Jerusalem journey, pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the fifteenth century / H.F.M. Prescott.

First edition published in 1950 under title: Friar Felix at large; a fifteenth-century pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

I FRIAR FELIX FABRI AND OTHERS -- II LEARNING TO BE A PILGRIM -- III SECOND PILGRIMAGEULM TO VENICE -- IV LEVANTINE TRAVEL -- V JERUSALEM THE HOLY PLACES -- VI ROUND ABOUT JERUSALEM -- VII THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE -- VIII LAST DAYS IN THE HOLY LAND

For a thousand years men and women FOR of all races and kinds visited the great pilgrimage shrines as their modern descendants visit Stratford or Versailles. They went to Saint James of Compostella, or to Rome of a thousand martyrs; or made the "Jerusalem Journey" to that holiest place of all, the church which contained within its walls Golgotha and the Tomb in the Garden. There were always some who recorded their experiences, and it is from a dozen or so of such pilgrim narratives that a picture of the life of pilgrimage has been recon-structed in this book. The narrow and regulated track of pilgrim travel led al-most all the writers by the same route and to the same holy places, but each saw and felt through different eyes and senses, and each recorded some different facet of experience. Among them all, however, one excels, not alone in the sheer bulk of his work but because of the inexhaustible gusto with which he observed and recorded the trivial, and, for us, precious details of the pilgrim's world. This man is Friar Felix Fabri, compared with whose work, ponderous in bulk but of an extraordinary vitality and intimacy, the narratives of the other pilgrims appear as hardly more than mere comments, glosses set in the margin of his huge Mappemonde. Felix Fabri was born about 1441 at Zurich and was brought up in the Dominican Convent of Basel. He came to Ulm about 1476, but not much is known of his life, except for the two periods when he went on pilgrimage. His "little book" as he called it, has hitherto only been available in a three volume edition privately printed in the nineteenth century, so that his engaging personality is almost unknown to the general reader. Miss Hilda Prescott, author of the unforgettable Man on a Donkey, brings her own learning and wit to point these fascinating travellers tales and has produced a book full of the most enthralling detail, some of it utterly strange, some curiously familiar, which will delight the ordinary reader and will probably rank with Jusserand's Wayfaring Life as an indispensable handbook on late mediaeval social history.