Bible in Acts, Chapter 12, verse 1-2 it is described like this, ‘Now about that time Herod the king stretched forth his hands to vex certain of the church. And he killed James the brother of John with the sword.’
According to legend, James’ remains are held in Santiago, brought to be buried in the city by miraculous means. Over his tomb and shrine the Cathedral was founded. Starting in the early Middle Ages the traditional pilgrimage to the grave of the saint, via the network of routes known as the Camino or the ‘Way of St. James’, has been the best known Western European pilgrimage.
The sculptor:
About Master Mateo (active 1168 to about 1217), the young artist Ferdinand chose for his commission of the Portico of Glory, almost nothing is known. The intricacies achieved in this marvel hint that its creator had been exposed to carving elsewhere in Spain and in France.
All Mateo’s sculpted figures demonstrate the most innovative aspect of his work: his accentuation of facial expression.
The Portico of Glory’s Saint James represents a prime example: shown with a benign expression, clear-sighted, his complexion rosy, his chin slightly lifted. James’ halo is magnificently be-jeweled and above it, Mateo tellingly offsets its luxe by positioning scenes showing the temptations of Christ during his forty days in the desert.
LITERATURE
THE WIFE OF BATH – A BIOGRAPHY
by
Marion Turner
Published by Princeton University Press in 2023.
For her biography Turner, J.R.R. Tolkien Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford University, extracts Alison, the Wife of Bath from the assembly of twentyfour pilgrims which poet Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1343 -1400) describes riding horseback from London to visit St Thomas a’ Becket’s shrine in his great work, The Canterbury Tales.
In The Tales Alison is the most prominent of Chaucer’s characters, her story the longest and most highly-coloured, Turner going so far as to describe her as the author’s ‘most fully-developed character.’
Through Turner’s eyes, patently those of an immense Alison fan, we discover just how entertaining a pilgrimage companion the late fourteenth century, five-times-married cloth merchant would have been: ebullient, fearlessly outspoken – as well as witty, laughing willingly at herself, requesting her listeners,
‘Do not be annoyed by what I say
For my intention is only to amuse’*
Amusing, Alison, yes you surely are – but influential too, beyond your lifetime, since your biographer states that, ‘I can think of no other .. woman who has anything like [her] reach, influence and capacity for reincarnation.’ Reflecting such importance, Turner gives us not just Alison’s biodata but an exploration of the entire social world within which she operated, whilst also situating her in her contemporaneous and ongoing literary context.
It is a big canvas for the book – but one that’s needed if the biography’s central question is to be answered: the question, in Turner’s words, why ‘Chaucer’s readers immediately and consistently respond[ed] to [Alison] with more passion, emotion, love, horror, outrage, and adoration than they did to any other of Chaucer’s characters – or perhaps to any other literary character at all.’
Any other character? This is a remarkable claim considering that over literary history’s long centuries, women’s roles have largely been ones of relegation: as accessories, adjuncts. Justifying it, Turner chooses to foreground feminism and its implications in her rendering of Alison’s life and legacy. And due to the impressively all-encompassing nature of her research, her chapters deftly address and bat away the careful catalogue she’s assembled of misogynistic criticism about the content of the Wife of Bath’s tale, many examples of which have accrued across its six hundred-years life.
In her enthusiasm for the Wife of Bath Turner also demonstrates to the modern-day reader the extent to which Alison is her own person: independent (emotionally and financially), forthright, clear-eyed in regard to her lived experience, and, as an older woman entirely lacking in self-pity, stating ‘….it does myn herte boote (it’s rewarding to my heart) that I have had my world, as in my tyme.’
In Alison’s tyme pilgrimage is her pastime. Such journeys were generally considered a rewarding way to escape the tedium of domestic routine, sight-see both at home and in foreign lands, while also having the added advantage of the religious ‘credit’ to be derived from devout behaviour undergone in some hardship.
Alison is a veteran, five pilgrimages already behind her, including Rome, Santiago and three to Jerusalem, her appetite as yet unjaded for the adventures, amatory and otherwise, such travel promises.
Turner maintains a tight focus on her subject, her book no Canterbury Tales readers’ guide nor travelogue. Nor does the biography offer entry into every twist and turn of Alison’s tale, so a grounding in Chaucer’s storyline** is recommended, in order to get the maximum benefit from the voice of the woman whom, according to Turner, was pioneered by Chaucer as the ‘first ordinary middleclass woman in English literature.’
The biography picks up pace as it approaches the modern era, with celebrity names such as Beyonce and Zadie Smith scattered across its concluding pages. Having decried the majority of past male adaptations of the Wife of Bath’s story as misogynistic failures, Turner is enthusiastic about the innovations by these and other women artists today, their efforts succeeding in continuing to creatively celebrate Alison’s wit, wisdom and relevance across diverse media.
The Wife of Bath is indomitable, Turner concludes, her final resounding tribute lauding Alison as a woman who, having ‘intimidated and frightened so many male writers and artists across time .. ultimately would not be suppressed.’
*This quotation is in modern English translation, see ** below for details
**Such as via the modern English language version of The Wife of Bath’s Tale: A Contemporary Translation and the Annotated Original by Carmen Geraci (independently published 2021), an accessible route for those of us who have not studied Middle English
PEOPLE
PATRICK KAVANAGH (1904-67)
Pilgrims pass Saint Patrick’s shrine as they begin their ascent of Croagh Patrick, one of the three famous Irish pilgrimages referred to in Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘Pilgrims’ poem
PILGRIMS
I saw them kneeling by the holy well –
It was for life, life, life they prayed:
Life that for a farmer is land enough to keep two horses,
Life that is healthy husband to a maid.
I saw them climbing the holy mountain –
It was the knowledge, knowledge, knowledge of life they pursued:
Knowledge that is in knowing what fair to sell the cattle in,
Knowledge that is in being able to cart an acre from a field.
I saw them lying on the burning stones –
It was vision, vision, vision they desired:
Vision that is forecasting a mare’s hour of foaling,
Vision that is catching the idler, newly hired.
I saw them kneeling, climbing and prostrate –
It was love, love, love they found:
Love that is Christ green walking from the summer headlands
To His scarecrow cross in the turnip-ground.
Religion, to the poet Patrick Kavanagh, was always viewed in an ‘ambivalent’ way, according to his biographer, Antoinette Quinn, Fellow Emerita of Trinity College Dublin. Although Kavanagh was born into Catholicism, Quinn suggests that his ambivalence may have stemmed from his writer’s ‘imagination and intellect which gave him the power to conceive an alternative to.. a God who always said yes.
Anyway, although he’d written poetry and supplemented it with journalism since he first became convinced in his teens that future fame lay for him in writing, (despite being an unlettered farm lad and entirely self-taught) it wasn’t until Kavanagh was in his mid-thirties that he tackled the sacred topic of pilgrimages.
It was 1942, midpoint of WW11 in neutral Ireland, when he travelled to Lough Derg, County Donegal, the major of the three locations mentioned in his poem Pilgrims. These moving lines contextualise that time,
‘Only God thinks of the dying sparrow
In the middle of the war’
Kavanagh, after the epic walk he’d taken as a young man to Dublin for the meeting at which his first chance to be published was secured, lived in that city, ultimately as one of its great ‘characters’, for the majority of his adult life. Eventually Dublin, a city which values wit and words, was largely to take him and his body of poetry affectionately and proudly to its heart – although by that time Kavanagh was reaching his rambunctious life’s last days, dying in his early 60s in the mid-1960s.
Kavanagh’s epilogue is that he was the greatest Irish poet between the death of W.B. Yeats and the rise of Seamus Heaney.
But before that time came one does have to ask just how many people, achievements aside, had he repelled with his unkempt appearance and degraded mode de vie, abused with his coarse remarks (and latterly, odiously drunken behaviour)?
Read the Quinn biography for the detailed itinerary of Kavanagh’s extraordinary career progress (characterized by her as ‘a slow and tortuous journey’,) dotted with encounters with every personality decorating the Irish and English literary scene of the mid-20th century period.
Quinn tells us to expect poetry that is ‘pervasively autobiographical and confessional.’ She indicates that Kavanagh’s work, what she calls ‘his doings’ or his ‘homespun balladry’, ie outpourings that have been compounded of his opinions and memories, are seductive to the reader because they are ‘put over in a confiding tone creating an impression of honesty and intimacy.’
It would take a very great deal, we read, to make Kavanagh want to go back to the rural areas he professed to loathe and wanted to forget – but, when even more hard-up for cash than was usual he was offered journalistic commissions in the early 1940s, he must have been persuaded coverage of pilgrimages was worth a try. We shall never know what prayers he himself might been proposing to make for better fortune to be granted by the Deity.
He only succeeded in securing publication for one newspaper article but was however inspired enough to write a short and resonant poem, Pilgrims, as above.
Here are the places mentioned in the poem, which was not well received, nor immediately published. (Perhaps his words were seen as dismissive of pilgrim devotion, the poem allowing the ordinary business of life to appear over-prominent at a time when a devout attitude should have been paramount – and his powerfully convincing devout last stanza not compensating sufficiently for this?)
His longer narrative poem focused on Lough Derg written in 1942 was only published in 1971.)
Verse 1
Lady Well – where Kavanagh’s family made annual pilgrimages to coincide with the day of the Assumption of the Virgin, 15 August. Keeping a vigil while saying prayers, crowds still kneel as they attend today, waiting until the midnight hour outside the small whitewashed building for the waters famed to rise then and overflow the well. From this inundation bottles of holy water are scooped up to take home.
Verse 2
Croagh Patrick – is a peak known as ‘The Reek” rising to 764 metres in County Mayo. The mountain is climbed in pilgrimage in honour of Saint Patrick annually on the last day of July, a custom dating from the Middle Ages. Some 1500 make the ascent, some barefoot, and attend masses and go to confession in the small modern chapel when reaching the top. Kavanagh noted that in the climbers he was witnessing ‘the raw-sensitive heart of the active Faith.’
Verse 3
Lough Derg – the three-day fasting pilgrimage is dedicated to Saint Patrick who reputedly visited the island during the C5th and had a vision of Purgatory. It can be made at any point through the summer open season of June-August and pilgrims come by the thousand, arriving by boat. They experience the hardship of fasting, prostration as they make their way repeatedly around the island, and an overnight vigil.
PLACE
SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA
Elevated and often mist-swathed, the cloisters of Santiago de Compostela’s C11th Cathedral
We did not walk the journey to Santiago – although our visit’s intentions were entirely sacred. We were instead in the contingent choosing to be bussed in by Martin Randall Travel for its October 2019 five-day Sacred Music Festival there. We were there to hear choral music performed in the city’s churches and cloisters.
(Other participants arrived after ten days on foot on the Way of the Camino, the world’s most enduring pilgrim journey, during which they’d have followed the signs marked with scallop shells that indicated their centuries-old route, and the location of their pilgrim-friendly overnight stops.
In the year 2024 it’s reported that 400,000 pilgrims registered for the pilgrimage – all undoubtedly spiritually curious, if perhaps the majority today not all intensely faithful. Setting out from all corners of Europe, their foot travel to Santiago would have taken place on one of the Camino’s nine principal ancient routes.)
Our bus stopped on the approach road to the city at the point on the lower slope of Monte do Gozo, the Hill of Joy, from where the distant spires of the Cathedral can be seen for the first time. Here, the guidebook explained, is where ‘deeply emotional responses have been inspired from pilgrims throughout history. As for example from Domenico Laffi, a 17th-century Italian pilgrim, who wrote, ‘Falling to our knees we began to chant and sing the Te Deum. But we could not recite more than two or three verses because the tears shed by our eyes did not allow us to speak.’
At this point, goal at last in reach, pilgrims have achieved the ‘longed-for final descent to Santiago’ as the choir sings in the closing lyrics of Joby Talbot’s the Path of Miracles. This powerful sequence encapsulates all the tumultuous joy of final stretch and arrival, as you can hear in this Youtube extract
In the clip this 2005 composition, performed by Tenebrae directed by Nigel Short, is shown taking place at Saint Denis Cathedral, Paris. Our group was scheduled to hear it in the magnificent Cathedral of Santiago during the Festival’s music-rich days.
Other Festival highlights were the Gabrieli Consort under composer/conductor Paul McCreech performing the polyphonically textured A Rose Magnificat. This performance which took place in the grand Gothic church of Santo Domingo de Bonaval was described in Gramophone as an ‘exquisitely crafted recital of English Marian motets and Magnificats. It opened with a soprano solo Of a rose is all my song that flowers out of frosty silence,that gradually pushed out its shoots into a full-blooming melody, seeming to belong at once to the 15th-century world of its text and to the 20th of its composer, while drawing the dialogue between the two repertories into fresh animation,’
For a second Tenebrae concert, this time with the choir of Clare College Cambridge, the performance was Thomas Tallis’ Spem in Allium (I have never put my help in any other). For this we gathered in Santiago’s grandest C17-18th church, San Martin Pinario. For me, this was the Festival’s crescendo event.
Any memory I have of my time in Santiago will forever be suffused with the ethereal voices of that composition. Sometimes the performers were massed in front of us, sometimes they were unseen, their heavenly music emanating from different angles and levels within the church, the ensembles varying in size, the unaccompanied lyrics ebbing and flowing out of the darkness around us, almost mesmeric, as we sat in a candlelit semi-circle.
My Festival memories are aided by the CD recordings I still play often, all of which are still available to buy online for the compositions named above.
For a further in-depth and immersive pilgrimage-related musical experience there is the option of listening to the Monteverdi Choir Pilgrimage to Santiago (also available on CD.)
Under the direction of John Gardiner in August 2004 Monteverdi’s choristers travelled for a month from southwest France, crossing the Pyrenees having joined the Camino’s French route, to culminate in Santiago, performing fourteen concerts along the way.
Their repertoire drew on what Gardiner describes as ‘the flowering of a capella singing from the C15-17th’. He describes how the concert performances of pilgrim chants, the antiphons and encouraging hymns each time ‘ignited’ the French and Spanish churches on their itinerary.
In a Pilgrimage Diary included in the CD’s excellently helpful programme notes one of the choir’s sopranos, Donna Dean, wrote of her experience of ‘living inside the music,’ noting how, ‘There are many rewards for our ‘work’. Witnessing the tears and smiles of stunned listeners makes this an honour.’
Offering valuable historical context, Gardiner explains how in years past St James’ shrine would have been alight with constant song in a multitude of languages as the different pilgrim contingents kept vigil there. Pilgrims would have come to Spain carrying their instruments with them. He lists the cittern, lyre, drums, recorder, trumpets, harps and fiddles they’d have brought along, and to whose accompaniment the pilgrim groups would have danced and sung, refreshing their spirits at their rest stops.
INSPIRATION
Re-interpretations: the pilgrim’s emblem of the scallop shell made sculpture, the traveller’s humble clay water bottle becomes an exquisite artefact in glass
On the left: on the beach near Aldeburgh, Suffolk, a giant scallop shell rises up from the shingle. The sculpture by local-born artist, Maggi Hambling, an ardent fan of Benjamin Britten’s music, is a tribute to the composer, who lived in Aldeburgh and walked its coastline almost daily. Scallop, A Conversation with the Sea, fabricated from steel in 2003, resembles two halves of a broken shell. Cut high into the sculpture’s upper edge is the line ‘I hear those voices that will not be drowned’ from Hambling’s favourite Britten opera, Peter Grimes.
Hambling sees Scallop as more than just a sculpture. It was designed to also be a shelter and a seat, a place where visitors can rest and contemplate the mysterious power of the sea. A labour of love for her, it is a gift from the artist for everyone to enjoy – she wasn’t paid for it and sold some of her paintings to raise funds for its construction.
Maggi Hambling’s new work can be seen in a joint exhibition with Sarah Lucas from 20 November 2025 – January 2026 at Sadie Coles HQ & Frankie Rossi Art Projects, 8 & 38 Bury Street London SW1Y
On the right: from the Robert Lehmann collection at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, a Venetian blown glass pilgrim flask dating from 1500-25. Its flat-sided shape draws on Islamic influences, as do its enamelled gilt, blue and rust-coloured patterns of flower and leaf decoration.
Pilgrim drinking bottles date to ancient Roman times in the West, and to 7th-century China in the East. They were made in a wide range of materials, including earthenware, porcelain, silver, and glass, and also in more perishable materials such as leather. On a pilgrimage these water vessels would have served a vital life-preserving purpose carried strung by a cord across the chest of every traveler but, in the opinion of Encyclopedia Britannica, the ones that have survived to this day to be displayed in our museums are often so sumptuous that their function was probably always purely ornamental.
JOTTINGS
Go forth from the land of your kinsfolk and from your father’s house to a land I will show you
The Book of Genesis, Chapter 12: verse 1
Proclaim to men the pilgrimage: they will come to thee on foot and on every lean camel, coming from every remote path
The Quran
Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this,
For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss
William Shakespeare
Romeo and Juliet
To go back is nothing but death; to go forward is fear of death, and life everlasting beyond it. I will yet go forward
John Bunyan
The Pilgrim’s Progress
The Pilgrims of old an example have given
Of mild resignation, devotion, and love,
Which beams like the star in the blue vault of heaven,
A beacon-light hung in the mansions above
Anonymous
Hymn of pilgrims departing on the Mayflower c. 1620
No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life…. There is one path in the world that none can walk but you. Where does it lead? Don’t ask, walk!
Freidrich Neitzche
Untimely Meditations
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T.S. Eliot
Little Gidding, Four Quartets
RESOURCES
Quinn Antoinette Patrick Kavanagh: A Biography (Dublin, Gill and Macmillan 2003)
Kavanagh Patrick Patrick Kavanagh: Collected Poems (New York, W.W.Norton 1964)